Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360
- 379)
TUESDAY 16 MARCH 2004
MR MICHAEL
SPURR, MR
PETER WRENCH
AND MR
SIMON BODDIS
Q360 Bob Russell: That sounds fine
as a general statement of principle. What is the product of that
likely to be in terms of your ability to change the mix of training
that is on offer or the work opportunities that are on offer in
a demonstrable way? Will you, for example, be publishing a skills
plan from the Prison Service showing what sort of skill needs
you expect to meet or develop amongst inmates over the next two
to five years so that we can see that you have set those objectives
and you have been able to change those arrangements to meet those
patterns of skills?
Mr Wrench: I think that will be
an increasing part of regional resettlement strategies as they
are developed. At the moment the situation is patchy around the
country and some regions have done very well in getting multi-agency
approaches together. What we want to do is encourage everybody
to come up to standard. Alongside the other developments that
we have been talking about, the development of the new National
Offender Management Service in particular over the next two or
three years should mean we have a much clearer picture in that
area than we have at the moment. The one caveat I would
enter is our ability to shift what we are doing in workshops quickly
because often you would need capital investment of the sort that
we would not necessarily have available to make fundamental changes
in the direction of what we are doing.
Chairman: That is a good point to go
to Mr Prosser.
Q361 Mr Prosser: I want to ask you
a few questions about new initiatives and future initiatives.
Firstly, can you tell us something about the benefits that you
see of the merger of prison work and rehabilitation services under
the auspices of the National Offender Management Service, NOMS?
Mr Wrench: I think that the real
prize there is to have a case manager looking at an offender right
the way through his or her career from sentence through to the
end of supervision in the community. I think that will certainly
encourage provision within prisons to become more responsive both
to the needs of individual offenders and to the circumstances
they are going to be returning to in the community.
Q362 Mr Prosser: How are prisoners
at present assessed for vocational training and for workshop placements?
Mr Wrench: As part of our sentence
planning and sentence management process, assessments are done
of their skills levels early on in their sentence. Increasingly
as we roll out the OASys offender assessment system previous employment
and skills are part of what is drawn out from an individual at
the start of the sentence by filling in the OASys form. It is,
as I described it earlier, a developing area of activity but we
are getting better and more systematic about doing this early
on in people's sentences.
Q363 Mr Prosser: How far away would
you say we are from having vocational training and prison work
as an integral part of the sentence planning process? We have
touched on it before but how far away are we from that?
Mr Wrench: As I said earlier,
we will have OASys throughout the Prison Service by the end of
this calendar year. It should by then be properly joined up electronically
with the probation side of it. We are not yet resourced to do
OASys for every offender. It will initially only apply to those
doing over 12 months. As I think I said earlier, two or three
years down the track we should have a lot better joining up than
we have got at the moment.
Q364 Mr Prosser: To what extent do
you take into consideration a prisoner's attitude to work what
the prisoner thinks he will be best learning or being retrained
for? Do you actually consider the aspirations and their plans
and their ambitions at all in the assessments?
Mr Wrench: Yes, and the OASys
section on skills employment is not simply a record of what people
have done, but also explores their attitudes to work.
Q365 Chairman: So the young offender
who said to a number of us at Aylesbury, "I do not know why
you are training me to be a cook. I don't want to be a cook. No-one
will employ me as a cook. If you train me as a plasterer or a
decorator or plumber I could get a job when I leave here",
when will that young person get an opportunity to train in the
trade they have identified that will enable them to get a job?
Mr Wrench: I do not think we will
ever be able to guarantee that. There is a difference between
taking account of an offender's wishes and always being able to
meet an offender's wishes in circumstances where you have got
limited provision.
Q366 Mr Prosser: On the same theme,
Chairman, we also met a young asylum seeker who is doing the much
sought after Toyota retraining course, and which we were very
impressed with and he said that he was very pleased to be doing
it but he would be deported at the end of his sentence and we
just wondered whether that is the best use of such a course.
Mr Wrench: I obviously do not
know about the individual case but I sympathise with your attitude
that if we have got limited numbers places that are aimed to improve
the prospects of people returning to the community in the UK then
we are probably better off filling those places with people who
are returning to the community in the UK.
Q367 Chairman: You have just given
to my earlier question a very straightforward and honest answer
but in reality would the Prison Service not be doing a great deal
better if it was to identify for offenders the type of skills
that would genuinely give them a chance of getting a job when
they go out? If you are really saying it is unrealistic to expect
the Prison Service to be able to match the inmates' potential
abilities with the jobs that are outside what are we trying to
achieve through the training opportunities that exist in prison?
Is this not a huge missed opportunity to get people into work
possibly for the first time ever in their lives?
Mr Wrench: I did not mean to be
too pessimistic in what I said, but I think it is always important
to recognise the pressures the system is under and the limited
capacity we have got to get individuals in the right place at
the right time to receive particular sorts of training simply
because of the juggling act that Michael and his colleagues are
constantly doing just to cope with the population. Of course we
would like to do better in the area that you are suggesting. I
was merely saying it was difficult.
Q368 Chairman: So it is the over-crowding
and general churning of prisoners that is the big obstacle to
this.
Mr Wrench: I think it is a certainly
a major obstacle.
Mr Spurr: I think it is a key
obstacle. I do not think we should lose sight of wanting to have
the right set of training opportunities to meet the needs of prisoners,
and we should do that, and then we have got a job of trying to
make sure the right prisoners are in the right training opportunities,
ie, the individual that you spoke of. I would argue very strongly
that there is a lot of good evidence why we have focused on catering
and service-type industries because for a lot of young men particularly
if they are going to go into work immediately on release putting
them into a service-type industry not as a cook necessarily but
in a range of fast food-type delivery (and I do not just mean
the big chains) the reality is there is work in those areas and
we have had some good success in placing people into jobs. You
have got to work with the expectations of the individuals. It
might be that a plumbing course was entirely right for that individual
and there might have been a range of reasons why it was not possible
to deliver it for him. I would want to expand to make sure that
we have got the training courses that are best able to meet the
needs of individuals, but individual courses take a length of
time. A plumbing course would take four to six months. We would
not have that for every individual prisoner. It might be because
we are not able to do that, although that would be what a prisoner
would want to do, but it might still be worth doing some basic
health hygiene catering work with that individual to fit them
for something when they go out, even if we are not able to do
the best, and that is where we have got to try and square the
circle and sort out that logistical difficulty.
Q369 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: My experience
of young offenders' institutes confirms what some of my colleagues
have said today, which is that it is a very mixed picture, with
lots of disappointing stories and not many heart-lifting stories
because of the issue of churn which I think has been under-estimated
here and which seems to be a serious problem, and also the length
of time that an individual will spend in prison which can be as
little as six months giving you very little time to do anything
at all. I do not think we should pretend that does not happen.
We should say it does happen and therefore it limits the choices
and the opportunities of working with that individual. On a more
practical note, one of the benefits of the NOMS is to have continuity
between prison and the Probation Service, so the point that you
have just made on the plastering course or any Learning and Skills
Council approved course where you have got qualifications and
endorsed vocational experience out of the end of your experience
is an opportunity. What are you doing now, given that you have
got this fantastic new opportunity, to take people on short-term
sentences but give them a real opportunity by hanging on to them
from prison into the Probation Service and delivering the type
of course that they say they need to work in the sort of areas
that they want to work in in the longer term and which will produce
a return for them?
Mr Wrench: An important part of
this I think is the work that the Department for Education and
Skills is doing to encourage education providers to do more unit-based
course work so that if people are in prison for a very short time
they could at least clock up the first couple of units on a course
and pick that up in the community. It is not straightforward because
colleges and other providers in the community are still geared
to pick people up at the start of term rather than next Tuesday
when they are being released from prison. That is something that
we are actively working on and want to do more of. The more we
can establish continuity in what is happening for an offender,
not just in education but in other support areas through from
custody into the community, the stronger we will be.
Q370 David Winnick: I want to ask
you some questions on the working day, but of course it is against
the background, is it not, where the Prison Service is under the
greatest pressure presumably, more than any other time?
Mr Wrench: Yes.
Mr Spurr: Yes.
Q371 David Winnick: Just remind me,
I may have been out and the Chairman may have asked you this question,
of the number of prisoners currently?
Mr Spurr: 75,080 this morning.
Q372 David Winnick: That is the highest
it has ever been?
Mr Spurr: It is, yes, today.
Q373 David Winnick: It was recommended
in the Internal Review Report, as you will obviously know, that
the working day for prisoners be increased. Is there any possibility
of that recommendation coming to fruition shortly?
Mr Wrench: I think it will vary
from establishment to establishment but given the population figures
that we are facing, it would be more beneficial for the system
as a whole to allow more prisoners to access places rather than
for individual prisoners to work a longer day.
Mr Spurr: I think I would endorse
that and say the primary aim for me at the minute is to provide
the majority of prisoners with something constructive to do each
day, avoiding (which is the risk when the population is rising)
more and more prisoners with nothing to do in their cells. I would
rather have more individuals attending some form of work than
the working day being lengthened for those individuals who were
in work. It is not necessarily mutually exclusive because you
can lengthen the working day and have two shifts as a potential
option, which is the sort of thing we would look to do, but that
is against the backdrop of a rising population and inevitably
because of that resources are tighter in terms of the whole range
of things we are having to do to manage that.
Q374 David Winnick: It would be a
desirable objective, would it not, to extend the working day and
have an arrangement, again as the recommendation said, as in the
outside world whereby time would be given off for various functions,
to go to the gym or what have you, in other words, as far as it
is possible to duplicate the situation which arises in work outside
prison?
Mr Wrench: Yes.
Q375 David Winnick: And we are quite
a long way from there, are we not, to be quite frank?
Mr Wrench: Certainly and I think
it would been unlikely we would ever get there in a local prison
but for some of our category C training prisons it is a more reasonable
aspiration.
Mr Boddis: Could I add to that,
at Ranby for example, we work night shifts now in some of the
industry workshops so the day is extended so the workshop is run
24 hours a day. So it is possible and we have to learn from those
experiences how we can translate that to other establishments
where it is possible.
Q376 David Winnick: The whole objective
presumably in a situation where the Prison Service was not under
such tremendous pressure, as earlier questions pointed out, is
to get the work ethic established so far as is possible. For some
prisoners it would be a hopeless task and we would be living in
a fantasy world to believe otherwise but for many presumably there
is a possibility that having lived a very different type of life
outside, the Prison Service may be able to undertake effectively
such rehabilitation. If the system were under less pressure, do
you think one would be reasonable to assume that the majority
of prisoners could be rehabilitated along the lines that I have
said?
Mr Wrench: I am optimistic about
what we are capable of doing given the resources to do it, but
I think we have to be constantly aware of the multiple needs that
an awful lot of our clients have got. If you go to some of our
local prisons and they tell you that upwards of 80% of their intake
are hard drug users, for example, that begins to put a scale on
the sort of problems that we are up against. Yes, work can make
an important contribution to changing people but we need to do
it in a way that also tackles the other issues that are there
for them and that are likely to drag them back into reoffending
Q377 David Winnick: We will be hearing
evidence later from the Howard League but, as you know, they take
the view and they are trying, as we will hear later, to put forward
schemes in prison whereby prisoners would be paid a fair working
wage and not what is the situation now where they are paid £2.50
and £4 per week? Is that not the current situation?
Mr Wrench: £2.50 is the minimum
for unemployed prisoners, £4 is the minimum for employed
ones.
Q378 David Winnick: What do you say
to a system which has been advocated over the years by prison
reformers that you have a proper working arrangement, you pay
a fair wage, and deductions are made for maintenance and food
and so on? Do you think that is Utopia? Be frank.
Mr Wrench: I can see the attractions
of that system. What we would need to do is firstly find a workable
way of doing that and of administering the system and, secondly,
we would need the resources to set it up, and given the sorts
of constraints there are on the Prison Service's budgets at the
moment, I am afraid raising wages is not the biggest priority.
Q379 David Winnick: Mr Wrench, would
it be unfair if I said you are not actually bursting with enthusiasm
at the idea?
Mr Wrench: I am actually very
attracted to it. I am just pointing to the difficulties of getting
from where we are now to that vision.
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