Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
20 JULY 2004
MR JOHN
GIEVE CB, MR
MARTIN NAREY,
MR WILLIAM
NYE AND
MR BILL
JEFFREY
Q80 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I have no doubt
it will be warmly welcomed, but so would a form of consultation
exercise where people are consulted before you introduce it rather
than after, do you not think?
Mr Narey: No, I do not. I believe
it was entirely proper for the Home Secretary to give a real direction
to this. There is a myth about consultation, that it makes people
feel better, but actually it fills people with anxiety and the
general direction of travel was very important. We then consulted
very widely on how we do this and I think staff right through
the Prison and Probation Services would recognise that they have
been listened to very carefully.
David Winnick: With no consultation.
Q81 Chairman: Is the story not this,
and tell me if I have got any part of the story wrong: that the
Home Office were actually making no progress in radically overhauling
offender management, the Carter Report was not commissioned by
the Home Office, but it was commissioned effectively by the Treasury
and Number 10 and published as a Strategy Unit report?
Mr Narey: No, that is not true.
Q82 Chairman: Well, it was published
by the Strategy Unit—
Mr Narey: Yes, but it—
Q83 Chairman: It was not commissioned
by the Home Office.
Mr Narey: It came out of a group
which the Minister for Prisons or Corrections chairs, on which
the Treasury and Number 10 sit and the Corrections Services' review
and the commissioning of an independent report into all three
departments, the idea for it came from that meeting.
Q84 Chairman: So the Carter Report came
from a meeting of the Home Office, the Treasury and Number 10?
Mr Narey: Indeed.
Q85 Chairman: The Home Office did not
do it itself?
Mr Narey: The Home Office agreed
to do it because of the links to spending and—
Q86 Chairman: But that process produced
an approach, NOMS, which has turned out to be fraught. Effectively
you had little choice but to announce that that was what you were
going to do and you have spent six months now trying to take a
basically very good idea of bringing together offender management
into a structure which would work and it must have been possible
to find a way of taking forward a better offender management system
without some of the uncertainties and disruption of the last six
months.
Mr Narey: I think what the Carter
Report recommended and what the Home Secretary accepted was something
which would make improvements in three areas: getting a grip of
sentencing, on which I think we have made remarkable progress;
on introducing the concept of offender management and, therefore,
accountability for reducing the offending of individuals; and
introducing contestability to improve the effectiveness of the
services. The consultation has not been about that, but that has
been warmly welcomed by almost everybody concerned. The consultation
has been about how we do that and we consulted on a single model,
so having invited others to suggest possible models, we consulted
on a single model. We have had an intensive process and we have
listened and we have suggested a different way of doing it, but
the principles that we have in the Carter Report and what the
Home Secretary said he would do on January 7 are entirely intact.
Q87 Chairman: I am still inviting you
to reflect on whether, in retrospect, it might have been better
to sign up to the principle, but not necessarily by the regional
structure and then to have to pull back the regional structure,
and to have consulted much more openly earlier on about the best
of way achieving the principle, which I do not think anybody around
this table is questioning?
Mr Narey: Possibly. My belief
is that putting up a single model on which people could respond
prompted a much better discussion and in my earlier consultations
with staff, one of the anxieties was that we did not have a picture
of what it might look like and what it meant for them and I believe
the consultation process became much more helpful after we had
done that.
Mr Gieve: Can I just say on your
first point that it is absolutely not true that the Carter menu
was imposed on us by the Treasury and Number 10. This came out
of a series of reports going back some years because the idea
that we should concentrate on managing the offender from end to
end of the process rather than having two separate institutions
was very much the line of the Home Office. The Treasury and Number
10 had to agree that this was going to be an authoritative study
because it had major implications for budgets, but I absolutely
reject the idea that we were forced into this and of course Pat
Carter is a non-executive on my Board and before that on the Prisons
Board. This was not an imposition.
Q88 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: In your consultation,
did you involve members of the probation boards or was it just
members of staff?
Mr Narey: I have had numerous
meetings with the Probation Boards' Association and numerous individual
board chairs.
Q89 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: Were they invited
to the consultation meetings?
Mr Narey: I do not know how many
board chairs turned up at the consultation meetings, but a very
large number of them.
Q90 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: I would like to
ask an additional question about re-offending and particularly
the mobility of prisoners. The Probation Service tell me that
one of the greatest problems they have is that a third of their
prisoners can be away from their area at any one time, making
it exceptionally difficult to contact those prisoners and develop
some sort of probation plans with them.
Mr Narey: That is correct.
Q91 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What about this
issue of mobility?
Mr Narey: What about it?
Q92 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: What are you doing
about it?
Mr Narey: Well, part of the problem,
and indeed one of the reasons why the Carter Report was commissioned,
was that the Prison Service has struggled desperately in recent
years to cope with the prison population which has rocketed from
43,000 12 years ago to about 75,000 today and every bed and every
cell is being filled on a nightly basis. It is with great regret,
but it is inevitable, that very frequently people are being moved
up and down the country to wherever there is a spare bed, which
is why it is so important, and quite frankly the most important
thing out of the new approach for the Offender Management Service,
that we get a little more balance into sentencing. What has been
emerging since Good Friday when the population has behaved in
a way which is not statistically suggested, that the population
has fallen when it should have risen very significantly, is that
we are beginning to get a bit of headroom now between the prison
population and total operational capacity, and I think movements
are slowing down a little, but we need to go much further because
if we want to have many offenders close to home as I would desperately
like to do, we need to have a great deal more slack in the system
so that we do not have to fill every single cell and every bed.
Q93 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: If you are so
committed, and I share that commitment, why no PSA indicators
for this and why no detail about mobility and the reduction of
mobility given its relationship to care?
Mr Narey: Well, I have KPIs for
both the Prison and the Probation Services which go much further
than the PSAs which we are discussing today and cover a much greater
range. I have not done a KPI in terms of closeness to home because
it would be deceitful to produce one when the Service is under
so much strain. The priority has got to be to take all those we
receive from the courts. Unlike some European prison systems,
we do not have waiting lists, and however many people are sent
into custody tonight, we have to take and deal with them as humanely
and decently as possible and that is why if we can reduce the
pressure of short sentences, as I believe we are beginning to
do, we have a real chance of improving closeness to home.
Q94 Mrs Curtis-Thomas: So no targets,
just "Let's see how it goes"?
Mr Narey: No, I reject that totally,
not see how it goes. I have been in this business for 22 years
and I believe pretty passionately in the advantages of treating
prisoners well and if you can get people more close to their home,
to families and employers, you have a better chance of resettling
them. What I am trying to explain is that when the population
has rocketed in a way which was never predicted, it has been very,
very difficult to sustain the emphasis on closeness to home. I
believe that over the next few years, if we control the rise in
the prison population, we will increase very steadily the proportion
of prisoners who will be close to home.
Mr Gieve: Can I just say on re-offending,
which has been, and is, one of our PSA targets from the last Spending
Review that we achieve a 5% reduction, we have got it in our new
set of objectives as a standard that we should keep re-offending
down, but that is really because it is part of simplifying our
crime targets. However, as you will see from a paper which we
published on the website yesterday where we have assessed how
we might achieve a 15% reduction in crime, we are looking to a
reduction in re-offending as one principal lever, if you like,
to reduce overall crime, so the fact that we have not got a separate
PSA does not mean that we are relaxed on re-offending.
Q95 Mr Prosser: I want to continue asking
you about NOMS and the changes in NOMS, but first of all, in answer
to Mrs Curtis-Thomas, you said, if I understood you correctly,
that consultation does not make people feel better, but it makes
people feel anxious. Do you think that is a view held across the
Home Office?
Mr Narey: Consultation is absolutely
vital and I am not suggesting that we do not do it, but the consultation
process has led to some of the anxiety which Mrs Curtis-Thomas
spoke about and I think that with the Home Secretary giving an
indication of the general direction that we were going to bring
prisons and probation together, it meant that the debate we have
had with staff has been a much more fruitful one, but consultation
does cause a great deal of anxiety. Generally speaking, whenever
I have gone out to speak to staff in the last few months, the
question I get frequently is, "How quickly will we know how
this affects me? That is all I want to know", and I think
to move quickly towards trying to clarify those arrangements will
make staff feel better and I think anxiety levels will drop very
quickly after today.
Q96 Mr Prosser: In the Government's statement
this morning, Paul Goggins' statement this morning, he does not
talk about withdrawing from the proposals to reduce to 10 regional
offices, but he talks about not moving immediately. Do you think
that there will eventually be a move to 10 offices instead of
42?
Mr Narey: Well, we will certainly
have ten regional offender managers and they will manage performance
in the 42 probation areas, and that is a very significant development.
It is not the status quo where we have 42 quasi-autonomous boards.
The regional offender managers will manage performance in their
regions, but working through the 42 boards.
Q97 Mr Prosser: But is it still the intention,
do you think, in ministers' minds to move towards 10?
Mr Narey: Well, this is an interim
step and we have not made the decision for the future. I think
we have to see how much progress we make on this basis. The important
thing we have got to do is try to make our work more effective
by introducing offender management and we have a number of possibilities.
We could move to the ten regional model, we could have fewer than
42 boards, or we could carry on working with 42 boards, and I
think we have to look at that closely over the next couple of
years.
Q98 Mr Prosser: In his statement, he
then says that he is still determined to bring more competition
to the Service and he uses phrases like, "using the powers
of the Secretary of State", and he talks about introducing
radical change at the local level. What does that mean? How will
you actually get competition without the changes?
Mr Narey: Well, as you know, Mr
Prosser, we have used competition in the Prison Service now for
some years and that has introduced a number of prisons run by
the private sector which are good, decent and cost-effective prisons,
but it has also helped me, as Director General and my successor,
to lever out very significant improvements in cost efficiency,
but also decency and humanity from the public sector. I have become
an absolute convert to contestability and I believe that as we
apply that to more prisons and also into the community sector,
we will further increase both cost-effectiveness and effectiveness
in terms of reducing re-offending. We want to try to do it in
packages which attract not only the private sector, but the not-for-profit
sector, so some of the work which you might want to package and
put out to the market sometimes will be on a very local basis
because we know that there are a lot of not-for-profit groups
who are keen to make a contribution at that level.
Q99 Mr Prosser: We are told that another
reason for the change and the integration is that there was a
cultural difference between the Prison Service and the Probation
Service. Is that right?
Mr Narey: I think it is much reduced,
but there has been a culture of antipathy between the two services.
When I joined the Prison Service 23 years ago it was acute. It
is much less so now, but it is still there and there is a real
change for the Prison Service and it is because offender managers
and probation officers at the moment are in the future going to
have a very influential role in what happens to an offender when
they are in prison in terms of prioritising them for programmes
for basic skills and so forth and making sure that what happens
to somebody inside is properly joined up with what happens when
they go out and that is not what is happening at the moment.
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