Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380-399)
27 OCTOBER 2004
MS JULIET
LYON, PROFESSOR
AUGUSTIN JOHN,
MR TOM
ROBSON, MR
PAUL O'DONNELL
AND MR
JOHN BRENCHLEY
Q380 Chairman: UNLOCK was a bit unkind
about the more established pressure groups in the prison reform
area. I do not know if they were talking about you but they said
"There are too many of these groups who have been here a
long time, publishing lots of research and glossy pamphlets but
who don't actually do anything." Did you smart when you heard
those remarks?
Ms Lyon: I was wondering if I
was going to escape some criticism or not.
Q381 Chairman: Do you think you are a
bit complacent? Lots of you have been around for a long time and
if you did performance indicators on you lot, there is NACRO and
yourselves, and you have been going for many, many years, the
Howard League, you have not done very well, have you?
Ms Lyon: I think there were some
startling failures. I am not sure you can lay this entirely at
our door, but our twin aims are, one, to reduce the prison population
to what Lord Woolf called an unavoidable minimum.
Q382 Chairman: I think you have missed
that performance indicator.
Ms Lyon: We have done pretty badly
on that one. The other is improving the treatment of and conditions
for prisoners and their families, on which I think we have done
somewhat better. We count particular things we are able to achieve.
In terms of public information, I think we achieve a significant
amount of good quality, accurate information, disseminated to
Parliament and the public, through the All-Party Group as well
to which we provide the secretariat. In terms of individual particular
gains, we have achieved a health policy agreed for older prisoners,
having published a report about older prisoners. This particular
report, on education, we were pleased that it was taken up and
used as a backbone to the curriculum review, and I am interested
now to talk to Lord Filkin about whether he feels it has been
fully responded to. In terms of where it went and how many bodies
considered it and looked at it, we were pleased that it appeared
to inform a lot of debate and discussion. Maybe that is a very
small aim, because clearly most of us would not come into the
business of working in a pressure group if we did not want to
make major changes, but sometimes we have to knock up some minor
ones.
Q383 Chairman: Do you engage enough with
the press? We notice here that as soon as we start an inquiry
into prison education hardly any press turns up at all.
Ms Lyon: We have independent press
monitors, so we know, in terms of the printed press, how many
people we reach. In January and February it is 22 million each
month; for September, it is 15 million.
Q384 Chairman: You would almost think
one of your jobs might be to get more people to come and hear
your evidence?
Ms Lyon: We did not actually press
release on this, in part because we try not to overdo it. We are
just producing a report about 18-20 year olds.
Chairman: I think press releases would
have been the minimum. I think some very large men, muscular men,
might have been more useful. We are going to move on and talk
about prison staff.
Q385 Jonathan Shaw: Short-term sentences
seem to be the problem, in terms of staff, in terms of prisoners
and governors. We have heard that governors stay, on average,
21 months. Juliet Lyon, what impact does that have on the commitment
to see educational programmes through?
Ms Lyon: I would not have chosen
a school for my children, if I had the choice, leaving out what
that headteacher was like. It seems to me that is an important
parallel. In terms of the culture of an establishment, the governor
in a hierarchical set-up has an enormous influence on the kind
of institution it is. If you have got that break in leadership
and that constant movement, it is a nonsense I think, frankly.
It is one of the key things that one would like to see change.
Over the last five years, up to March of this year, 44 prisons
had four or more governors or acting governors. If those were
schools, people would be going berserk. On the previous point
about the press, it would make every headline, you know, "What's
happening to our heads?" We do not have headlines about "What
is happening to our governors?" or "What is happening
to our prisons?"
Q386 Jonathan Shaw: Parents would be
waving placards, would they not, quite rightly?
Ms Lyon: They would, indeed. I
think the point is well made. The other thing is, we did do another
survey, called "Barred Citizens", which I would like
to submit, if I may, after this meeting. [1]It
was a scoping study of opportunities for prisoners to take part
as volunteers and to be involved as citizens of the prison community,
if you like. We looked at examples of good practice and in particular
looked at the Samaritan "Listener" scheme, where the
Samaritans train prisoners to respond to suicidal prisoners, and
we looked at the Inside Out Trust. They are the two biggest examples
of very positive work which engaged prisoners as givers of services
rather than recipients. The reason I am telling you that now,
in relation to governors, is that it was a landscape where there
were some startlingly good examples and some completely barren
areas where nothing much was happening. It was not to do with
security classification, it was always to do with whether the
governor, he or she, subscribed to that activity, supported that
activity and supported the staff who initiated and ran it.
Q387 Jonathan Shaw: On that, did you
see any correlation between the churn of governors and the impact
upon those sorts of programmes for the institutions?
Ms Lyon: Certainly things fall
away when a new governor comes in, very often, and equally it
is true of the individual reformers who are running a particular
thing. For example, they may well get a Butler Trust award and
it is something the Butler Trust, I know, feels very strongly
about, we did a joint conference with them last year about Prison
Service performance recognition. They reward exceptionally able
staff for doing programmes of this kind, but so often after they
have been rewarded for it they are moved on or promoted to a different
area and that is lost along with the individual who has put it
in. There is a lack of integration, is what I am saying really,
I think, and things hang on individuals.
Q388 Jonathan Shaw: Is it a profession
that finds it reasonably easy to recruit, is it a popular profession
to go into? I am talking about governors.
Ms Lyon: It is a simple fact that
there are not enough good governors to go round and this explains
the reason for movement. It is not just to do with the promotional
structure, which I think needs investigation. At the moment the
planning is, as Tom was saying, to reward people for moving rather
than for staying and it is only the exceptional governor, like
Paul Mainwaring when he was at Huntercombe who negotiated to be
able to stay at a young offender institution for five years and
to be rewarded for staying. It was a special arrangement attached
to that one governor, who put forward a case for needing to maintain
consistency with young people, which was admirable but it should
not have been him having to make a special case.
Q389 Jonathan Shaw: The reason is that
there are not enough good governors so they have to move them
around all the time?
Ms Lyon: If you have a large London
prison that is in trouble, a Brixton or a Holloway, that is very
near to ministers, very near to the press. It is a high profile
institution, it will not be a good thing if it gets into serious
trouble, so the tendency will be to move a good governor in from
another, regional prison as fast as possible, often with absolutely
no notice. In that case you have to back-fill the appointment,
so if you moved from the Midlands you have to back-fill into the
Midlands, and each large governor move may require another five
or so moves, like dominos. There simply are not enough good governors.
There was a scheme to attract in new people.
Q390 Jonathan Shaw: Thank you very much.
Can we go on to targets?
Mr Robson: In support of Juliet's
answer, there was a very high profile case regarding Wandsworth
some years ago, we are going back possibly five years, when the
Chief Inspector's Report found that actually there had not been
a governor in Wandsworth for some two years. The situation was
that the government of Wandsworth was so high profile and so well
thought of within the Prison Service that it was forever being
taken out of the establishment to shore up a poorly-performing
establishment or to cover for people in head office and, as a
result, Wandsworth was sadly neglected. That is a situation, in
a smaller way, which occurs up and down the Prison Service day
in and day out.
Q391 Jonathan Shaw: This is about education;
nevertheless, I think the parallel with a headteacher is one that
I wrote down as well, Juliet.
Mr Robson: It is to do with continuity,
of course.
Q392 Jonathan Shaw: Absolutely. Can I
ask you about the appointments of learning and skills, Tom Robson.
How was that received by your Association?
Mr Robson: First of all, our Association
welcomes any initiative that will give quality time to inmates.
The worst thing that can happen to my members is for prisoners
to be idle. I am talking about initiatives, whether they be, as
was talked through earlier, a myriad of things that happen, we
are talking about cell work, vocational training and education,
so the Prison Officers' Association welcome quality time out of
cells for inmates. The worst thing that can happen to my members
is to have to lock people up for 23 hours a day, which I think
is the standard press response to what happens in prisons, and
to watch inmates, day in and day out, playing table-tennis or
hanging around. Anything that is quality for inmates is quality
for prison officers.
Q393 Jonathan Shaw: Have things changed
in the last few years?
Mr Robson: Yes, they have. I think
that we have a different style of prison governor. I think that
there is much more hands-on by the Prison Service, prisons are
not being left to do their own thing any more. Certainly there
is more monitoring, which again we welcome. However, what goes
hand in hand with that is, in some areas of the country, a difficulty
of recruiting prison officers, so not only is there a lack of
continuity with governors there is also a fairly high turnover
of prison officers in some areas as well. I think the Prison Service
has changed in that way. I think we do need to have a more stable
staff, although that has been addressed and it is starting to
improve now, certainly in London, which has always been a more
difficult area.
Q394 Jonathan Shaw: How is it being addressed,
what are they doing that is making an impact?
Mr Robson: I think that we have
gone into a situation of local recruitment, recruiting people
who actually live in London rather than bringing in people from
outside, and I think that is having an impact. It is in its very
early stages now. I would reserve judgment as to whether it is
going to be a permanent situation or not but, so far, the local
recruitment I am talking about appears to be working.
Q395 Jonathan Shaw: Juliet Lyon, has
that been your feeling, that the staff, the prison officers, have
embraced the recruitment of the heads of learning and skills in
institutions?
Ms Lyon: Certainly our sector
has, the voluntary sector.
Q396 Jonathan Shaw: What is your perception
of it?
Ms Lyon: I think there is a fear,
which Tom voiced earlier, that prison staff will be reduced to
turnkeys, that they will be locking and unlocking doors, while
other people come in and do the more interesting things, the more
interesting things being education and other sorts of activities.
Q397 Jonathan Shaw: I do not know whether
you are familiar with the contract. We have heard that REX has
collapsed and there has been some discussion about the inability
of the head of learning and skills within prisons to have much
influence on the contract, particularly importing, using local
education providers. Is that something on which your organisation
has got a view?
Ms Lyon: We have contributed to
the consultation on the contracting procedure.
Q398 Jonathan Shaw: What were you saying
in the consultation?
Ms Lyon: We were saying, it is
an area on which we do not feel strongly informed, so we did not
say as much as we might have done. What we have said in relation
to heads of learning and skills is, we welcome their appointment
and we welcome the level at which they are placed in the senior
management team, clearly that was important and that was a significant
change. In terms of contracting, I remain unconvinced that the
process is right yet. I was in Durham Prison last week, looking
at new education units but being told by the Governor that there
were no people to staff them because of problems with the contract.
Really I could not understand what this was about, where you can
have facilities and nobody using them and no staff to run them.
Q399 Jonathan Shaw: Tom Robson, is that
something on which your organisation has a view?
Mr Robson: Turnkeys were mentioned,
and that is absolutely right, but we have got no fear, we believe
that we should be integrated and that we are major players within
the Prison Service anyway. I think I mentioned earlier that there
are education centres of great quality up and down the country
where, because of lack of staff, governors are not able to keep
them open for the hours that they should be, and sometimes that
is because of a shortage of prison officers, sometimes because
of overcrowding. When a prison is overcrowded it is more likely
that people will self-harm and have to be sent out to local hospitals,
which takes staff away, etc. There are 101 reasons why an education
department might suffer brickbats in that way.
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