Examination of Witness (Questions 120-131)
HOME OFFICE,
PRISON SERVICE
AND NATIONAL
OFFENDER MANAGEMENT
SERVICE
19 DECEMBER 2005
Q120 Greg Clark: That is it, just
to take the money and spend it? It is not to educate?
Mr Wheatley: My task as a civil
servant is to take the money that I have and use it to the maximum
effect so that we can reduce the risk that the country would otherwise
face from offenders who would be more likely to re-offend. That
is what I am trying to do and we could spend more money in many
areas to effect.
Q121 Greg Clark: I understand that.
You spend the money that you are given. Sir John, who takes the
decision as to what is the right amount of money to be spent on
education?
Sir John Gieve: It is like everything
in government; it is a collective decision. The prime responsibility
is in the Department for Education because we transferred responsibility
for health and health funding to the Department of Health and
education funding to the Department for Education, partly, I have
to say, because they have got much bigger budgets than we have
which have been growing faster. We have seen a reward from that
in that they both now feel responsible for the quality of education
and health and the fact that they have had a lot of cash has led
them to expand the provision and we have pressed them to go as
far as they will go, but obviously they have other priorities
to trade off against.
Q122 Greg Clark: You can press them
to go further and to go as far as they can go but is there no-one
in the Prison Service or in the Home Office that has a vision
for what education should be in the Prison Service that can it
pull the Department for Education towards rather than just looking
for a bit more each time? Is anyone responsible for raising that
issue?
Sir John Gieve: On the health
side we have a joint unit with the Department of Health which
runs this. It is the same on the education side, although what
has been happening this year is that the responsibility has been
passed down to the Learning and Skills Council, but we are still
very involved with the Department for Education; hence the publication
a week or so ago of the Reducing Re-offending through Skills
and Employment paper which I referred to, which is a joint
production by the Home Office and DfES.
Q123 Greg Clark: Who would make the
assessment of how much education is optimal in the Prison Service?
Who would come up with that? It is a genuine inquiry.
Sir John Gieve: It would be done
in a process of dialogue with, on the one hand, us pressing for
more and on the other hand the Department for Education weighing
up how much to put into prisons against how much to put into adult
literacy schemes in the community, colleges for further education
and so on, and in the end it will be the Secretary of State for
Education who makes that judgment.
Q124 Greg Clark: Is it not a rather
incremental process if it is just the annual public service expenditure?
Sir John Gieve: It is like a lot
of things quite an incremental process, although moving from £50
million to £150 million is, I think, quite a step change.
Q125 Greg Clark: It would be nice
to think though that there was someone who could paint a picture
that was so compelling that resources might be provided.
Sir John Gieve: One other group
who are very involved in this are the inspectors. We have the
Inspector of Prisons who now does her inspections with educational
inspectors from the Adult Learning Inspectorate. They do Reports
on the quality in prisons and they do round-ups, if you like,
of the quality in prisons and they are pushing for better standards
and they are a pressure within the education sphere.
Q126 Greg Clark: Can I just pick
up on one thing you said, which was that short sentences make
it difficult to educate people? That strikes me as a failure of
vision. You have got people for short sentences. They are probably
towards the beginning of their penal career and surely that is
an important time to grab them, because you have got them 24 hours
a day, and to seize that time to equip them with some basic skills
so that they do not need to come back for three or four year sentences.
Surely that should not be an excuse; that should be a problem
to be solved? Would you agree with that?
Sir John Gieve: I think there
is something in that and part of the reason for creating NOMS,
which is, if you like, to take people from the court room to resettlement,
is to try and make what they do in prison part of a longer plan
and try to link education in and outside the walls. However, there
are practical problems here. If you are going to prison for a
few weeks it is a very disorienting time. You may not be able
to finish a course, you may not want to start a course which you
are not sure you are going to finish and so on, so inevitably
the people who are in prison for weeks are going to do less just
as a matter of practicality than the people who are there for
a bit longer, and that, I suppose, puts more onus on the Probation
Service side of NOMS to pick these people up because on the whole
they are under supervision for longer periods in the community.
Q127 Chairman: Mr Wheatley, remind
me what each prison place costs on average per year.
Mr Wheatley: Peter has the figure.
Mr Brook: It is about £37,000.
That is including capital and depreciation charges.
Q128 Chairman: I just remember that
we have had this discussion in this committee before and we never
seem to make any progress. Gareth Davies was on our committee
in the last Parliament and he drew a comparison with that £37,000
that you will spend and the most expensive public school which
is about £24,000, and just look at the education they provide.
Look at this last stream of questions that you have had. The education
you are providing is pitiful. Let us look at paragraph 3.15, shall
we? It says here, "The need to move prisoners at short notice
to free up space in local prisons can disrupt education courses".
That is obvious. "Our interviews with key staff in local
prisons and training prisons confirmed that a prisoner's full
records are not typically transferred when the person is moved."
The security file is sent but other records are not sent. It says,
"As Morton Hall receives all its prisoners from other establishments,
much of this work should have already been done elsewhere and
could have been sent to the prison when the prisoner arrived."
There is a sense in this committee that so much is wasted—£37,000
a year. This should be an opportunity not just for punishment
and rehabilitation but there does not seem to be any commitment,
Mr Wheatley, in your service to rooting out waste and inefficiency
and giving people a decent education.
Mr Wheatley: We have considerable
commitment in the service to rooting out waste and inefficiency
and we have made cash flow savings each year which for the last
five years have averaged about £160 million which are ploughed
back into letting us use the money better.
Q129 Chairman: Yes, but even the
most basic thing, Mr Wheatley, of ensuring you run an organisation
where, if a prisoner is moved, his or her records of previous
education go round with them is not being done. How can you run
a service which tries to rehabilitate people when you appear not
even to be able to transfer their records, although you are spending
£37,000 a year on each prisoner?
Mr Wheatley: In order to improve
record transfer there are things that we need to do; that is something
we need to improve.
Q130 Chairman: I should think so.
Why did you not do it before? Why did you wait for the National
Audit Office Report to tell you what to do?
Mr Wheatley: We are investing
in an IT system, along with the Learning and Skills Council, which
will allow us to move all the educational records at the point
of transfer electronically, which is the right way of doing it,
rather than looking at paper records in a prison. The other thing,
and the Report makes it plain, is that we have been coping with
very high levels of overcrowding running at 98.8% of full capacity
and moving prisoners across the country has been very difficult.
We have managed that but it undoubtedly has impacted on delivery
of services.
Q131 Chairman: The overcrowding may
be the fault of the courts and we are not debating that now, but
you are constantly on the back foot, are you not? You are overcrowded,
you are not providing proper rehabilitation and education courses.
You are just coping from day to day. You are trying out solutions
on the hoof in terms of building work; we have heard that with
all the comments and questions you have had about building these
portakabins. That is the reality of the situation, is it not?
Mr Wheatley: We have had to cope
with considerable pressure and we have succeeded in coping with
that pressure with an improved educational record, an improved
escape record and a reduction in serious incidents. I think, as
you said at the beginning, that has been quite impressive.
Chairman: I agree with that. Thank you
very much, Mr Wheatley, and thank you, Sir John. This is your
last hearing. May I thank you on behalf of this committee for
your outstanding record of public service for which we are very
grateful.
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