Examination of Witnesses (Questions 393
- 399)
TUESDAY 16 MARCH 2004
SIR JOHN
PARKER, DR
MARY HARRIS,
MS SAMANTHA
SHERRATT AND
MR PETER
WRENCH
Chairman: Welcome, Sir John, Dr Harris,
thank you both for joining us, and Ms Sherratt, thank you very
much indeed. Can we move on and ask you a few questions. Bob?
Q393 Bob Russell: Sir John and Dr
Harris, can I first of all express my appreciation for what Transco
has been doing since 1998, I believe. It is an excellent project
by all accounts and to an extent the Government wishes to extend
it and indeed other partners want to come in. As I say, I want
to place on record my personal appreciation for that and I hope
others follow on. Could you give us an update on the roll out
of the Transco model and indeed list perhaps some of the key industries
which are now training prisoners with a view to employing them
on release?
Sir John Parker: Thank you very
much for inviting us. We are very pleased to come to the Committee
today. When I hear the figure of 75,000 prisoners I recognise
that what we are trying to do is a small drop in the ocean but
hopefully it is in the right direction. We are mainly working
with young offenders although a few mature prisoners have come
into our network. We have been working in National Grid Transco
and its predecessor companies on building this model and the model
basically has the principle of identifying a business need, ie
expressed as a job vacancy or job needs, then with the help of
the Prison Service we have built up a screening process to identify
those inmates with the right aptitude for work. We then take them
through a relevant training period so they emerge with NVQ-type
qualifications and any other bolt-on skills that they need for
the job in question. Above all, it is underpinned by a guaranteed
job if they pass right through. We have been able to offer that
guaranteed job working with our supply chain and I think that
is a very, very important dimension to this. If I take the first
scheme that Dr Harris was involved in designing, it was actually
forklift truck training schemes. That was working with Reading,
for instance, and the M4 corridor was clearly a place where one
could see massive warehouses and there was an overheated jobs
market and a great shortage, we discovered in doing the research,
of forklift truck drivers. We had the same vacancies in our organisation
so we were able then to identify this market need, set up the
training facility at Reading, and to date 104 young people have
actually got jobs as or were put into jobs as forklift truck drivers.
Q394 Bob Russell: So there was an
economic justification and it is not just the company's feelgood
factor?
Sir John Parker: Absolutely. We
describe it as a business need being satisfied. We then moved
on to look with our supply chain at the fact—and I apologise
in advance for this, Chairman, that we will be digging up the
roads for the next 30 years—that in agreement with the Health
and Safety Executive we will be replacing all metallic mains within
30 metres of buildings to plastic. 50% of the network today is
plastic but we have got to complete the other in the interests
of safety, which is paramount in our business. We have identified
that 30-year workload with our contractors which is a significant
volume of work per annum so this underpins their confidence to
say to us, "Those boys that you train we will guarantee a
job" because they have this forward visibility of workload
with us. That is a very, very important dimension. Either we will
give them a job or more likely our supply chain. That is training
them as gas pipeline layers.
Q395 Bob Russell: There are two linked
questions. Regarding expansion of the project are there any concerns
and have you had any pitfalls you have had to overcome in order
to implement the programme you have brought in already?
Sir John Parker: I think this
would be a good place for Dr Harris to come in because she has
been absolutely at the sharp end of this. Given that we have had
to take boys out of prison and bus them from Reading Jail, for
example, as one of the jails, to our Slough training centre (and
then in fact they are released into the public) and clearly we
have had to work very, very closely with the Home Office and prison
authorities to work out a system to allow all of this to happen.
It does not happen in 24 hours. So we have worked very closely
and had tremendous co-operation, I have to say, from the Prison
Service and from the Home Office to allow this to take place.
We have had a very steep learning curve, I think it is fair to
say, together, and without that joint co-operation the projects
we have done to date would not succeed and the projects we are
engaged in now, and more importantly the idea of multiplying it
out, would not succeed. I think now we have got a proven, tested
model between us. Clearly consistent improvement has to be the
theme where both the service and ourselves have to work to refine
what we are doing and overcome some obstacles. Mary, you are at
the front end of this. What have been the big pitfalls for you?
Dr Harris: We have gone from one
prison and this year we are in four prisons and we are using the
four prisons as hub prisons where we do our training and then
we will be feeding into during this next year 11 other prisons
which will act as feeder prisons, and I think you have got the
information on who are hubs and who are feeder prisons. We have
done a full sectoral analysis to find out where we have got the
job needs around the country and what we want to do is to make
sure the feeder prisons where the prisoners will be going back
to are the prisons where the jobs are. We want to concentrate
our training at a smaller number of prisons. We will have up to
20 prisons feeding into those training prisons. There are a number
of challenges in doing this. Most of the challenges are to do
with the mechanisms rather than the underlying philosophy. Obviously
one of the agenda items we talked to just a little while ago is
the key performance indicators. The key performance indicator
is if you have a resettled prisoner going out of your prison that
goes towards your key performance indicator target. If we are
having feeder and hub prisons, obviously the hub prison which
the prisoner will be leaving from will have the key performance
indicator target against that hub prison. What we need to do is
to make sure that the feeder prison has some benefit from that,
otherwise I think we will have difficulty having enough feedstock
coming through from the 20 feeder prisons to our hub prisons.
Q396 Bob Russell: Is there a numerical
limit, other than the 70,000 prisoners, as to how many you think
would benefit from a scheme such as this?
Dr Harris: We have been doing
some research—and Sir John has got the figures—looking
at the realistic numbers we can achieve because we do not want
to promise what we cannot deliver and if we look at what we have
done, 26 this year, we would anticipate it is going to be 110
by the end of 2005 and we are saying 220 per annum onwards
for gas. That figure is pretty realistic in that we have got the
vacancies. The thing about this is it is industry-led guaranteed
jobs. The other sectors are water, engineering, energy and logistics
and for each of those other four sectors, it took four months
to do a proper sectoral analysis of where the job needs were.
Looking at those other four sectors we are anticipating between
200 and 250 per annum for each of each of those other sectors,
so I think this programme from about 2006 can deliver about 1,100
to 1,300 guaranteed jobs a year.
Q397 Bob Russell: A year?
Sir John Parker: That is the target.
You asked a supplementary which is an important one, to give you
an idea of who is coming in now because having proved the model
in our own vineyard on two projects, forklifts and gas pipes,
the idea now is to get the multiplier across the other sectors.
Dr Harris has mentioned the four sectors that are active with
us now and we have built those up through a marketing effort direct
to the FTSE 200 chairmen and chief executives and we have now
got 50 companies that have signed up with us. I am sure not all
of them will come completely good in meeting our targets but others,
I think, have a good potential to surpass them.
Q398 Bob Russell: The two of you
answered that the key challenge for the future are going to be
the managed expansion and ensuring that the jobs are there.
Sir John Parker: Correct.
Q399 Bob Russell: It has been a success
story all the way through, it would appear. You have not answered
my earlier questions, were there any pitfalls?
Sir John Parker: There are many
I am sure. There were a lot of things to iron out.
Dr Harris: It is an iterative
process. It is not something where we said, "Right, this
is what we are going to do," and it became successful.
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