Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
SIR
JOHN BOURN
KCB, MS AILEEN
MURPHIE ANC
MS PAULA
DIGGLE
19 APRIL
2006
Sir John Bourn KCB, Comptroller
and Auditor General and Ms Aileen Murphie, Director, National
Audit Office, were in attendance and gave oral evidence.
Ms Paula Diggle, Treasury
Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, gave evidence.
REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR
GENERAL
HM PRISON SERVICE
SERVING TIME: PRISONER DIET AND EXERCISE
(HC 939)
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome
to the Committee of Public Accounts, where today we are looking
at prisoner diet and exercise and we are joined once again by
Mr Phil Wheatley, who is Director General of the Prison Service,
and by Mr Alan Tuckwood, who is the Head of the Prison Catering
and PE Services. You are very welcome. May I refer you to the
appendix on page 40 where there is a list of various recommendations
made by the Committee of Public Accounts and the Treasury minutes?
If you look at "f" and "g", you will see there
are two important points. One is "Time taken between food
production and service is unacceptably long"; it should not
be more than 45 minutes. That is in "f". Then in "g"
"In many prisons there is a long interval of more than 14
hours between the evening meal and breakfast the following day".
There are various Treasury undertakings, but apparently they have
not been acted on. Why is that please?
HM PRISON SERVICE Mr
Wheatley: We have made progress on them. It is not that
we have not acted on them; they have not been completely actioned.
There is a small number of establishments where getting the food
from the point of cooking, from when the cooking has finished
not just from leaving the kitchen, to the servery within 45 minutes
is challenging and that is primarily where we have kitchens outside
the perimeter of prisons, which give us obvious efficiencies because
there are economies of scale which come from having a central
kitchen which serves a number of establishments. In a smaller
number of cases we have substantially increased the population
of the prison, but not increased the size of the kitchen and we
have done that to cope with over-crowding which the Committee—
Q2 Chairman: This Report of ours
was in April 1998; seven years ago.
Mr Wheatley: Yes. I am giving
you the reasons why.
Q3 Chairman: Does that mean that
it does not matter how long we wait, we are not going to get these.
Mr Wheatley: No, it means we have
made substantial progress. We think we have compliance running
well over 80% of that, but we have a small number of establishments
where we have a problem. The Committee will be aware that the
NAO visited a cluster of establishments on the Isle of Wight where
we have a central kitchen, which gives considerable efficiencies.
Actually, I should be very reluctant to abandon those efficiencies
and create three separate kitchens. We know that we get the food
into the establishment within 60 minutes, not within 45 minutes.
Q4 Chairman: How can you serve up
food to people and take 60 minutes to reach them? We read about
this in medieval palaces.
Mr Wheatley: It is from the point
of cooking actually. If we go to a number of places which are
doing mass catering, from the point at which they finish cooking
to the point at which it actually hits the servery there will
be some gap and that is a particular problem, the other thing
which I was trying to say, in establishments where we have increased
the numbers of prisoners but not the size of the kitchen. Because
of the shortage of equipment, we have to cook things up and leave
them in order to cook other things, so that we can serve for the
full, say, 900 at Bullingdon rather than the 600 the kitchen was
designed for. That is not ideal, but it is a consequence of coping
with additional numbers.
Q5 Chairman: It would be more useful
in the future, if we make recommendations and receive a Treasury
Minute, if it explained the problems. There is no point having
a Treasury Minute saying you are going to do something where it
is impossible apparently to do it.
Mr Wheatley: We have managed to
improve it in most places. There is a small number of places where
there is a remaining problem.
Q6 Chairman: While we are on the
subject of appendices shall we look at appendix three please on
page 45. It makes the obvious point about the link between nutrition
and prison behaviour. Research has been carried out at Aylesbury
Young Offenders' Institution and there is a conclusion that obviously
the ". . . anti-social behaviour in prisons, including violence
were reduced significantly by vitamins, minerals and fatty acids
with similar implications". Apparently you have not acted
on these findings or commissioned any further research. Is that
a fair criticism of you? If you look at paragraph 3.18 on page
31 you will see that.
Mr Wheatley: The research which
was carried out at Aylesbury, which was done by an external organisation,
was a relatively small piece of research looking at adding in
vitamin supplements to the diet and simply measuring performance
by way of adjudications. It is the only piece of research I know
that establishes it. It is not as obvious as you say. If it were
simply possible to control behaviour by diet, the country might
be a slightly different country. There is not a solid research
base for saying that diet links directly with behaviour. We have
agreed with Natural Justice that if they want to fund a larger-scale
study, the Home Office not having funded it, we shall happily
co-operate with that, providing it meets the standards of research
which will give us a base on which to work. It is important when
research is done that it has a large enough sample and is rigorous
enough to enable you to make firm conclusions, on which we would
then, of course, base considerable expenditure. The Committee
would want to make sure we were doing that on a solid research
base.
Q7 Chairman: It may be a slightly
facetious point, but in my experience of children, diet and behaviour
are intimately linked, particularly fizzy drinks and things like
that.
Mr Wheatley: Yes, but we are not
issuing those sort of things in the first place. We have removed
those sources in the main from their diet. As you can see from
the research done by the NAO, we are actually producing a diet
that is, in the main, a balanced diet.
Q8 Chairman: Shall we look at their
diet then? Let us look at paragraph 3.11 on page 29. You see it
says there "Most prison meals do not contain enough dietary
fibre to meet the guidance". Later on it says "The researchers
found that it was difficult for prisoners to obtain five portions
of fruit and vegetables a day". It is not very satisfactory
is it, in terms of a balanced diet?
Mr Wheatley: In terms of a balanced
diet, as the research very helpfully done indicates, there are
improvements which can be made. Dietary fibre is a particular
one.
Q9 Chairman: I am sure there are
improvements. Improvements are made all the time.
Mr Wheatley: It is giving most
of the vitamins that one would expect to find and giving quite
a good range. There is more to do. It would be particularly helped
if prisoners chose the healthier options when they are offered.
One of the problems of hitting the five-a-day rule, five vegetables
a day, is that to do that prisoners have to give up a sweet for
fruit and many choose not to, which is one of the reasons why
we are not hitting that level.
Q10 Chairman: We all have that problem.
Paragraph 3.14 though goes on to say, and this is perhaps less
excuse for you, ". . . prisoners are also provided with meals
which rely heavily on convenience foods, for example, pies, burgers,
soups and noodles. These economy foods are often relatively low
specification products and are likely to have high levels of salt.
Many prisoners are not offered oily fish every week". What
do you say about that?
Mr Wheatley: Standards are to
offer fish at least twice a week, one of which should be oily
fish. That is the standard and we should ensure we hit that standard.
That is the published standard we try to aspire to. The various
pre-cooked foods, which are convenience foods, are very popular
with prisoners. There is a risk that if we serve too many of them,
we will give too much salt and that was one of the concerning
things out of the research which was done for the Report. We are
working with the manufacturers and we have some work done which
we think will mean that by May we shall be able to produce acceptably
tasting convenience foods that are much lower in salt. We are
obviously able to say to the manufacturers that if they produce
this food, we shall take it from them; they do not have to worry
about whether it will it be bought. So we are perhaps finding
ourselves in an easier position to make change with the manufacturers
than perhaps supermarkets selling on to the public are. We think
we shall be able to make some substantial progress there. There
are advantages in convenience food because it is not labour-intensive
to produce from our point of view, it is relatively cheap and
helps us to manage within tight budgets and the use of convenience
foods is one of the reasons why prisoners rate the diet better
than they used to do.
Q11 Chairman: Can we have a look
at exercise? There is a staggering variation. Look at paragraph
4.4 on page 33. "There were large variations in participation
levels between prisons . . . ranging from 11% of prisoners in
Bristol Prison . . . to 87% in Huntercombe Prison". Why is
that?
Mr Wheatley: One of the reasons
for the very heavy use of PE in Huntercombe is that it is a juvenile
establishment, holding juvenile prisoners, much better resourced
than most of the rest of the Prison Service because it has additional
money.
Q12 Chairman: How are you going to
try to resolve this situation?
Mr Wheatley: I am not going to
resolve the high levels of PE at Huntercombe which are very good
for that specialist population. At the other end of the scale,
we have local prisons with very limited access to facilities,
with small or non-existent gyms and weight-training rooms, poor
access to pitches because they are old Victorian prisons, Bristol
being quite a good case. We have tried to work to drive up the
level of performance in those establishments. Bristol actually
last year hit 40% of its people, because we have now got the end
of the financial year. Trying to make sure we have busy local
prisons with sufficient resources and with sufficient PE staff
to use those resources is the best way of resolving that difference,
but there will remain a big difference because they are different
sorts of establishments with different facilities and actually
I do not have not the funds to rebuild prisons to make them so
that I can get equality between them.
Q13 Chairman: If you look at paragraph
4.20, page 37, there seems to be an astonishing range of cost
per prisoner for physical education, ranging from £392 at
Bullingdon Prison to £1,085 at Aylesbury Young Offenders'
Institution. I wonder how you explain these very wide variations
in the cost.
Mr Wheatley: There are two reasons
for the variations and they relate to the last answer. One is
that some establishments, because of their specialist nature,
young offenders' establishments with active growing young men
in them, are provided with more PE facilities and that is quite
a deliberate policy decision. Other establishments actually have
the mix of possibilities of occupying prisoners that result from
the investment there has been over the years in physical facilities.
As an example, if I use Woodhill which is a place I know quite
well, it was built, not by me, without workshops. One of the main
suppliers of activity is the PE department. The PE department
therefore has a major part to play in that establishment. There
is quite a good gym in the place and we use it to maximum effect.
So we are often supplementing for weaknesses in other areas of
the regime. Because of the lack of physical investment to provide
a full range of workshops or a large education facility, we inevitably
end up having to make those sorts of choices.
Q14 Chairman: Lastly, to sum up,
if you look at paragraph four right at the beginning of the Report
on page one, it seems that benchmarking could achieve a lot here.
If all the prisons performed along with the best, we could achieve
a lot more. Would that be a fair comment, something we should
bear in mind when we are writing our Report?
Mr Wheatley: There is scope to
use this benchmarking information to make further savings and
the saving quoted of £133,000 a year is worth having. It
is not, in terms of my budget of just under £2 billion, a
large amount, but it is worth having. There are differences between
establishments that relate to their jobs. All the resettlement
prisons and the open prisons show as having a low cost, but actually
lots of prisoners work out and lots of prisoners have temporary
release on licence for a variety of reasons so they are not in
the establishment. That is not the case in a high security prison,
where they do not leave the establishment at all. There are those
sorts of differences as well.
Q15 Helen Goodman: I wonder whether
you could look at paragraph 2.29 on page 18 and I wonder whether
you believe that costs could be reduced and more training and
experience offered to prisoners if they did more of the catering
rather than having so many external contractors.
Mr Wheatley: That is actually
accurate and is one of the reasons why, over the years, we have
pulled back from catering contracts and brought a number of our
catering operations in-house because, particularly if we are short
of ways of occupying prisoners, they give us a good way of occupying
prisoners with training opportunities and training opportunities
in areas where one can get jobs. We also, from a prison governor's
point of view, get slightly more control over catering when it
is an in-house operation and food is, as the Report makes plain,
absolutely vital to running a quiet and ordered and secure prison.
We have moved away from the contracts. There are now fewer than
there were. There are still some where it makes sense and governors
are left with the choice. We do give governors a lot of freedom,
as the sub-accounting officers in charge of establishments, to
organise in the best way to meet their targets.
Q16 Helen Goodman: I suppose what
I am asking is: at the moment how many prisoners gain catering
qualifications and what scope do you see for increasing that number?
Mr Wheatley: There is scope for
increasing it. We now have NVQ training being done in 80 establishments
in catering in our kitchens, which is a substantial part of the
estate and we have NVQ catering qualifications being gained. We
are doing lots of training in basic health and hygiene, so we
have hygiene certificates being obtained by prisoners, which is
a nationally accredited certificate, and there is scope to do
more of that and we are encouraging that process. It does not
always work in high turnover local prisons. There we are moving
people through so fast, because of the need to keep the population
moving, that they do not match the NVQ approach. Where we can
do it, we are trying to and moving away from private sector contracting
of catering helps in that process and that is why at places like
Reading, at Belmarsh at an earlier stage, we have pulled back
from what proved not to be the best way of catering in prison,
but it still works in some establishments.
Q17 Helen Goodman: Could you look
at the pre-selected menus in figure three on page 13? It looked
to me as though the list of menus was really rather long in all
these meals. Do you not think it would be possible to provide
better quality food if instead of having five options you had
four? You need a vegetarian option and you need a Halal option
and you need a cold option, but you have more options than that
and inevitably it costs more to provide a greater variety. Why
do you not cut down on the choice?
Mr Wheatley: Within a limited
budget we are trying to cater for prisoners so that we can cater
for a variety of tastes, different ethnic backgrounds, different
religions and different tastes. We get that right in most places.
We try not to over-elaborate the menus because, you are quite
right, the more elaborate the menus, the more difficult it is
to cater and this is a menu from Kingston which is very stable
in terms of population, a lifer prison. It is a very low turnover
establishment but holding very long-term prisoners. We also find
we have to include a vegan option in most establishments, not
just a vegetarian option because we have a number of vegan prisoners
who require a stricter diet. So it is slightly more difficult
than you say, but we try to get that balance right. What you have
here is a particularly good example of a varied menu. I could
go to other places where there would be slightly less choice.
In a prison with a small population and a very stable population
like this on a pre-select menu, this is relatively easy to do.
I would not like to attempt the same menu in, say, Leicester Prison,
a high turnover small local prison.
Q18 Helen Goodman: Coming back to
the point about the research that has been done on the impact
of diet on behaviour, are you aware of the fact that the DfES
have also got research connecting children's behaviour and what
they eat? Have you thought of looking at the research that the
DfES has rather than commissioning yet more research? Perhaps
it would just speed things up to read the papers they already
have.
Mr Wheatley: I personally have
not read the research. I have asked for a literature search to
make sure we know what is available, but I must not claim more
personal knowledge than I have. I do know some of the research
that links food additives, and the Chairman referred to that behaviour
about fizzy drinks with lots of colour additives in, but we are
not supplying those; they are not part of our diet. There are
very few places where there is as much control over diet as we
have in prison obviously, where we are effectively supplying nearly
all the food. There is a canteen, a prison shop, from which prisoners
can buy some items, but necessarily constrained by a very small
amount of cash to spend. We have tried to take account of the
other research. I am certainly happy to look afresh at anything
that is drawn to our attention.
Q19 Helen Goodman: Similarly, have
you done any research or seen any research on the possible interconnections
between how much exercise prisoners get and their behaviour?
Mr Wheatley: We have done research—research
is perhaps a grand phrase for looking at our own data in a methodically
organised way—to look at whether regime links to behaviour.
Depressingly, because I expected to find that access to regime
played a big part in reducing assaults and reducing indiscipline
in prison, from our own information there is not a strong link
between regime and reduced misbehaviour.
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