Examination of Witnesses (Questions 306
- 319)
TUESDAY 16 MARCH 2004
MR MICHAEL
SPURR, MR
PETER WRENCH
AND MR
SIMON BODDIS
Q306 Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen.
Thank you very much indeed for coming to the Committee. Just to
explain we will have an opening fairly lengthy set of questions
to the Prison Service representatives and then there will be a
switching round and we will take our witnesses from Transco and
from the Howard League. Mr Wrench, I wonder if you could introduce
yourselves and your colleagues and we will get under way.
Mr Wrench: I am Peter Wrench and
I am Director of Resettlement in the Prison Service. On my right
is Michael Spurr who is Director of Operations in the Prison Service
and on my left Simon Boddis who is the Head of our Regime Services
Group which is responsible for prison industries.
Q307 Chairman: Thank you very much
for coming in this afternoon. As you know, the Committee's inquiry
is looking in particular at the role the prison regime can have
in the rehabilitation of prisoners and this afternoon we are particularly
interested in issues about the employment in prisons and the training
of prisoners. As I understand it, just 13% of the current prison
population is employed in prisons at the moment, just under 10,000
prisoners; is that correct?
Mr Wrench: About 10,000 places
in our prison industry workshops or in contract workshops. There
is other employment available in prisons, whether it is in catering,
cleaning and so on, but 10,000 is the figure for workshops.
Q308 Chairman: And what would you
say is the total number of prisoners then who are engaged in some
paid work within the Prison Service?
Mr Wrench: The total for workshops,
catering, land-based activities, farms, horticulture, people who
are in the resettlement estate and who might be going out to work,
if you add all that together it is some 24,000.
Q309 Chairman: So that would be just
over 30% of the prison population who would be engaged in what
you would describe as work?
Mr Wrench: Yes.
Q310 Chairman: Would you say that
that really reflects a sufficiently high priority for prison work
if only a third of the prison population are engaged in working
activities?
Mr Wrench: There may well be a
need for more. I would say that alongside that there is education
as a separate component of activity in prisons and at any one
time we think something like 24,000 prisoners are doing some education.
There is a limit to how much can be done particularly in local
prisons where you have got a rapid turnover of people coming in
and out of court and needing to talk to their lawyers and so on.
I am certainly not complacent that we have got absolutely the
right number yet.
Q311 Chairman: What percentage of
the prison population do you think, in theory at least, could
be usefully engaged in work in a way that would be of benefit
to them as well as to the wider community and to the prison system?
Mr Wrench: I hesitate to put a
figure on it. What we are not yet good enough at is analysing
the characteristics of our population and deciding what interventions
they need in what order at what time to give them the best possible
chances. We have got a lot of systems coming in, OASys and other
approaches to sentence management which will help us to do that
better but I could not put my hand on heart now and give you a
figure as to what the absolute need was.
Q312 Chairman: As you know, we have
visited a number of prisons as part of our inquiry so far. As
a personal observation I do not think we would have got the impression
in any of them that providing work opportunities for prisoners
was seen as a central and essential part of the prison regime.
Does that surprise you?
Mr Wrench: It does not. I think
prison industries have rather got left behind by other developments
within the system and we have got a good opportunity now, following
a review we did of industries last year and a reformulation of
what the purpose of this activity is, to really get a better grip
on it across the estate and to make sure that we are doing the
best that we can, getting the most out of these activities right
across the estate.
Q313 Chairman: You have talked about
various assessment systems that are coming into place. What are
you doing to try to meet what seems to be an increasing demand
for new workplaces at a time when obviously we have got a record
prison population?
Mr Wrench: As we are bringing
new accommodation on stream we do obviously try to get regime
activities in place to allow us to occupy the increased population,
and Michael might want to say something about that, but we cannot
always guarantee that we have got proportionate new workshop places
as the population goes up.
Mr Spurr: I would add to that,
if I may, that where we have had to increase capacity very quickly
over the last few years, particular in category C establishments
and medium security establishments and open prisons, we have not
been able to build regime facilities alongside that but we have
provided funding to expand the regime within the existing physical
facilities that were there so that there has been regime provision
but a lot of that has led to increases in areas such as education
which is easier to increase because you can do some of that in
a range of different places on the wing, attached to workshops,
as well as in physical buildings. As we move towards building
new house blocks and larger permanent capacity, there the aim
is to link regime facility with that so we are building workshop
spaces as well in a number of establishments where we have expanded.
Q314 Chairman: You say a number.
There have been several new prisons built over the last few years
either by the public sector or the private sector. Have they had
built into them sufficient workshop capacity to provide paid employment
for all the people who are going to be inmates?
Mr Spurr: The new prisons have
all been private-sector built PFI establishments. The expansion
of public sector prisons has been of house blocks and where we
have put substantial house blocks in at the size of 100 or more
we have looked at what the regime provision need was in that establishment.
In some there may have been workshops and in others there may
have been things like a new education building which would allow
you to use the old one for something else so we have looked at
individual prisons and provided regime facilities to go alongside
that, some of which would have been workshops.
Q315 Chairman: If I understood Mr
Wrench's earlier answer correctly, when you take those decisions
you do not have a given number or target of the number of workshop
opportunities you ought to be providing as part of that expansion.
It seems to be a bit more arbitrary than that.
Mr Spurr: Our aim is to have prisoners
in purposeful activity in activities that primarily focus upon
their offending behaviour, so we would look at each individual
establishment and look at what the mix in terms of regime was
in that establishment and it will vary from establishment to establishment.
Work in that sense plays a critical part in that strategy but
it is not the whole. Peter Wrench spoke about education. We have
also got a range of other interventions such as offender behaviour
work that I have mentioned that run alongside work, some of which
you can dovetail. You can have prisoners at work in workshops
and doing other things, which increasingly is what we are trying
to do so that we have prisoners who are undertaking work also
linked into education, prisoners who are undertaking offender
behaviour programmes also doing something else such as work alongside.
That is the broad strategy but each individual establishment is
in a different position in terms of what its balance of regime
provision is so we would need to look at each individual place
to determine what the right level of increase would be and what
type of increase that should be.
Q316 Chairman: To what extent does
the variation from one establishment to another depend on the
skills and interests of a particular prison governor in providing
a certain mix of regimes rather than any central prison policy
or any real assessment of individual prisoner needs?
Mr Spurr: Historically prisons
have grown with a good deal of differentiation in what is provided
and how a regime has been developed, which had a lot to do with
how governors saw that establishment. Increasingly over recent
years, with a much clearer strategy from the centre and much clearer
line management with our managers and governors, it is not the
case that governors determine entirely what is going to happen
in an establishment. There is a much more strategic approach now
in terms of both work and offender behaviour programmes. We are
just going through a review of offender behaviour programmes on
where they are located to ensure that they are in the right places
to meet the needs of prisoners given the resources we have got.
Some have developed in places because governors in the early days
were very keen to do them and that was a good thing because it
was innovative and got things moving, but we have got to look
at where programmes are now placed to be able to match the needs
as far as possible with the population. That is true equally with
work. It is true to say that a lot has depended on a governor's
commitment to particular types of work or workshop. I would say
all governors want to see prisoners purposely employed. It is
good for the establishment in terms of order and in terms of the
regime generally but it is true that on occasion previously workshops
changed because governors thought it would be better for their
own individual regime for that workshop to change without a broader
consideration of what impact that would have on services as a
whole. We are much better following the Industries Review at tackling
that now. That is one of the key areas within that review.
Q317 Chairman: You concluded in that
Internal Review that the investment often required and the time
for large organisations to react to changes in employment trends
often means that opportunities come and go before the Prison Service
can react. What have you done to ensure that the Prison Service
is better able to take advantage of opportunities?
Mr Wrench: I think there are several
strands to that. One is getting closer liaison links with outside
industry and understanding how things are developing in the world
outside prison, and there are specific proposals arising out of
the industry review to strengthen our ability to learn from experience
outside. However, the difficulty that we cannot always overcome
and will not be able to, is the need for often significant investment
to allow us to operate in a particular area of business. If we
are going to need several hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth
of new machinery in order to operate in something where there
is a gap in the market it will always be difficult given the general
resource restraints we are under to respond quickly to that sort
of thing.
Q318 Chairman: Is there a case for
creating the more commercial or semi-commercial or commercially-orientated
not-for-profit arm which is actually there to develop the opportunities
for prison work as opposed to having it managed either by prison
governors or a body of civil servants at central level neither
of whom may necessarily have the skills required to take advantage
of these opportunities?
Mr Wrench: I can see the attractions
of that approach but given the way that other developments are
going within the system, the sort of move I was describing earlier
towards a more cohesive approach to planning individuals' sentences
and managing their way through it, to take out one block of regime
activity and say this is handled separately without regard to
those wider case-related factors for individual prisoners would
be going against the flow of what we are trying to do.
Q319 Chairman: So it would be better
to lose those commercial opportunities than to have that sort
of interruption to the way you want to manage the regime?
Mr Wrench: I think commercial
opportunities are important, they play a part in making our balance
sheet balance but the statement of purpose that—
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