Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260
- 279)
TUESDAY 2 DECEMBER 2003
MR PHIL
WHEATLEY, MR
PETER WRENCH,
MS EITHNE
WALLIS AND
MR BRIAN
CATON
Q260 David Winnick: The overcrowding
in prisons is quite acute. You are not likely to say no, are you?
Mr Wheatley: There is quite a
lot of overcrowding, yes.
Q261 David Winnick: At the moment
would it be correct to say that there are more prisoners than
ever before? The figure I have in front of me is 74,452. Give
or take a few we are basically talking about well over 74,000.
Mr Wheatley: It is actually dropping
as we approach Christmas. The peak was 74,460, which was at 18/11.
It has dropped to today's figure which is 74,182. We are beginning
to experience a seasonal drop. I am not saying this is the answer
to my prayers. In the pre-Christmas and over the Christmas period
the Prison Service expects to have a reduction in population probably
of the order of a couple of thousand.
Q262 David Winnick: The scenario
painted by some is that the long-term projection for the prison
population suggested that the numbers could go up to somewhere
in the region of 100,000 within six years. Do you take such a
somewhat pessimistic assessment?
Mr Wheatley: I take no particular
view on it. I look at the projections as they appear. The projections
vary over time, because it is very, very difficult to project
the prison population accurately. You are trying to project and
predict so many different actors in the system. What the police
will do, what the CPS will do, what magistrates will do, what
individual judges will do, how the media will respond and what
is happening in politics all affect the numbers. The projections
downstream are always likely to be inaccurate and have, in my
experience, always been inaccurate. They are normally reasonably
good in the short-term. It is a little bit like weather forecasting,
to be honest. I always look, a bit like I do at a long-term weather
forecast, with interest but I do not actually expect to see that.
My experience is that is not what actually happens downstream
because things alter in the meantime.
Q263 David Winnick: Are you telling
us, based on what has happened in the last few years and with
an ever-rising prison population, a figure of somewhere in the
region of 100,000 by 2009 is not likely to be reached?
Mr Wheatley: I am not saying it
is not possible or impossible.
Q264 David Winnick: What is more
likely?
Mr Wheatley: My estimate of this
is not worth anything very much. You are really asking me to assess
politics. The really key issue is whether you as parliamentarians,
whether the Government, will want to fund that level of accommodation
or not; and what your view will be about Criminal Justice Acts—all
things that are not within my gift. Your guess would be better
than mine, actually.
Q265 David Winnick: That is one way
of answering it!
Mr Wheatley: It is honest!
Q266 David Winnick: As far as accommodation
in prisons is concerned, again I have figures which you can confirm
or otherwise, that some 20% or more of prisoners are sharing cells
designed for one?
Mr Wheatley: That is right, yes,
over 20%.
Q267 David Winnick: That is 15,000
prisoners.
Mr Wheatley: Yes. There are other
prisoners who are overcrowded as well. That is not the total of
overcrowding. There will be prisoners who are three in a two cell.
There are dormitories which should have four people in which have
five people in. The sum total of overcrowding is rather large.
Q268 David Winnick: 83 out of 138
prisons overcrowded, is that right?
Mr Wheatley: That will be right,
yes. I do not have the figures to hand. We have spread overcrowding
in small amounts into the Training Estate, where once we did not
overcrowd. We overcrowded, and have overcrowded for all my career,
in local prisons. The levels of overcrowding are nowhere near
what we used to do. I joined the Prison Service when every cell
was three'd-up in the local prison. I could not go to any prison
which had that level of overcrowding nowadays. I am not complacent
about it, but there has been a substantial reduction in levels
of overcrowding over a long period of time. At the moment we are
running near to the peak levels we have certified as acceptable.
We have, after all, been within just over 500 of what we think
is about about absolute maximum capacity.
Q269 David Winnick: A point which
has been made to us by a number of organisations, obviously those
concerned with prison reform in one form or another but not entirely
confined to them, is that with such an amount of overcrowding
prison rehabilitation simply becomes that much more difficult
and, therefore, we would be justified to have a pessimistic view
of what is going to happen to those prisoners when they are released?
Mr Wheatley: What is realistic
is, if we only have 7,900 offending behaviour programmes, as an
example I do not mean that is the only thing we do, if that is
to be shared around amongst 74,000 rather than 66,000, the number
of prisoners who will miss out will be greater. We are not delivering
offending behaviour programme places that totally match the potential
need. There will be a bigger miss. Similarly, what I know happens
in lots of establishments is there is not sufficient ordinary
occupations—not rehabilitative occupations—it is workshops
and lots of fairly mundane work; but there will not be enough
work for all prisoners to work full-time. The work will be shared
so, in effect, you have a work-sharing system with people only
working part-time, or a number of prisoners are queuing for work
and are locked up during the period they queue and wait for a
vacancy. That is as a result of increased population and increased
levels of overcrowding. That shows in our purposeful activity
figures which, although they have gone up substantially and we
have increased purposeful activity since the late 1990s by 30%,
the population has increased by 50% so that is again shared; it
is either given to a few and some people do not get it, or it
is shared so everybody gets less. All those are the reality of
population pressure on us. We are still hitting our targets for
which we are funded on things like basic skills qualifications,
key work skills, giving people skills they can take as marketable
commodities back into the community. We are not only hitting our
targets, we are exceeding them substantially. We are hitting our
offending behaviour overall target, and have managed to do that
quite nicely. We have managed to prioritise our efforts so we
hit the key things we think are making a difference. It is a smaller
proportion who will get them because there is a larger population.
Q270 David Winnick: Mr Caton, your
members are dealing with this situation day in and day out, do
you feel with the present amount of overcrowding rehabilitation
is really going to be in any way effective?
Mr Caton: The Prison Service which
Phil Wheatley and I knew in the early 1970s through the 1980s
was dramatically overcrowded. The Prison Estate had not been maintained
correctly and cells were overcrowded. One thing we did have was
work for prisoners. Prisoners went to work in the main. We had
workshops, and it was thought at that time that what we would
do was give them work, give them purposeful activity and, hopefully,
they would not commit offences while they were in prison and it
would lead, as the Chairman said in his opening remarks, to people
being better on release. The problem is now that we have increased
the prison population. We have put quick build units in prisons.
What we have not done or been able to do—and I am not blaming
anyone for it—is increase the opportunities of prisoners
to go to work, to be involved in work, to get into routines which
lead towards the beginnings of rehabilitation—because we
have concentrated on being able to warehouse prisoners and put
prisoners in new cellular accommodation and to ensure they are
kept in safe custody. The ethos of rehabilitation is about getting
prisoners to do various pieces of work. I actually believe that
in the 1970s (and it continues today) part of the rehabilitative
process is that you make sure a prisoner is clean; you make sure
they keep their cell tidy. All those things matter as a base before
you start building. You want to change these people and give them
reason to change themselves. Rehabilitation is not the gift of
the Prison Service or the Probation Service, it is a gift of the
individual to be provided with the resources, to be able to look
at what they have done and correct it. That is what we are trying
to do. My members are very, very frustrated indeed. If you give
prisoners an expectation then you should deliver on that expectation.
If you do not they very quickly tell you that they are upset.
We have seen an increase in assaults and an increase in antagonism
between prison officers and prisoners, which is always there lying
dormant but comes to the fore when you are not able to give them
what you have told them you can. Even things like physical activity
and gymnasiums, those kinds of things have not been increased
at the same level as the accommodation or the prison population,
and neither have staff numbers to be able to deliver these programmes.
It is a very disappointing stage we are living in. Yes, we are
getting the resource and we are having further accommodation in
existing prisons, and the alternative to that is to privatise
prisons because the new prisons would be privatised, but we are
opposed to that as well.
Q271 David Winnick: The Probation
Service when it looks at the numbers in prisons do you take the
view that one should be somewhat pessimistic about the chances
of rehabilitation while in prison?
Ms Wallis: In terms of prison
numbers, given the current environment and sentencing climate,
I do expect to see these numbers grow. At the same time, we are
working very hard indeed to create the kind of community penalties,
the kind of supervised community penalties, that we hope will
be able to displace a lot of those prisoners who are actually
getting very short custodial sentences. Clearly we are not aiming
to try and displace the longer sentenced and the more serious
offenders, but many offenders who are currently in prison are
there for very short periods of time and are not coming out at
the moment under statutory supervision. We are trying to build
provision in two ways, first of all, through creating more programmes
in interventions in the community of both sufficient punitive
weight and, if you like, rehabilitative content that we hope will
be attractive to sentencers. For example, regarding the 18-20
prison population at the moment, and you referred to them earlier
in relation to very high re-conviction rates, they spend very
short periods inside and very short periods on licence; and it
is hard for either of us to be able to grip them. We have recently
built a programme called Control and Change and this contains
an electronically monitored curfew where the young adult is actually
curfewed for up to 12 hours a day. We work with the police on
their oversight in the community and the enforcement of the terms
and conditions. They also do up to seven hours a week community
service, unpaid work for the community. In addition, we deliver,
with partners, up to 18 hours a week rehabilitation, depending
on what the OASys assessment actually has told us the offending
behaviour is all about. These are the kinds of programmes we hope
are going to help keep some kind of grip on the potential for
the prison population to rise still further.
Q272 David Winnick: Mr Wheatley,
I wonder if I could ask you about community prisons which Lord
Woolf recommended. This would allow prisoners to maintain much
better links with their families and deal with employment and
accommodation when released, to some extent arising from what
has been said just now. Is it the aim to provide more such prisons?
Mr Wheatley: I no longer build
prisons myself, as it were.
Q273 David Winnick: The Home Office.
Mr Wheatley: There are no plans
to produce the sort of change to the Estate that would mean we
could move in any wholesale way to community prisons. The reason
why we do not have community prisons, is not because they are
not a good idea, it is because the Prison Estate is where it is
and it does not actually line up with where prisoners come from.
For instance, to produce community prisons in London I think we
would have to build something like another 20 prisons in London
to cope with the large population of criminals convicted and sentenced
to prison in the London area. All we have in London as prisons
are local prisons sending people out to the south-east, out to
the Isle of Sheppey, up into East Anglia, down onto the Isle of
Wight. That is where the prisoners go. To produce community prisons
you have to be able to hold them near home. That would be an interesting
venture for any government to decide to do, to increase the London
prison provision to such a great extent. Similarly, Dartmoor is
not near anywhere, nor Haverigg up in Cumbria, but those are our
prisons and we have got to use them. To produce a good community
prison you really need a large prison that is multi-functional
so you can move prisoners through the security categories within
it, and you do not have to move them when they require lower security.
We do not want to end up expensively holding them within a secure
perimeter when they do not need it. You are looking for a multi-purpose
establishment, probably purpose-built to be effective, near to
a site where lots of people come from—normally the big conurbations.
What we have been trying to do is build our new prisons in a way
that line up with that and do not exacerbate the problem of our
Estate as it currently is, spread around areas of the country
that are not, in the main, places that are good providers of prisoners.
New accommodation has been built near to centres from which prisoners
come. That has mainly been new private sector prisons, because
that is what has been built. Parc Prison near Bridgend in South
Wales is an example; the new private prison, Forest Bank near
Manchester supplements Manchester Prison. We have tried to build
in a way that moves us towards being able to run community prisons.
If we did build at some point in the future large multi-purpose
prisons they would particularly assist if they were built with
ready access to a large conurbation.
Q274 David Winnick: Lord Woolf's
wish is not likely to come true for quite a while?
Mr Wheatley: Not unless somebody
wants to build a lot of new prisons at whatever cost that would
be, or the prison population is reduced so sharply we can close
the places that are not near where prisoners come from. While
we are running at full capacity with the existing Estate we cannot
run with the community prison concept, except in one or two areas
where we have got an over-provision of places—Kent, for
instance, and Yorkshire and Humberside are really quite good and
we can hold people fairly near to home and try and make strong
local links and there are advantages from that.
Q275 David Winnick: Again, a question
regarding the Prison Reform Trust. They told us during an earlier
session that some 44 of the 138 prisons in England and Wales had
had at least one change of Governor in the last four to five years.
That seems to be a pretty high turnover?
Mr Wheatley: There is quite a
high turnover of prison governors and there are a variety of reasons
for that. The Prison Estate has been expanding, obviously enough,
as the prison numbers have gone up. It has actually been expanding
in the new private sector prisons and the private sector buy my
staff. Although they may be the private sector they are still
buying my governors who then leave and have to be replaced. We
have had an expanding Prison Estate that produces a pull-through
effect. The ideal time for a prison governor to be in a prison
is something like three to four years. That gives you a chance
to look at the place, understand it, make long-term changes. If
you stay there too long, there is a risk of becoming stale as
a manager. Really there is a prime responsibility for creating
change and we grow our governors. That is the other thing that
we have to bear in mind, that I do not just produce a governor
off the shelf for a big prison like Wandsworth and I have to get
somebody who has worked in smaller prisons, learned their trade,
proved their worth, worked as a deputy governor somewhere and
that produces long careers with lots of steps in them, and that
is what generates the need to move people. Sudden death, sudden
movement to the private sector, promotion into other parts of
the Home Office, all things that are beyond my control produce
a pull-through effect and then lots of steps because you are pulling
governors up the various steps. You bring a prison governor from
a medium-sized prison to a large one and you bring somebody from
a small prison to a medium-sized prison, so it is a bit like a
house purchase where there is a whole chain behind any move.
Q276 David Winnick: Do you agree
with that, Mr Caton?
Mr Caton: No, I do not.
Q277 David Winnick: I did not think
you would.
Mr Caton: Unsurprisingly not.
The change in general is causing massive problems in the Prison
Service for the people who deliver the service on behalf of society.
A change of governor is a massive thing, let alone when we get
the governor, the deputy governor and senior functional heads
all moving together. The staff then become a little bit like a
boat without a rudder for a long period of time sometimes until
another governor comes in. The handover, on numerous reports and
recommendations of the way in which governors hand over a prison,
it is always recommended that there should be quite a considerable
amount of time for the incoming governor and the outgoing governor
to get to grips with what the prison is about and where it is
going. It seems every time we get a change of governor in some
establishments, they take it in a different direction. They have
huge amounts of autonomy, and I am not saying that is wrong and
I am not saying that is right, but they do have huge amounts of
autonomy. It causes massive industrial relations difficulties
when people have an expectation that they know what they are expected
to do for the next two or three years and then suddenly it changes
and new governors do bring new ideas, some of them good, some
of them bad, some indifferent, but I would say to the Committee
that change is the biggest enemy to prison officers. We never
seem to be in a position where we are not being expected to change
considerably either on the wish of government, individual ministers,
senior members of the Prisons Board, the governors or functional
heads, and if we are to have a successful Prison Service, one
that can link up and have a joined-up method of dealing with prisoners
with other members of the criminal justice system, then what we
need to do is put the brakes on all the change because with some
of it, we have been there before and it has failed. That is a
fact.
David Winnick: I would like to give the
right of reply, but that is for the Chair.
Chairman: Perhaps we will pick that up
later on.
Q278 Bob Russell: I think my question
is almost redundant now that Mr Caton has given such a totally
different version than Mr Wheatley, so clearly there is a conflict.
I just wondered, Mr Wheatley, whether you would like to come back
on that because quite clearly the lack of stability or consistency,
as Mr Caton sees it, is a serious problem. I just draw your attention
to the fact that we have been told of this constant changeover
of governors, and indeed I understand that at Chelmsford Prison
there are proposals to give the Governor a long service engraved
watch in the last two years.
Mr Wheatley: Yes, I will come
back to what Mr Caton says because it is quite interesting. Mr
Caton says that his members find change difficult and it is the
enemy of being a successful prison officer. Actually my view is
that we must change prisons and improve them and I think that
you, as parliamentarians, will expect continuous improvement.
That implies continuous change and I think Mr Caton is quite accurately
representing the views of many of his members who would prefer
there not to be change. I understand that. I joined as a prison
officer and I know that change is often challenging. You are not
certain it is going to work and you are never absolutely certain
in prison quite how you manage to make it work. When somebody
comes along and says, "You can do it differently", we
look at it with some nervousness whether it will really work.
I have got to create change, I am required to create change and
make improvement and that involves governors leading improvement
and leading change and moving governors is part of making sure
that we have got the right governor in the right position to make
the right change. I can see no way of doing anything other than
growing governors through the process of trying small places and
then moving into bigger places because that is the safe way of
doing it. If you pick somebody as a young assistant governor,
as it were, and say, "Well, you are a pretty good chap. We
want stability, so go straight to Wandsworth because that way
you can stay there for 20 years", it would not be, I think,
a very good way of operating. We believe that we have got to have
a pattern of good changes in governors and we are doing that very
quickly. The one thing we are not doing is leaving interregnums
in the way that we once did and I think rather dangerously actually
for long periods of time. We have been very careful in judging
that, so at Feltham where the Governor has been promoted (it is
very difficult to deny somebody their promotion) and he will make
an excellent area manager, he has been very successful, very capable
and experienced in both the Prison Service, public service and
the private sector, and we have immediately moved in, as he has
moved into his new job, another governor. He is the Governor of
Bedford Prison and he was just short of three years in Bedford
Prison and was doing a very good job of Bedford Prison, but he
is the best governor for Feltham and I do not want Feltham to
fall back. It has been a prison that we have put a great deal
of effort in to change and work reasonably and where actually
Mr Caton's members are probably working more co-operatively with
the management of the prison than they ever have before. We have
moved him quickly from Bedford and we will then advertise for
Bedford where we judge at the moment that the Deputy Governor
can hold the fort. It is those sort of fine judgments we are busy
making and that is part of my job. There is no easy way of slowing
this process down.
Q279 Bob Russell: So the Prison Service
practices a policy of evolution, and stability and consistency
are okay?
Mr Wheatley: We practice a policy
of continuous change actually. We are continuously trying to improve
prisons. I think you would need to worry about me and the Prison
Service if we said, "We've now got it right. We can't alter
anything".
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