Examination of Witnesses (Questions 680-700)
17 NOVEMBER 2004
MR PHIL
WHEATLEY, MR
MARTIN NAREY
AND MS
SUSAN PEMBER
OBE
Q680 Paul Holmes: There was a recently
published report from Ofsted and the Adult Learning Inspectorate
which said that although the Skills for Life initiative
had been highly successful in increasing the number of students
doing various types of basic skills and raising the profile of
that area of learning, they said there needed to be much sharper
focus on the quality. So, you are ticking the box for numbers
but the report said that the quality needs improving.
Mr Wheatley: I think that, for
the public sector prison service, that is right. We need to work
on quality. The Adult Learning Inspectorate work is an important
part on helping us to work on quality. The heads of learning and
skills have gone in specifically to help us to do that and the
re-tendering process that we will go through as LSCs take on that
responsibility will also give us another chance to build quality
into the contract in the way that it is not built into the current
contracts. So, it is perfectly accurate that that is what we should
be doing and that is what we are trying to do.
Mr Narey: It would be very easy
just to measure bodies in education, that is very easy to manipulate.
We are being measured by hard outcomes. Phil holds his governors
to account for getting prisoners with qualifications; I hold Phil
to account and I hold the private sector prisons to account. This
is hard outputs and we could not be doing that if we were not
doing something right. We all acknowledge that the quality could
be much improved. I not infrequently visit a prison and believe
that the tutors who we are getting from a particular college are
not exactly the pick of the bunch and we do need to address that
and improve that, but I think we are doing something right otherwise
we would not be getting the outputs that we are.
Q681 Paul Holmes: The Independent Monitoring
Board has said that you are ticking the boxes for basic skills
and basic skills are essential for employment but they are not
sufficient in themselves because particularly the prisoners would
then need a lot more help in life skills and the motivation to
apply for jobs and the higher level skills that are needed for
any decent job in the job market now and we have seen again the
icing on the cake examples like the Transco training information
for gas fitters, but that is the tip of the iceberg. So, is it
enough just to tick the box for basic skills or do we need to
be having a lot more than that?
Mr Narey: Certainly not and the
primary challenge, and the primary challenge for me leading this
new organisation, is to make sure that the gains made on education
in prison are built on when people go out and we do very badly
on that. That is much my greatest worry. It is hard to get offenders
in the community to attend basic skills. It is much more difficult
to motivate them and retaining them and building on what has been
achieved in prison is a huge challenge and I think that is the
key to improvement. Basic skills are where it begins. I know David
Sherlock spoke to you—he has been a great friend to both
Phil and myself throughout this and has been very, very supportive—and
he said to us, "In terms of addressing the main problems
that your offenders have, you should continue to concentrate on
basic skills".
Q682 Paul Holmes: I have a question regarding
following up when they leave prison but, just before I ask that,
I do have another very quick point. We heard examples of a very
crude way of a tick box culture having an effect in that you go
into some prisons and they would actually advertise key performance
target classes and you would ask the prisoners, "What are
you learning here?" and they would say, "We're learning
key performance targets" and they were not really making
a connection or the emphasis was on ticking the target box, it
was not actually on the educational process.
Mr Narey: I have never heard that.
Phil and I were at Wandsworth a fortnight ago and at Hindley last
week and we both spent quite a long time in education there and
I saw a number of young people who knew exactly what they were
doing. They did not much enjoy it, they were not exactly motivated.
One of the reasons why we will always have relatively small class
sizes is that you cannot teach 20 people who have never been to
school in a single room. You have to have class sizes sometimes
of six or eight. I saw a great deal of learning going on. There
is nothing to hide here and I urge you to believe that we do not
think all is perfect but I would urge you to visit as many places
as you want and speak to as many governors as you want, not just
the Chair of the Prison Governors Association, and I think you
will find a real commitment right down the Prison Service which,
frankly, I wish I could yet say I had replicated in the Probation
Service and, ironically, I am finding that a greater challenge
than I did with the Prison Service.
Chairman: We will be coming to that in
a minute.
Q683 Paul Holmes: My final question,
which I touched on in my first question near the start of the
session, is, you just said a few minutes ago that you would need
to look more at what happens after they go out of prison and I
asked you right at the start about you saying, okay, we have met
the Home Office target for getting 31,500 prisoners into employment,
training or education outcomes on release, but we have heard evidence
to query how true that is because what you are basing that on
is a questionnaire that you give prisoners before they are released
and they say, "Oh, yes, I am going for an interview"
and "I am going for a job", but you have no idea in
effect whether that interview actually becomes a job or whether
that job lasts for more than week, 10 weeks or 20 weeks. You do
not know what the actual outcome is, it is just a questionnaire
in which prisoners say, "Yes, I am going to do this when
I am released" and you do not know what the quality is. The
Adult Learning Inspectorate has said that the targets should relate
to employment and reducing re-offending rather than just being
a tick box where they are saying that, yes, they are going for
a job interview, but you need to be able to measure and target
whether they are actually reducing re-offending and whether they
are going to sustain employment.
Mr Narey: I have to admit, though
it is not very fashionable at the moment, that I am great fan
of targets. Targets change organisations; they send messages to
your workforce about what you want to do. If you look at the targets
which Phil and I inherited as Director General and Deputy Director
General when we started working together in 1999, you would see
targets which concentrated almost entirely on ordering, control
and security. Phil now has targets to which I hold him to account
which cover those things but also cover getting people into employment,
reducing their use of drugs, getting people into accommodation,
improving their education and improving their cognitive skills
and the Prison Service has changed accordingly. So, we are doing
much more than that and overall the thing that underpins it, all
the targets to which the Home Secretary holds me personally responsible,
is to reduce re-offending by 5% based on people leaving prison
in 2002 and in the longer term by 10% and that is what all this
adds up to and what it is for.
Chairman: I have two patient colleagues
who want to get their section of questions in. Work, pay and employers.
Q684 Mr Pollard: Martin, you mentioned
earlier that kids you have seen eventually in your prisons have
been out of education since they were 12, generally excluded.
It seems to me that we should be doing much more positive pro-active
things well before they get to become guests of your establishments.
It would be initially very expensive to do that but, in the long
term, perhaps much, much cheaper. Are you talking to the Home
Secretary and to Charles Clarke about that very issue?
Mr Narey: Certainly. Over a long
time, the Department for Education knows of our concerns about
exclusion and has been doing a great deal to address that. I should
say that I have great sympathy with heads. My kids have left school
now but it is relatively recently that I was shopping around for
which school my kids would go to and headmasters sell the schools
on their exclusion policy and it is very attractive. If I worried
about my son who is a little small for his age getting beaten
up, I would be greatly reassured by a head who said, "Anyone
who touches him will be thrown out". The fact is that 13,000
or so people a year, a worrying proportion of them young black
men, are being excluded from school and a much greater number
are being informally excluded—and that is what very much
I get from visiting youth offending teams—and it is a time
bomb which we inherit. Of course, I would much rather that it
was not happening but it is happening and we have to deal with
realities and we have to try and do what we can.
Q685 Mr Pollard: What needs to happen
to enable all prisons to take a joined-up approach to work and
education and training opportunities?
Mr Narey: Do you want me or Mr
Wheatley to answer that?
Mr Pollard: Either of you.
Q686 Chairman: Joining-up does run as
a theme, so we would be grateful for an answer to this.
Mr Wheatley: The key to the joining-up
is in fact offender management which is what the National Offender
Management Service has at its heart. Actually, what you have to
do—and I think one of the members of the Committee referred
to it—is take somebody, work out what the things are that
are wrong with them and then, as far as resources allow, try to
then do what we can in prison, linking through to the outside,
to deal with those problems and that is how the joining-up should
be achieved. So, as we move into working as part of a service
that has offender management at its core, that is how I think
we make those links, by making offender management the way in
which we run establishments. So, you are looking at what the needs
of the offenders are, what we can stack up to cope with those
needs, what the best order is in which to do them and then how
to adjust the things that we learn about offenders during the
period we have them in custody. So, if somebody has a positive
drugs test while they are inside, we will have to adjust to take
account of the fact that something we were doing was not working.
I think that joining up is best achieved in that way. It is also
achieved by having a senior management team that owns the whole
of the aims of the prison and the targets of the prison, and I
think that actually the importance of the head of learning and
skills cannot be underestimated in this because previously there
was not a champion for education on the senior management team.
The person who was most qualified in educational terms was usually
the manger in the establishment who was actually the contractor's
staff and I think that we did miss a trick in the Prison Service
as we moved to contracting as opposed to delivering direct in
not putting somebody in to be responsible for the management with
skills and knowledge about what could be achieved in education.
So, I think that the head of learning and skills post in enabling
education now to punch its weight as part of the team to make
sure that we do integrate things, and they do need integrating
because quite a lot of education can be done not in education
but in places of employment, on the wings and as part of other
things. I can think of a particular example that I saw at Onley
where I saw young men, over 18s, in a workshop making concrete
blocks. Not the most exciting of jobs but they liked it because
it was big, strong men's work as they saw it and it involved using
dumper trucks and a forklift truck and things that give you skills
that are actually very employable skills outside. The instructors
who were doing that were also doing a basic education class as
part of the work they were doing and that played back into calculating
things, recording stuff that they had made and you had the whole
integration very neatly. We should be doing more of that and trying
to make sure we do that and head of learning skills is a key part
of that and a concerted senior management team built round, as
we move into the future of the National Offender Management Service,
carefully planning for offenders in order that we do our best
to reduce the risks they present.
Q687 Mr Pollard: You mentioned the head
of learning and skills. A very old friend of Mr Narey told us
quite recently that the head of learning and skills in his prison
was not part of the senior management team. If education is so
important and so crucial, why was that person not represented
on the senior management team in order that it gave the clear
view to one and all that education was at the core of your activities?
Mr Wheatley: I must admit that
I agree. I think that the head of learning and skills should be
on the senior management team.
Q688 Chairman: The Governor of Durham
said that he cannot control the contract, he cannot control the
education, so why should that person be on the management team.
Mr Narey: Chairman, he certainly
can control education.
Q689 Chairman: You read the transcript
and that is what he said, is it not?
Mr Narey: Yes, that is what he
said and, as I explained, I am dismayed by what he said and I
am not quite sure why he should say that. Mike Newell is very
proud of his prison; he has been a very fine governor of Durham
and he has achieved a great deal.
Q690 Mr Pollard: You say that he has
been.
Mr Narey: He has been a very fine
governor of Durham and has achieved a great deal; he is very proud
of what he has achieved. I have recently been round Durham with
him and been round education and have seen the things that he
has been doing and, in very, very difficult circumstances in one
of the most overcrowded prisons, and he has been doing a good
job. I barely recognised anything of what he said to you and certainly
I shall be taking it up with him.
Q691 Mr Pollard: You talk about NOMS
being the coordinating body. We were told earlier that, apart
from Martin, there are 10 other people doing this throughout the
country. How is that going to be affected if there is a man, a
boy and a dog doing this, no matter how good the man is?
Mr Narey: I promise you that is
not the case, Mr Pollard. I have the resources of prison and probation.
That is one thing that I cannot complain about either when I was
doing Phil's job or doing this job in terms of the resources I
have been given. I would like much more obviously but I have done
pretty well. We have 64,000 staff all being brought together into
this organisation. At the moment, we are still running the organisations
and Phil is still Director General of Prisons and indeed will
remain so and I have a Director General of Probation and we are
running them as separate services. The work to do to bring them
together, to introduce regional offender managers who will hold
the budgets for prisons and probation in their areas, is only
just under way. It is going to mean a very, very large change.
It is a change which we are taking steadily. I cannot possibly
put at risk the performance improvements that we have had. I think
one of the greatest achievements that Phil has made as DDG and
DG is that he has taken prisons, for months at a time, off the
front page of the papers and the Service has been allowed to prosper
because of that. We are taking the organisation steadily but it
will make a dramatic change and the whole purpose of the organisation
is to bring together that coherent management of offenders and
manage them as individuals in and out of custody.
Q692 Mr Pollard: What opportunities are
there for prisoners to get paid real wages in order that they
have the dignity that goes along with that, perhaps sending money
across to their families? I appreciate all that you said earlier
about the low skills, low levels and all that.
Mr Narey: Phil may want to comment
but one of the things which amused me when I read the Prison Reform
Trust evidence which talked about the need to pay people was that,
separately and quite rightly, the Prison Reform Trust is very
keen for the number of experiments that we have around the Prison
Estate in public and private prisons where we do pay prisoners
real wages and, as a condition of that, they have to save money
for their release. There are quite a number of these real pay
schemes, some of their wages are sent to Victims' Support. There
are some real difficulties with what we would really like to do
which is for them to support their dependants on the outside because
of the effect on benefits. We are doing a number of these things
but of course, in doing that, in giving people real work and real
money, perhaps £60 a week to work in an industrial production
workshop, then we are providing, it would be argued, a disincentive
to going into education. I share Phil's view. I have been more
than once to every prison in the country and I have never been
stopped by a prisoner who has said to me that wages are preventing
him from wanting to go into education.
Q693 Chairman: Just on NOMS for a moment,
what we are hearing is that it is a wonderful idea, wonderful
aspiration again, but that it has been torpedoed. The Probation
Service, aided and abetted by 130 Members of Parliament signing
an Early Day Motion, has frightened the Government totally and
they have really backtracked very, very fast on NOMS. NOMS, as
Kerry said, is you and 10 others and not going very fast because
you cannot get the Probation Service to cooperate. People are
saying that you are dead in the water, Martin! Are you or not?
Mr Narey: I am certainly not dead
in the water and I can promise you that the Probation Service
does not believe that. I can tell you that, three Saturdays ago
at the NAPO Conference, they did not think that NAPO was dead
in the water, they were still very, very nervous about it. NAPO
hates the concept of the National Offender Management Service
primarily because one of the things we will introduce is greater
contestability. My experience in leading prisons and in this job
is that injecting contestability into public services hugely improves
the effectiveness of those public services. Contestability in
prisons has produced 12 shortly to be 13 very good private prisons
and has allowed Phil to drive up standards in public sector prisons.
I now want to do that with probation. I think I can make more
effective use of the money we spend on offenders in the community
if there is some competition. I stress competition, not privatisation,
competition. NAPO hates that but NOMS is very much up and running
and, in some areas, particularly in sentencing, we are making
some very, very encouraging progress. I spent a great deal of
my time in the first few months as Chief Executive speaking to
sentencers, some 300 of them just last week, trying to get home
to them what the Home Secretary and the Government's message is
about sentencing, which is not "bang up everybody",
it is about locking up dangerous offenders, often for longer,
but, wherever possible, using community punishments for minor
offenders and that is beginning to pay off. The prison population
is still very high but it is 5,000 smaller than statistical projections
suggested it would be last year. That and the development of offender
management are coming along steadily but very well and it is certainly
not dead in the water. NOMS is here, it is a reality and some
members of the Probation Service will have to change.
Q694 Jeff Ennis: Paul Goggins, the Prison
Minister, recently described one of the main problems with the
system as being the high number of short-term prisoners in the
system with whom very little can be done, to which we referred
to some extent earlier. He then went on to say that what was needed
was robust alternatives to prison for short-term prisoners in
order that they are dealt with more effectively in the community.
Is he right and what would be the robust alternatives?
Mr Narey: He is absolutely right.
He is my minister! I agree with every word of that. There has
been the most astonishing change in sentencing policy in the last
10 years. First-time offenders did not used to go to prison when
they committed minor offences. In 2002, the last year for which
we have full figures, 3,000 individuals convicted of minor thefts—theft
of a bicycle, theft from a shop, theft from a car—without
a previous conviction went to prison. That is just one example
of the way custody has been almost the first choice for many sentencers
and we need to turn that around in order that we can use prison
for what it is best for, which is for dangerous people who are
going to be there for long periods. I have to pick a confidence
in the Probation Service which has deteriorated somewhat. I need
to convince sentencers that, if they give somebody a community
punishment, it will be enforced rigorously and, if someone does
not comply, they will go back to prison. That is now beginning
to happen but there is always a lag between making something happen
and convincing the world that it has happened and, to be almost
frank, it has not yet happened at all satisfactorily in London
which is still struggling. There are very different community
sentences. For example, the drug testing and treatment order is
not the half-hour with the Probation Service which used to characterise
probation supervision—half-an-hour a week—it is now
25 hours of activity including clinical treatment in order to
get people off drugs. I have been given the investment to roll
out more of those sort of sentences and I believe we will be able
to convince the courts that, in terms of effectiveness, they should
not send to prison for short periods of time, they should leave
them in the community, but with the absolute understanding that,
if they mess up, if they do not take that opportunity, they will
end up back in prison because they will be in breach.
Q695 Jeff Ennis: Are we able to incorporate
more education into community punishment measures or do we need
to do more of that sort of thing, Martin?
Mr Narey: We need to do an awful
lot more. It has been very difficult to turn this around and Susan
has been by my side while we have done it. I think that we have
made a breakthrough and, even this year, with radically improved
performance relative to last year, we will only get 8,000 basic
skills qualifications from offenders in the community which, set
to the 60,000 we will get in prison, is still far too few. It
is more difficult. Phil has a literally captive audience and we
do not have that with offenders in the community but we can do
and must do much better. What we plan to do is make education
absolutely at the heart of the offender experience in custody,
out of custody and between the two.
Q696 Jeff Ennis: So, you are developing
the strategy to achieve that.
Mr Narey: Absolutely and the targets
are being pushed up year on year and it is back to Mr Holmes's
point about targets. The Probation Service is in no doubt now
that the real priority is education and we have made a sort of
retreat from cognitive skills programmes to which I think to some
extent the Probation Service had attached themselves rather too
closely and believed that they were the one and only way of dealing
with offenders and they are not.
Q697 Jeff Ennis: We have already mentioned
some of the barriers to prison education being delivered in the
prison environment such as overcrowding, the churn factor, staff
shortages, etcetera. What progress is the Prison Service
making towards overcoming the various barriers to prison education
within the regime itself and I guess this question is more to
Phil?
Mr Wheatley: I think the barriers
are the ones you have listed.
Q698 Jeff Ennis: How do we overcome these
barriers?
Mr Wheatley: We are now nearer
to target staffing level than we have been at any point over the
last 10 years and that is primarily because we have managed to
get local recruitment to work in London. That has made the really
big difference. We have also targeted the spending we have and
will lift up pay by area, very targeted, and we are putting additional
money into prisons to which we are having difficulty in recruiting
in order to make it more attractive. Getting our staffing levels
right is crucial to running prisons effectively. We are running
a performance improvement programme which again is targeted on
prisons which we think can be improved that gives governors the
chance—this is not a stick approach—to rethink their
prison and re-organise it. Prisons are very complicated interlinking
organisations and, if you are going to re-sort the regime in order
to make sure it delivers better, you have to alter a number of
things and letting them have the time and some additional resources
to do that thinking in the performance improvement process is
improving a number of establishments that were not performing
quite as well as we thought they could and that has proved very
successful with the bottom end of that, those that we really thought
were in difficulty, using a rather more robust benchmarking process
which actually performance tests establishments with the possibility
that, if they do not lift their performance to an adequate level,
of going to private sector contract. That has proved a major incentive
to get everybody to pull together to try and make sure that this
establishment works. So, out of those things, we are getting improvements.
That is not to say that it is perfection. If I ever thought I
had perfection in every prison, I should probably be sacked at
that point because I would be deluding myself. I think we have
a steady process of improvement and part of the improvement is
making sure that we use the educational spend better and we integrate
regimes better, which comes back to your question. So, we can
actually sentence plan at the moment and then, later on, I think
offender plan in order that we are thinking through to the outside
in a more organised way.
Q699 Chairman: Why, when you were talking
about the barriers with Jeff Ennis just now, did you not mention
drugs? We are finding a great deal of reluctance to talk about
drugs in prison and whether they are a barrier to the education
and training process in prison. That was the first thing that
the Norwegians wanted to talk to us about. They said, "We
have 60-70% of the people here addicted to some form of substance
abuse, drugs, alcohol or whatever, and that is a very big problem".
Is that not a very big problem for English prisons as well?
Mr Wheatley: It is a big problem
and you have not asked about it. Of our prisoners coming into
custody, we think round about 80% will have been using drugs in
some form and just over 50% problematical drug use, opiate abuse.
That is a number of people to detox. We are very successful at
detoxing prisoners. Prisoners have to detox. Nobody can keep a
street level habit going in prison. The supply reduction methods
we have is that we have dogs to check visitors, there are searches
of people and there is good surveillance on visits, supervision
of the perimeter and all those sorts of things which do not absolutely
prevent all drugs coming in but they do reduce the supply. So,
the chances of keeping an opiate habit going are simply non-existent
in any secure establishment and our mandatory drug testing, which
is quite a good measure of the rate of drug use, suggests that
opiate use turns up in about 4% of samples. That is 4% too many,
but the level of opiate use has remained fairly static having
dropped from an original high, as we first brought in mandatory
drug testing, and it has been quite a good disincentive to prisoners
to use drugs in prison. For some prisoners who are addicted, until
they have got over the detox process which is relatively rapid
for opiate use and actually more difficult for alcohol abuse interestingly—it
is much more difficult to get people off alcohol addiction safely—for
the fairly fast detox, once they are detoxed, it is not a barrier
to what goes on in prison and, in most prisons—not in every
prison—I can confidently say that we have drug use under
control, but have not completely removed it anywhere. So, it is
not a barrier to education. It is less of a problem because we
have quite robust methods of dealing with it. There are some prisons
that I worry about and that is primarily when somebody has found
a way of getting drugs in that has got around our control mechanisms
and, until we have found out what it is—is it a bent member
of staff? Is it some contractor coming into the prison? Has somebody
found a way of throwing things over the wall which are picked
up by work parties?—and have closed that method down, then
I do worry about the stability of the prison and there is a risk
that too many people are thinking about drugs and not improving
themselves. I am not complacent about it. Overall, the Service's
performance has got drugs to a steady level but I would like to
reduce it.
Q700 Chairman: Martin, Susan and Phil,
this has been a very, very good session for us. We could have
gone on longer because there are so many questions we wanted to
ask you. I hope that you have found it not too uncomfortable and
we look forward to being in communication with you. As you go
away on the tube or in a taxi, I always say, "If you think
of something you should have told that darn committee", do
email us, phone us or get in contact.
Mr Narey: Thank you very much
indeed, Chairman and members. We will do that.
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