Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 392)
TUESDAY 16 MARCH 2004
MR MICHAEL
SPURR, MR
PETER WRENCH
AND MR
SIMON BODDIS
Q380 David Winnick: Would the Howard
League's proposals, which I repeat will be dealt with later in
this session, have your support?
Mr Wrench: Certainly. Their ideas
and the system they are proposing and developing for The Mount,
for example, we are very willing to co-operate with them on that.
Q381 David Winnick: Is that a genuine
wish to co-operate or is it just for members of the Home Affairs
Committee to put it on the record?
Mr Wrench: We would genuinely
like to see it succeed.
Q382 David Winnick: A genuine wish
to co-operate?
Mr Wrench: A genuine wish to see
it succeed.
David Winnick: We will hear from the
Howard League in due course later today whether that has come
about.
Q383 Chairman: What is the biggest
obstacle to moving on a much larger scale to the type of regime
that Mr Winnick has just annunciated? Is it resources or just
the fact you would have to deal with the commercial world in terms
of providing commercial services on a scale that is massively
different to the level of contraction you do at the moment and
the Prison Service, possibly for very good reasons, is ill-equipped
to do that?
Mr Wrench: You would not necessarily
have to engage with the commercial world. You could in theory
simply pay all activity in prisons at the commercial-style rates
and then take money back off people for board and lodgings, tax
them, and so on, but it would be a huge bureaucratic exercise
to put that in operation and it would need a very significant
up-front resource investment which I do not think we would get.
Q384 Chairman: What assessment has
actually been made of the rehabilitation benefits or otherwise
of getting prisoners into a regular working week of taking deductions
that they can pay to support their families, of paying tax and
National Insurance and those other experiences of normal life
which most people take for granted but which many of your prisoners
may never have enjoyed?
Mr Wrench: I do not know that
there has ever been an experiment that would allow us to draw
those conclusions. What we have got experience of, of course,
is our resettlement estate and prisoners going out to work from
there doing real jobs for real money. I think that is a system
that works extremely well. We have got about 1,500 prisoners out
at any one time.
Q385 David Winnick: Resettlement
prisons have been quite successful, have they not? We saw one
where there had been some difficulties which you will know about.
In those circumstances the prisoners would go out during the working
day and come back to a hostel or whatever?
Mr Wrench: That is right.
Mr Spurr: We have about 1,500
prisoners engaged in that type of resettlement work. If I might
add about the whole prison regime, we have tried looking at industrial
prisons such as Coldingley which I think you are aware of and
Featherstone in previous times, and where we have attempted to
run a work ethic type prison, and that was the whole of the regime,
that has worked for a period but increasingly, as the level of
vulnerability that prisoners bring into prison has increased,
we have recognised that we have to offer a broader regime. At
Coldingley people used to go to that prison to work eight to five,
with holidays, with time off so they were working very much on
an industrial basis. However, to do that there was little education,
visits were in an evening, which is okay, but increasingly the
prisoners we are having to work with have got health problems
and drug problems which we need to take them out for. We need
to recognise that there are education issues and we were ending
up selecting prisoners to go to work in an industrial environment
who in one sense were our better prisoners because they were able
to work in that industrial environment because we had to keep
that production workshop operating. We were not addressing the
needs of the broader population so a place like Coldingley has
had to develop. We are still doing primarily industrial work but
there is now much more education during the day and there are
opportunities for drug work during the day. The way that we are
seeing regimes develop I would like to see work (if we had the
resources and the ability in the workshops) so that we could fill
a day for all prisoners preferable so they could go to an activity
each day and work would be a part of it, but I do not think it
will ever be the whole part of it because I think the needs of
our population are much broader.
Q386 David Winnick: As far as resettlement
prisons are concerned, are you limited by the space or the fact
that in your view in the Prison Service there are not enough prisoners
who could be relied on to do that type of work and not escape?
Mr Spurr: We have got scope to
increase the capacity and the number of resettlement places. What
we have to obviously balance is the risk assessment for allowing
prisoners to go and work full time in the community.
Q387 David Winnick: Of course, but
are you saying you could not have more than 1,500?
Mr Spurr: I am not saying that.
I am saying that we can increase the number. We have not set a
limit as to how many places. I would look at any application from
a prison that wanted to set up a resettlement unit along with
people from Peter's area. We have got an obvious limit in the
number of prisoners we feel are suitable at any one time to go
into the community and we have got to look at a whole range of
things, protection of public confidence and a belief they are
going to use that opportunity properly and not abuse that trust,
and that is an issue we have got to keep under review.
Q388 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Two small
questions. Have the statistics been produced that look at the
amount of capital investment you would need to produce training
facilities that you believe would match the demand that currently
arises in prisons, demand that is as yet unmet? Have you carried
out that exercise?
Mr Spurr: I would be surprised
if there had not at some point been a strategic exercise to look
at what the gap was from our strategic planning department but
I do not have those figures. I would indicate it would still be
a significant gap in terms of workshop space or regime facility
space across the whole estate, not least, as I gave an example
earlier, because in some establishments the actual space on site
makes it very difficult to provide physical facilities which is
why we have been looking at other areas such as doing much more
work with prisoners on wings, which you can do if you are dealing
with drug treatment or you are dealing with education when you
have not got the physical space.
Mr Wrench: Perhaps we could check
and see if there are any figures.
Q389 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: It would
be a very useful figure for us to see. We have just heard about
an industrial prison that is working eight to five and you then
went on to say that (and we recognise) you have prisoners sent
to that prison who could not fit into that regime. We hear in
other prisons about a population of people who could work who
are frustrated in that aim because the greater population of the
prisons really demands the attention of the Prison Service and
therefore this group of available workers are rather thwarted
because they are dominated by this other group. So why not say
we have facilities that can take this type of prisoner and it
must be exclusively this prisoner because, quite frankly, we are
going to become a jack-of-all-trades and master of none if we
keep on trying to accommodate a mixed population rather than concentrating
populations of specific prisoners in specific prisons and specific
areas and gearing up significantly to help those prisoners in
those areas rather than sharing them around?
Mr Spurr: We are doing that. If
I was not clear, my apologies. Coldingley is still predominantly
a production industrial establishment, but when it was first operating
as that it had nothing else in terms of regime other than workshop-type
work, that was its sole regime. I worked there in the 1980s and
it did not even have education, except for education and recreational
evening classes. The reality is that the number of prisoners that
would fit into that regime now that do not have some other need
is relatively small, so although it is still industrial we have
had to build in a range of other things. When you have got 80%
of your prisoners coming into custody with a drug problem it is
difficult to say we will only send those who have not got a drug
problem to a place like Coldingley. It would be wrong to neglect
them. We are specialising. I mentioned earlier about the review
of where we are delivering offender behaviour programmes. That
is to see in the broadest sense where we have drug treatment programmes
whether we have focused those right and, increasingly, we are
looking towards putting short drug treatment programmes into local
prisons for the prisoners who come through very quickly and we
can still do things with them there positively, and then having
the longer programmes in training prisons where we can take convicted
prisoners. So that is what we are looking at and focusing on—the
particular emphasis that each establishment would have.
Q390 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. Can I ask a last couple of points before we invite the
other witnesses to join us. What contribution would you say that
prison work makes to the success or otherwise of the Custody to
Work initiative? It is possibly the Government's biggest commitment
to getting people into work. I wondered really whether what goes
on in prison work and prison workshops is central to that or rather
peripheral compared with the education training activities you
have been talking about.
Mr Wrench: The key thing about
Custody to Work and the various forms of activity that are funded
under that programme is bridging the gap between prison and the
community and getting the links in place. I think there is an
important element that is provided by work in prisons and we can
look at what we do in our workshops and what skills people can
acquire there and see whether we can bring back learning from
the community and adapt what we do inside, but I suppose it is
not the single biggest element.
Q391 Chairman: What proportion of
released prisoners do successfully go into work each year?
Mr Spurr: Around 30% was the outcome
from this survey a year ago. We are about to launch a survey this
year on the level this year.
Q392 Chairman: When we were on one
of our visits to the Isle of Sheppey we got the impression that
within that 30% figure of people going into work or education,
you were counting people who had just had one interview with somebody
from the Employment Service. Were we right or was that wrong?
Mr Spurr: No, the 30% is the people
into work or education that we have taken from properly conducted
surveys now over three years. Where people are confusing it is
with our key performance indicator, which makes an allowance for
people directly into work from the survey in that sense but also
incentivises establishments to help prisoners to go to Fresh Start
job interviews on release. The overall key performance indicator
is a combination of prisoners into work and the number of prisoners
who go for interviews on Fresh Start; the 30% figure is actually
into work or education.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Could we take a short break, and I believe Mr Wrench is staying
with us, and invite Sir John Parker and Dr Mary Harris to join
us. Mr Boddis and Mr Spurr, thank you very much indeed.
The Committee suspended from 3.51pm to
4.06 pm for a division in the House.
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