Examination of Witnesses (Questions 208-219)
MR PHIL
WHEATLEY CB, MR
PAUL FOWEATHER,
MR PAUL
THAIN, MR
IAN HULATT
AND MR
PAUL CORRY
17 NOVEMBER 2005
Q208 Chairman: Good morning. Can I welcome
you to this evidence session looking into the issue of smoking
in public places and work places. I wonder if I could ask you
to introduce yourselves.
Mr Foweather: My name is Paul
Foweather. I am Governor of Wetherby Young Offenders' Institute.
Mr Wheatley: Phil Wheatley, Director
General of the Prison Service, responsible for public sector process.
Mr Thain: Paul Thain. I am the
Executive Director of the Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health Trust.
Mr Hulatt: I am Ian Hulatt, the
mental health adviser to the Royal College of Nursing.
Mr Corry: I am Paul Corry and
I am a Director of the mental health charity, Rethink.
Q209 Chairman: Thanks very much for
coming along. Could I just ask you, Mr Wheatley, do you think
that prisons should be included among the institutions exempted
from the Government's proposals to ban smoking in public places
and work places?
Mr Wheatley: Obviously that is
largely a question for Parliament and for the Government as to
what they propose to Parliament. I think prisons are special and
the circumstances are special and it is important we take account
of the fact that they are places in which people not only work,
but live and in many cases for years at a time, in some cases
for natural life. I think that makes it special.
Q210 Chairman: In the written submission
that you gave to us, you had a range of options for creating smoke-free
environments in prisons. How likely is it that these will be implemented
and do you think there should be any sort of timescale on taking
action like that? If you are to get exempted under the proposed
legislation, should there be any timescale on it?
Mr Wheatley: Well, I think prison
will remain a place where people live for large periods of their
life and that, to me, is why prisons are special. We are looking
at options, we have not decided on what the best way forward is,
and we will pay attention obviously to any legislation, and we
are not yet certain what the legislation will say. I would expect
them to work towards a situation where prisoners smoke in their
cell, they do not share cells with non-smokers, no smokers and
non-smokers together, so we keep prisoners segregated by whether
they smoke or they do not, and they smoke outside in the open
air and in other parts of the prison they do not smoke. That is,
I think, replicating largely what the legislation may achieve
for the rest of society and I think we can do that. I would expect
staff not to smoke, except possibly in the open air and I think
there is no real reason why we should stop people smoking in the
open air, but that is all to be thought through carefully. We
do need to make sure that we do not cause significant problems
for disturbed people arriving with us with already a multitude
of problems, many of them coming off drugs, many with serious
alcohol problems and many of them potentially suicidal. As we
try to settle people into prisons, I do not want to heap any more
pressure on them than I need in the interests of keeping people
alive and safe.
Q211 Chairman: The Department of
Health has suggested to us that banning smoking in certain circumstances
in prison would be an infringement of human rights. Do you see
it like that or is it more about control?
Mr Wheatley: I think prisoners
would see it as an infringement of their human rights. I do not
think staff would see it as an infringement of their human rights
and we are not arguing that. It would create control problems
in some establishments, there is no doubt about that. You do not
know what you are in for in prison; you are deprived of most of
the things you might ordinarily enjoy, and probably what you enjoyed
last night are things the prisoners do not do, so to take yet
another thing away will not be wildly popular with a group who
are not always charming and pleasant in their behaviour, so I
am not volunteering for a complete ban in every place. We have
done things in young offender institutions where we have put in
complete bans successfully with a lot of work to support it, but
there people are not as well entrenched in their smoking habits
and are not normally doing the sentence lengths that we will meet
in some of the adult male secure estates.
Q212 Chairman: Why should we give
this freedom to smoking when, as you suggest yourself, the people
in prison who have alcohol problems would like to feel that they
should have access to that as well, although they are not given
access to that officially?
Mr Wheatley: We do not give access
to anything which we regard as a mind-altering substance. Certainly
until my time, we made sure that prisoners, except for remand
prisoners at one stage, were allowed to have a pint of beer a
day, a rather Victorian custom, but it lasted into my experience
of the Prison Service. We have not let prisoners have access to
alcohol and we work very hard to make sure they do not get drugs.
I do not think that tobacco has quite the same threat to people's
thought processes, but it is just not good for their health and
there is no doubt about that.
Q213 Mike Penning: Can I just pick
up on one point you made there. Can you assure the Committee that
what you said is correct, that no prisoner who does not smoke
ever has to share a cell with someone who does?
Mr Wheatley: No, I did not say
that. I said that is what I envisaged us doing as we went through
the review. That is not true at the moment and, as we pack prisoners
in, and we are packing prisoners in, 77,634 today in the whole
system including the private sector prisons and with large-scale
sharing of cells, I have not got the luxury of being able to differentiate
and carefully select. However, we do try to make sure that we
do not cause undue problems, and it is not the wisest of things
to put smokers and non-smokers together, but we will be doing
that in order to get the places for prisoners and make sure we
use every available place at the moment.
Q214 Mike Penning: I apologise, I
misunderstood what you meant, and I was gobsmacked by that having
recently visited The Mount Prison—
Mr Wheatley: No, it is certainly
not true and there will be an effect on the amount of prisoners
we can put in. It will slightly reduce our ability to use every
place.
Q215 Mike Penning: You mentioned
earlier on that it was a decision for Parliament as to whether
there was a total ban in prisons, so if we assume possibly that
Parliament has decided that there will be a total ban, how would
that actually affect your capabilities of running your prisons?
Mr Wheatley: It would pose some
significant risks.
Q216 Mike Penning: Can you explain
those?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, as we announce
that smoking is to stop, presumably with some sort of run-in,
so we work hard to try and get people off cigarettes and that
costs quite a bit of money and we are currently spending about
£158 per quitter as we go through the process of using nicotine
patches and trying to offer advice and support, or that is roughly
what that cost is,[1]
as we go through that process, there will be some people who did
not come out of that process as quitters and I would expect to
find that there was an increased incidence of assaults on staff,
that we ended up with prisoners who were more likely to be troublesome
and there would be an increased risk of disorder. Those are the
things that would be a problem, particularly in the long-term,
high-security estates where taking things off prisoners who are
doing very, very long sentences always carries a degree of risk.
Q217 Mike Penning: You mentioned earlier
on that the Prison Service is doing everything it can to prevent
drugs and alcohol getting into prisons, but I think we are all
too aware that they do get in. As I say, I recently visited The
Mount Prison where there is an issue like there is in most prisons,
so would it really be physically possible for the Prison Service
to enforce a smoking ban? If they can get alcohol in or even produce
it themselves and they can get drugs in of all different types,
surely they will be able to get tobacco in and smoke.
Mr Wheatley: Tobacco would end
up being more of an illicit currency than it currently is and
people would work hard to smuggle it in. It would be very difficult
to keep it out of open prisons, as it is very difficult to keep
drugs out of open prisons. There would be people who will attempt
to bend my staff in order to get them to bring things in, people
who will attempt to smuggle stuff in through visits and people
who will attempt to throw things over the perimeter, the ways
that illicit substances enter prisons. We would not ever, I think,
achieve complete success unless I can put lids on prisons, which
actually I cannot.
Q218 Mike Penning: So what you are
basically saying is that you would drive it under ground?
Mr Wheatley: We would drive it
under ground, we would reduce it. Do not get me wrong, I am not
saying people would not continue to smoke at the same rate, but
there would be another area in which we would be working hard
and, as prisoners might see it, battling with them to make sure
they did not get what they were trying to get, and we would have
to put a lot of effort into that. We would do it if Parliament
required us to do it, but it would carry risks, it would carry
costs, and I guess it is for Parliament to decide whether that
is something we should do because it will involve spending the
country's money.
Q219 Mike Penning: It is for Parliament
to decide and for us to try and find out what effect it will have
on the different institutions.
Mr Wheatley: It will cost in staff
time and produce another significant rubbing point in prisons
and we would not have complete success.
1 The Prison Service later informed the Committee
that the current cost per quitter using NHS stop smoking services
is around £158 excluding Nicotine Replacement Therapy and
Zyban. This compares with £206 in 2001-02. Currently they
have only calculated the cost of providing NRT to our prisoners
wishing to give up, and that is in the region of £100 per
course per prisoner. Back
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