Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
Monday 14 June 2004
Mr Martin Narey, Mr Phil Wheatley, Mr Gareth Hadley,
and Mr Robin Wilkinson
Q80 Mr Allan: Each prison tries to make
incremental improvements, year on year?
Mr Wheatley: Incremental changes
and, if we think they can make big changes like Holloway, we would
set big targets. We are making an assessment of what we think
we can get by way of determining management action in that establishment.
Q81 Mr Allan: Mr Narey, this looks like
kind of a good news Report. It looks like the thing was dramatically
under-managed and is now receiving significant management attention.
Sitting before us now, do you think the nine day target over time
is achievable or do you think it is one of those targets like
road traffic reduction that governments like to set but is never
going to happen?
Mr Narey: We can get nearer to
it but much greater experience and the difficulty of dealing with
this suggests that would be a very demanding target indeed. I
think the Prison Service will hit the 12.5 target this year and
can probably get close to 10 days but all experience of other
organisations and significantly the experience of the private
sector, as their workforce has matured, suggests that nine days
might be very difficult.
Q82 Mr Allan: You would not want a performance
related pay target based on the nine day achievement?
Mr Narey: I would prefer not to
have one.
Q83 Chairman: Why on earth did you agree
to it in 1999?
Mr Narey: I agreed to set that
as a target and try to work towards it.
Q84 Chairman: Five years later you are
nowhere near meeting it. Even now you say you cannot meet it.
Why on earth did you agree to it in 1999 when you must have known
that there was not the remotest chance of you meeting it?
Mr Narey: I did not know that
at the time.
Q85 Chairman: Because you were too new
in your job, or what?
Mr Narey: I dispute that that
promise has been made and I am genuinely very surprised at the
Committee's attitude. Five years ago, taking account of under-reporting,
it was suggested that sickness absence might be as high as 15.9
days. It is now running at about 12.3 days and has been falling
steadily. I think I would have had much greater success to report
to you if we had not had to withdraw various procedures under
legal challenge. The NAO Report makes it quite plain that we handled
this rigorously and commends much of what we have done. We have
more to do yet but the fact that I believed five years ago it
might hit nine days and over time I have found that rather more
difficult than I anticipated does not mean that this has not been
gripped with some enthusiasm.
Q86 Mr Steinberg: When I read the Report,
I did think progress had been made, not enough, but I did think
that progress had been made. I certainly did interpret page 16,
figure 10, in a different way than my comrade interpreted it.
I think this clearly shows that big progress has been made. Too
many of the staff were taking the mickey out of the service and
I think this clearly shows that that has now stopped or is beginning
to stop and, if they are taking the mickey, they can expect to
suffer the consequences. The thing that did strike me also about
the Report was the wide variation between certain prisons and
certain regions. Therefore, this leads me to believe that there
are many reasons why there is high absenteeism throughout the
service in different areas and different prisons. For example,
the type of prison it is or cultural reasons at the prison, why
it has such a bad record. The more I read the Report, the more
I realised it was because of bad management. That was the problem
more than anything else. Some of the prisons are managed very
badly indeed by very bad managers. What would you say to that?
Mr Narey: Generally, that is not
the case. We have some managers who may not be as good as we would
like, but the overall level of management in the Prison Service
has increased considerably. I am sure, for example, that you would
not suggest that the governor of Durham is not a fine manager.
Q87 Mr Steinberg: I would say he is an
excellent manager.
Mr Narey: He is an excellent manager,
but he has a sickness rate of 15 days a year. Some managers have
been better at gripping this than others. There are obviously
inconsistencies and we have had to do an awful lot of learning
as we begin to grip this. It is very difficult but I think we
have done it well.
Q88 Mr Steinberg: You have brought in
a system called attendance score mechanism which is a national
system but do you not really think that absenteeism and swinging
the lead is the responsibility of the local manager, to ensure
that it does not happen in his particular prison, and therefore
local solutions are better than national solutions?
Mr Narey: I do not believe that
necessarily. We tried to have a great deal of local discussion.
We had a great deal of local discussion when the Committee last
discussed this. I discovered the so-called Bradford formula, as
it was first called, on a visit to Europe with other Prison Service
directors general. I was impressed at the fact that it removes
a huge amount of discretion. It is simply mandatory on managers
to take action. Managers cannot because the person who has not
come in might be a friend. It might be someone you know who is
a colleague. It simply takes away the excuse not to take action
and that has been the foundation for the improvement.
Q89 Mr Steinberg: When I was a manager,
you knew who the malingerers were and who the genuine people were.
By having a national scheme, it does not take into consideration
personal knowledge. You could have a situation where somebody
who is genuinely not a malingerer is penalised by the scheme,
whereas somebody who is can get away with it.
Mr Narey: That is certainly the
case. I am afraid the only way we have been able to drive down
sickness levels from the unacceptable level is to be very rigorous.
That means that some individuals, very dedicated to their job,
who have found it difficult to return to work, have to leave the
service. It is one reason why, contrary to Mr Trickett's views,
I think they should be compensated when they lose their employment.
Q90 Mr Steinberg: I have a lot of prison
officers working in my constituency. I do not know how many but
there must be 2,000.
Mr Narey: Certainly more than
about 1,500.
Q91 Mr Steinberg: They all have wives
and children and they all go to the ballot box. It is a wonderful
profession. However, I certainly would not want to do it myself.
I go round the prisons in Durham and it is one of the worst experiences
that I have. I can understand the stress and the problems that
they have.
Mr Narey: Because of that, you
would know without my explaining why the sickness rate at Durham
was considerably higher than the sickness rate at Lower Newton.
Q92 Mr Steinberg: Just before I come
on to that point, Richard brought up on page 15 about the long
term cases of 55 sick. He took it from a different angle than
I would. I think that the mickey was being taken here because
how come that it can be reduced from 55 to 12 in a year by new
management? What does that say? It says that the original management
was crap, was it not? They were useless. They were allowing a
liberty to be taken, were they not, and yet new management comes
in and they can reduce the sickness in a year down to acceptable
levels. In other words, they were bad managers, the ones who were
there to begin with.
Mr Narey: The previous manager,
if we are talking about Holloway, was certainly not as effective
as the current incumbent, but I would not condemn him absolutely.
There were many other features of the work which he brought to
Holloway, including considerable humanity, which were very important.
Certainly I agree that he was a much less effective manager in
reducing sickness absence.
Q93 Mr Steinberg: If we turn to paragraph
3.2 on page 17, here again there is a variation on illness between
the prisons, and again Richard mentioned two extremes. At the
bottom of the page, notes 17 and 18, it says, "Blantyre House,
Kirklevington Grange, Stocken, Usk/Presoed and Wayland".
What types of prisons are they?
Mr Wheatley: There are two resettlement
prisons. Kirklevington is a resettlement prison.
Q94 Mr Steinberg: So they are open prisons?
Mr Wheatley: They are open prisons
with people working out during the day, a very small number of
prisoners staying in during the day. The prison is highly selective.
Usk/Prescoed in Wales has a small closed sex offender establishment
with a relatively stable group of sex offenders and an open prison
which is run by the same governor, which again does some resettlement
work in the area and is a high quality open prison.
Q95 Mr Steinberg: You do not need to
explain Brixton because I have been there. It was probably one
of the worst experiences of my life, going into there.
Mr Wheatley: Wayland and Stocken
are both category C prisons, fairly civilised. They are relatively
easier than the other group.
Q96 Mr Steinberg: I assume that, obviously.
The ones in 18 are probably appalling. I went into Brixton. It
was the most horrendous experience of my life and for someone
to have to work there and go there every day to earn a crust,
they probably deserve twice the wage that they are getting. What
I am saying is that there are easy prisons to work at where it
might be a pleasure to go to work, and then there are Brixton
and Holloway etc which clearly are not.
Mr Narey: That is correct.
Q97 Mr Steinberg: That is why I am coming
back to the original argument. How can you have a national scheme
which takes into account a prison like the ones mentioned in note
17 and those in note 18? How can you have a national scheme which
covers that?
Mr Narey: For one very good reason,
Mr Steinberg. We have to treat staff consistently. We cannot say
that at one prison you can have seven days' sickness absence and
then you will start on the process of warnings, possibly leading
to dismissal, and in another you can have rather longer. We need
to treat staff fairly equitably. The fact is that the nature of
the establishments in the second list is such that significant
sickness absence does not arise, in part because the job is easier.
That is not to excuse malingerers; of course we have some malingerers
in a workforce of 47,000, but it is easier to see their presence
in a very large impersonal establishment which is under a lot
of day to day pressure.
Q98 Mr Steinberg: I am making the point
that to work at Brixton and to work at Durham, for example, would
put a huge stress on the individual, whereas to go to work at
Kirklevington does not put a great deal of stress on at all. How
can you compare the two jobs? They are virtually two different
jobs. The last time I was in Durham they asked me if I wanted
to go and meet Mr Bronson, is it? They said, "We would like
to put an overall on you because he does not like people in suits".
If you have to put up with that every day of your life—by
the way, I declined. I did not want to meet him. It is two different
jobs, is it not?
Mr Narey: It is essentially the
same job but dealing with different circumstances. It is still
a custodian job. I do not deny at all that Kirklevington which,
as you know, is in Yarm, not many miles south of Durham, is an
extremely pleasant place to work.
Q99 Mr Steinberg: Exactly; that is the
whole point I am making.
Mr Narey: The fact is that wherever
anybody works we have to apply common rules in terms of the amount
of sickness absences we will tolerate.
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