Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


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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