Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
SIR
JOHN BOURN
KCB, MS AILEEN
MURPHIE ANC
MS PAULA
DIGGLE
19 APRIL
2006
Q120 Greg Clark: It releases the
money for other activities. I can understand that. Just turning
to physical education and looking at page 37, table 16, you have
a table there of the total cost of physical education per prisoner
and the point has already been made that that varies quite substantially,
up to £1,000. It strikes me that the average cost per prisoner
is very high. When you think that a subscription to a private
gym outside London probably costs £500 a year, you are actually
having the same kind of cost within prisons as a luxury gym. I
am sure the facilities are not the standards of Holmes Place or
somewhere, so why is it so high?
Mr Wheatley: The quality of supervision
will be high or higher than you would get in your average gym,
because we are supervising people who need close supervision as
they use the gym. Using equipment is potentially dangerous in
security and control terms and with a high responsibility on us.
We are not dealing with people who have volunteered to come here
and who sign away their rights as they come in; if you are stuck
on the equipment it is your fault and not our fault sort of thing.
It requires high levels of supervision from skilled staff and
we are also providing for the security and control of those prisoners,
which is not an issue in most gyms; that is not something you
have to worry about in the average London gym.
Q121 Greg Clark: According to the
Howard League in the memorandum to which Mrs McCarthy-Fry referred,
they are concerned that there is too much focus on the gym rather
than broader forms of exercise and that a focus on the gym can
promote an aggressively masculine culture. Is that your experience?
Mr Wheatley: There is certainly
a risk of that, which is why it is important that we do not just
respond to what prisoners want. If we got a majority of prisoners
who wanted to do weight training and come out with giant muscles
that would not be a good use of our time and would not be helpful
to the public. We do need to make sure that we are not using the
gym in that way, we work fairly hard to do that and that is why
we try to produce balanced programmes, the emphasis on gaining
accreditation and qualifications in the gym, to avoid just that
risk. There are great gains out of involving people in things
which raise their fitness level, make them fitter people and involve
them in team sports. The gym does get used a lot more than in
society because prisoners cannot do the other things that I would
do by way of getting exercise where I can go outside my house
and go for a long walk, which is not something I wish to encourage.
Q122 Greg Clark: Indeed. In terms
of the cost per prisoner and the use of non Prison Service sub-contractors
as fitness instructors, you are not responsible, as I understand
it, for private prisons.
Mr Wheatley: That is right.
Q123 Greg Clark: Does the Prison
Service or do you, in running the state Prison Service, look to
benchmark your costs against those of the private sector?
Mr Wheatley: We do, and we have
sought to learn, as we should expect in any competitive situation
and I do feel it is a competitive situation, what the private
sector does that we might be able to use in order to make us more
efficient. My aim is to have a Prison Service which is a public
sector service as efficient and effective as it can be and therefore
competitive. We have not seen, in the way in which the private
sector organise PE, anything that is particularly stealable by
us. Our PE organisation, the quality of our PE staff, the range
of their skills, is good and one of the pluses of the Prison Service.
Q124 Greg Clark: In terms of value
for money, do you know whether they spend the same amount of money
per prisoner as you do?
Mr Wheatley: In some cases they
spend less on their PE staff and use less qualified staff and
produce less good product. There is an issue about how much you
train your staff. We train our PE staff well, give them a range
of skills to go with skills of handling prisoners and select them
carefully for it. I am glad I am in that position.
Q125 Greg Clark: So a prisoner who
had had experience of different prisons, private and state, would
find that the standard of PE was higher in your prisons.
Mr Wheatley: If looking for quality
PE, rather than just a chance to do things that they wanted to
do, yes, is my feeling about that. You would expect me to say
that in a competitive situation, but I believe it to be true.
Q126 Greg Clark: I should be interested
in the evidence for that, perhaps you might be able to point to
some of that in writing to us.
Mr Wheatley: Much of that would
be a value judgment based on information I have gleaned and probably
a bit unfair to my private sector competitors. This is a competitive
market in which I should be careful what I say as I, in effect,
am in danger of attacking my competitors in a privileged situation
which I do not want to do.
Q127 Greg Clark: Sure, but it is
a matter of public interest how much exercise prisoners are given
in different conditions.
Mr Wheatley: It is commercial
in confidence from the private sector point of view what it costs
actually, so they have commercial in confidence reasons to wish
not to disclose their costs.
Q128 Mr Williams: Just a couple of
curiosity questions. If we look at figure seven on page 19 and
we look at the figure for "Male Young Offender Closed",
the young male offenders prisons, Feltham get 341p per day per
prisoner for food, Brinsford get 166p per prisoner per day for
food. Why the difference?
Mr Wheatley: That difference is
rationally very difficult to explain. It is one of the reasons
why we have put work in at Feltham to see why they were spending
so much more than they should have been spending and they have
reduced their spend substantially over the course of the last
few months. They are now spending a much lower amount.
Q129 Mr Williams: If it had not been
for the NAO Report, you would not have been aware of it and you
discovered this as a result of the NAO investigation.
Mr Wheatley: We did discover things
as a result of the NAO Report; that is perfectly accurate. Actually,
we had already identified that Feltham was an outlier and required
additional work. We have made changes to the catering arrangements
and the catering team there. We have reduced the amount of waste
and we have brought down the price so that if one were to look
at it now, it is substantially less; £2.80 if I remember
rightly.
Q130 Mr Williams: That is still very
significantly more.
Mr Wheatley: It is still significantly
more than Brinsford and I have some concerns, as I have looked
at this information, as to why Brinsford is spending so little,
to make sure that we have got that right there. We may be able
to learn from that, or we may not, given that Brinsford is another
young offenders' establishment with juveniles in it. We may not
be supplying as much food as we should.
Q131 Mr Williams: You say there is
no rational explanation. You have looked at it, you have had this
information and you have enquired about it. There must be a rational
explanation. It may not be an acceptable rational explanation.
Mr Wheatley: The explanation at
Feltham was that we were not catering as well as we should have
been doing, that there was considerable waste of food materials
going on in the catering process and they were using some high
value products, some of which were healthy; oven chips in particular
are expensive compared with making chips but have a lower fat
content.
Q132 Mr Williams: What is the Youth
Justice Board?
Mr Wheatley: The Youth Justice
Board is the statutory authority which purchases places from suppliers,
providers of custodial places for the under-18s and they buy some
from the Prison Service, some from the private sector, some from
local authorities and they have the choice.
Q133 Mr Williams: The only reason
I am asking is, if you look at footnote 19 on that same page,
"The Youth Justice Board allocated £152,000 to Feltham
and £102,000 to Brinsford". Why did they not realise?
I do not know how many prisons they had to deal with, but why
did the Youth Justice Board give such a wide disparity and why
did it not ask why the disparity was so great?
Mr Wheatley: It is not possible
for me to answer for another body for which I am not responsible.
Q134 Mr Williams: Why did you not
ask them? You knew you were coming here and you must have guessed
someone was going to ask about this.
Mr Wheatley: I do not know why
they purchased in the way they purchased. There are different
sized populations in the two establishments; the number of juveniles
is much higher at Brinsford.
Q135 Mr Williams: I understand that,
but that does not account for it, does it? The variation is so
different compared with the average for prisons as well: 187p
for the average prison, 341p for Feltham.
Mr Wheatley: We expect the amount
to be higher in establishments with young prisoners in, but Feltham
was an outlier.
Q136 Mr Williams: Yes, but you do
not expect one to be twice as much as another, do you?
Mr Wheatley: Exactly. We know
that Feltham was spending more money than it should have been
doing.
Q137 Mr Williams: Did no-one notice
it?
Mr Wheatley: It was noticed, which
is why we changed the team there and altered the way in which
they cater.
Q138 Mr Williams: How many youth
prisons did the Youth Justice Board allocate for?
Mr Wheatley: Rather than guess
I need to write to you. It is something like 12 establishments,
but we ought to make sure we have got that right.
Q139 Mr Williams: Perhaps you had
better have a look to see their allocations more generally.
Mr Wheatley: They are responsible
for their own purchasing, not me.
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