Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 29 OCTOBER 2003
MR PETER
RUSSELL
Q140 Reverend Smyth: So, having won
that round, they changed their tactics and, bearing in mind the
situation in Northern Ireland, attacks on prison officers outside
the prison, you have taken steps within the prison to maintain
health and safety, but is there not therefore a danger that the
prisoners will change their tactics outside to again dictate to
the prison authorities?
Mr Russell: Certainly, I think
that is a lesson from the past. The recent upsurge in attacks
on prison officers is rather more recent and could be dated from
the rooftop protest. Indeed, they had been happening before then.
Earlier in the summer, I had managed to visit the three or four
officers who had been attacked in their homes; I think we have
had about 11 in October and I am not able to keep up with personal
visits to all those but I would not date it from the "dirty"
protest particularly that there was an upsurge. Really, October
has seen the big increase.
Q141 Mr Beggs: The memoranda we have
received depict a situation which has been building up at Maghaberry
over a considerable time. Factors commented on by the Steele Review
which other organisations also suggest may have had some bearing
on developments include poor relations between officers and management
at Maghaberry, an inefficient shift system, a high level of staff
sickness absence and an inadequate prison estate. Do you accept
this picture as it has been presented to us of the Prison Service
operation both at Maghaberry and more widely?
Mr Russell: I think there is force
in all four points and, if you could take me through them one
by one, I will comment on each.
Q142 Mr Beggs: Poor relations between
officers and management at Maghaberry?
Mr Russell: I think that would
be more true of the collective than of the individual. I think
relationships between the Prison Officers' Association and the
Governor have been a little fraught. The Governor has always found
it difficult to make reforms move. He always seems to have difficulty
in getting agreements to comparatively modest changes. That is
a sweeping generalisation but if you ask if there is evidence
to support that statement, I would say that there is evidence
to support that statement. I do not think I would take from that
that individual officers were at odds with their own line managers
in any notable way, but I think if you are referring to the collective,
there certainly is something in that.
Q143 Mr Beggs: An inefficient shift
system?
Mr Russell: Yes, that is undoubtedly
true and we have been working on that for some months earlier
this year. We do not deploy our staff as efficiently as we should.
We know that we can do better and we have begun work on that.
Q144 Chairman: Why has that taken
so long?
Mr Russell: What we discovered
was that only a comparatively small number of managers were really
knowledgeable about how to design good staff attendance systems,
so we had to go right back to the beginning and start providing
training for governors in the design of staff attendance system
and shifts and we got through the process of training all governors
to a basic level and a smaller number to a more advanced level
by about June, which is just when our troubles were kicking in.
So, it is certainly right that our attendance patterns do not
make the most efficient use possible of the staff at Maghaberry.
Q145 Chairman: When you say that
you have just discovered it was an inefficient system, who just
discovered it and when?
Mr Russell: I hope I did not imply
that it was a new realisation. When I arrived in the Service,
there were two or three people who had been seized of this for
some time who had my ear and were delighted to hear that senior
management were now prepared to make this an important issue,
which I was.
Q146 Chairman: I think that senior
management have always made it a relatively important issue. I
think what you are trying not to say to us is that you have the
POA resisting changes.
Mr Russell: Well, we had not even
reached the point of taking the game to the POA in a big way.
In fact, I would say in favour of the POA that they attended some
of the training which I have referred to and we were actually
managing to establish a reasonable rapport as to what constituted
an efficient design of shift systems, so that was a bit of constructive
industrial relations.
Q147 Chairman: It just seems to me
very strange that, three years after the closure of the Maze and
three years into "the normalisation of the Prison Service",
suddenly someone says, "We have an inefficient shift system"
which you, by definition, have had for years. Why has it been
neglected for all these years? It was inefficient in the day when
I was there—I was a prison minister—but there were
reasons for it because prison officers were being killed and the
prison officers were not in control of the wings. All of these
things actually happened before I arrived there and therefore
one had to accept that there were inefficiencies. My question
is, once you started to get down to a normal prison regime, which
I suppose started after the Downing Street declaration and certainly
took power after the Good Friday declaration and should have been
up and running by the time all the paramilitaries or most of the
paramilitaries were released, why, three years later, is somebody
saying, "My goodness me, we have an inefficient system"?
Mr Russell: The account I would
give is that I have been in this job for 18 months, so my personal
experience goes back that far. When the Maze closed, we had a
40% reduction in the size of the Service. A large number of staff
moved between establishments. Quite a lot of managers were newly
promoted into post. That is a very sizeable upheaval in an organisation
and, when you have a number of people new to role and new to location,
it is quite difficult to be at the same time turning the attendance
patterns inside out. So, I can well understand why my predecessors
were keen to consolidate the significant upheaval that the Service
had taken on board immediately after September 2000. However,
I am facing a continuing challenge to reduce the cost per prisoner
place in Northern Ireland—it is one of the Northern Ireland
Office's targets set by the Treasury—and on examining where
the scope lies for reducing that cost, the more efficient deployment
of staff stands out as an opportunity that we ought to be able
to capitalise on.
Q148 Chairman: It is just taking
a very long time and you acknowledge that?
Mr Russell: I do and it will take
longer because of the Steele business because I am reluctant to
try to force through changes in working patterns while we are
having to implement a wholly new regime in part of Maghaberry
Prison. We are going to be taking on new staff and we have to
train staff for particular roles in connection with the separated
regime and that in itself is a new upheaval in the Service.
Q149 Chairman: How many new staff
are you taking on?
Mr Russell: We are working that
through but it will be a three-figure number; it will be over
100 at Maghaberry.
Q150 Chairman: And these will be
people coming with no experience of the Prison Service?
Mr Russell: Yes. There is an opportunity
to take on people who are not prison officers to do a range of
jobs which currently we use prison officers to do, but which jobs
do not involve the supervision of prisoners. The external gate,
for example; the admission of visitors to the prison; jobs which
involve being in a control room and watching screens and pressing
buttons to open doors and gates but not supervising a prisoner.
We have quite a number of these jobs.
Q151 Chairman: Yes, obviously administrative,
so you are redeploying prison officers in order that they are
the people who have contact with the prisoners and do not do administrative
jobs.
Mr Russell: That is correct.
Q152 Chairman: Is that a more expensive
process or a cheaper process? Is it a money saver?
Mr Russell: It must be a money
saver. If it were not a money saver, it would not be worth doing,
frankly.
Q153 Chairman: It might be from a
management or a training point of view.
Mr Russell: There is a training
penalty with a prison officer because you have to provide training
in things like control and restraint techniques which are plainly
not necessary if the job is done by somebody who does not control
and restrain prisoners. So, there are additional overheads, if
you like, to a prison officer which are not needed if somebody
is censoring mail or opening the external gate or admitting visitors.
I do not say that they need no training but they certainly do
not need as much as would attach to a prison officer.
Q154 Mr Beggs: Point number three,
sickness?
Mr Russell: There has been a bit
of a drop in the last month, but I do not think I can point to
anything I have done which would give me the credit for that.
However, from 1 November, we are implementing a new sick absence
policy. Of itself, that will not make a huge difference. What
will really make the difference is more robust management so that,
for example, when somebody hits what you would call a trigger
point for the issue of a warning, we actually ensure that the
warning does issue. We are not very good at that at the moment;
only a small proportion of those who hit the warning trigger point
actually receive the warning. So, we have not been as robust at
managing all of that.
Q155 Chairman: What is the warning
trigger point?
Mr Russell: I would have to confirm
that afterwards. For short-term absence, it may be ten days or
three occasions, but I could not be definitive about that.
Q156 Chairman: Three times 10 days'
absence before they get a warning?
Mr Russell: If I am right, it
would be either three occasions or 10 days.
Q157 Chairman: I see.
Mr Russell: However, as I say,
I am speaking without the document in front of me. If the Committee
would like me to confirm that in writing, I would be happy to
do so afterwards. So, it is a combination of having the right
policy in place and actually operating the management controls
correctly. The management of long-term sick absence is an increasing
issue for us, even disproportionately compared with my previous
experience in Scotland, mental debility or, if you like, stress,
is a dominant causal factor in absence and these are usually long-term
cases requiring the involvement of the Occupational Health Service.
There is more work for us to do in terms of our relationship with
the Occupational Health Service to make sure that we do not leave
it too late to get into these. If there is good reason to believe
that somebody will not be coming back, we should not wait a long
time before arriving at that point.
Assistant Director of Services:
Forty per cent of people who are out sick is to do with stress
and anxiety.
Q158 Mr Beggs: Would you like to
comment on the suggestion that there is an inadequate prison estate?
Mr Russell: I would because the
irony is that Northern Ireland has a comparatively modern prison
estate and yet chunks of it are not really fit for purpose. If
you visited the square houses at Maghaberry, the original four
house blocks which were built, they are a hollow square with comparatively
short runs on each side of 18 cells. The site lines are dreadful,
the corridors are narrow and they are an awful environment in
which to control prisoners. My suspicion is that this design was
copied from England; it was maybe originally thought appropriate
for low-security category prisoners where levels of supervision
could be much lower. However, we find ourselves using it as our
main resource for managing higher-security prisoners and, to be
honest, if I could replace them tomorrow with something more like
the two more modern houses in Maghaberry, I would be very well
pleased. Plainly, that is not a realistic possibility. We do,
however, hope to get started on a further house block at Maghaberry
before too much longer.
Q159 Mr Beggs: Do you accept that
management failings may have contributed to the protests at Maghaberry
either directly or by creating a situation which the paramilitaries
were able to exploit?
Mr Russell: I think I would have
to have a more specific proposition to that. However, should prisoners
have been on the roof? Prisoners should not have been on the roof.
So, there was something about our management of prisons at that
point which was not right. Ultimately, that comes down, if you
like, to management.
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