UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1063-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS

Wednesday 19 April 2006

 

PRISONER DIET AND EXERCISE

 

PRISON SERVICE

MR PHIL WHEATLEY and MR ALAN TUCKWOOD

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-153

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral evidence

Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts

on Wednesday 19 April 2006

Members present:

Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair

Mr Richard Bacon

Greg Clark

Mr David Curry

Helen Goodman

Mr Sadiq Khan

Sarah McCarthy-Fry

Mr Alan Williams

________________

Sir John Bourn KCB, Comptroller and Auditor General and Ms Aileen Murphie, Director, National Audit Office, gave 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)

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Phil Wheatley, Director General and Mr Alan Tuckwood, Head of Prison Catering and PE Services, Prison Service, gave evidence.

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?

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 is 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 minutes 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 cooperate 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 per cent of prisoners in Bristol Prison ... to 87 per cent 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.

Q20 Helen Goodman: So in paragraph 4.12, which describes how in Bullingdon in particular some people get five times as much exercise as other people and that is used as a kind of incentive system, you believe that you can have a better impact on behaviour through using exercise as part of the system of rewards and punishments than by giving everybody plenty of exercise.

Mr Wheatley: There certainly is evidence, simply in terms of controlling behaviour, that our incentives and earned privileges system, which is what is described here, rewarding good behaviour is a very effective way of getting better behaviour in prisons. From the introduction of the incentives and earned privileges system, and that is not the only factor, we have seen a substantial improvement in behaviour in prison and certainly a substantial reduction in major indiscipline such as riots, which is a thing that any prison governor or prison administrator fears. I do not want, however, to say and I do not believe that it is right, that prisoners do not get some exercise and access to the outside air. That is a very important essential part of delivering a decent prison, whatever effect it has on behaviour.

Q21 Helen Goodman: Given that that is the case, what are you doing to improve and make more appropriate, the facilities for exercise in women's prisons?

Mr Wheatley: We do not believe that the facilities in women's prisons are bad facilities. What we need to do is to encourage the women to use to the full the facilities that are there. There is a particular problem in women's prisons because a very sizeable number of the women coming in are coming in with major drug dependency problems, really significant drug dependency problems and often coming in emaciated and in a very poor physical state because of the way they have been abusing drugs. I am not over-dramatising that. They are not the people you would expect to go into a gym to do gym-type activities, but we do need to engage them in things that will build up their health and to feed them well, which becomes an essential part of building them back up to strength. Many of them would die, but for the fact that they have come into prison. We get them off drugs and onto a steady lifestyle for a period and that should include encouraging them to engage in exercise, getting them involved in activity that builds up their fitness. We are trying to make sure that our PE staff are not just providing facilities for the willing or facilities for the maximum number, but that they are trying to target their efforts so that they are hooking in all the groups and making sure that they have access to something that makes a difference to their fitness levels, particularly the very damaged groups.

Q22 Chairman: Members may not be aware, looking at this figure three that Mrs Goodman referred to, that this breakfast pack is served the night before, is it not?

Mr Wheatley: It is served the night before.

Q23 Chairman: If the dinner is served to you at 4pm, you might be hungry, eat your breakfast pack and then you have no breakfast and have to wait until lunch the next day.

Mr Wheatley: If I choose to eat my breakfast in the middle of the night, I would not have my breakfast either. There are choices that prisoners can make and it is certainly a risk that some prisoners will choose to eat what is available for breakfast at a time other than breakfast. The introduction of the breakfast pack was primarily to allow us to unlock first thing in the morning rather than taking people to breakfast. This is quite an elaborate and expensive process just in terms of supervising people through a hotplate servery area. Instead we can move them straight into activities so that we extend the number of activities and the access to offending behaviour programmes and to education. An incoming staff can simply get the roll correct, prisoners can be woken up during the period before they are unlocked, have had their breakfast and they now have, in many prisons, kettles in cells so that is possible. We can then unlock and prisoners can move straight on to activities. We can extend the day in terms of activity rather than simply having a meal which means going down to a hotplate and in most prisons then bringing that up to your cell to eat.

Q24 Mr Khan: You have worked in the Prison Service for more than 35 years and been DG for more than three years.

Mr Wheatley: Yes.

Q25 Mr Khan: How high up are prisoner diet and exercise in your list of priorities and issues?

Mr Wheatley: High, because it is essential that prisoners feel reasonably content.

Q26 Mr Khan: It is one of your top priorities.

Mr Wheatley: It is high because it is an important component of delivering a safe and decent prison.

Q27 Mr Khan: As important as issues around over-crowding, self-inflicted deaths, industrial relations, budget concerns, rehabilitation issues?

Mr Wheatley: It may play into a number of those. A prisoner is unlikely to be ready to engage in rehabilitative work, if we have not fed that prisoner correctly. The prisoner whom we have not got off drugs and built up in their strength is unlikely to play a part in the rest of the regime. That is why I say it is high rather than my top priority and it has to be balanced alongside, you are quite right, the question makes it clear, a number of pressing priorities which are inter-dependent on each other in many cases.

Q28 Mr Khan: So it is not the most important, but it is an issue for you?

Mr Wheatley: It is an important issue, not the most important. It is one of the important issues in running a successful Prison Service and running a successful prison. As a governor, if I did not get good food served in my prison, I had real problems and indeed the NAO report makes that plain.

Q29 Mr Khan: How do you relay to your governors the importance of prisoner diet and exercise, leading on to improvements in issues which are of utmost priority?

Mr Wheatley: The way of doing that is to have clear standards through which prison governors are judged on diet and ---

Q30 Mr Khan: But Helen Goodman asked you a question which showed the disparity between, for example, prison A and prison B.

Mr Wheatley: But we do have clear standards and the Chairman quoted one, that we are not getting full compliance with the requirement to feed people at the hotplate within 45 minutes of the food being cooked, but that is a standard which we are trying to drive through and make sure that is followed. We have a number of standards which we make plain to prison governors.

Q31 Mr Khan: How do you do this?

Mr Wheatley: They are published standards which are audited and prison governors are measured on them, they form part of our judgment about establishments.

Q32 Mr Khan: When was the last time you spoke to a governor about prisoner diet and exercise?

Mr Wheatley: At the last prison I visited, which was the week before last actually, because I had last week off.

Q33 Mr Khan: Were you surprised then that in a 48-page report, only three paragraphs refer to religious and ethnic food?

Mr Wheatley: In terms of concerns for me, getting food right, particularly for ethnic minorities and for different religions, is important and has occupied quite a lot of my personal time and was one of the things I was talking to both prisoners and staff about on my last prison visit. I cannot judge the report.

Q34 Mr Khan: The question is: are you surprised that in a 48-page report, three paragraphs are devoted to the food that your guests who are of a certain religion and ethnicity receive?

Mr Wheatley: I did not think about it and it was not my report.

Q35 Mr Khan: I put it to you that there are about 7,000 Muslim prisoners.

Mr Wheatley: It occupies more of my time than three paragraphs.

Q36 Mr Khan: So I infer you were surprised that this NAO report only ---

Mr Wheatley: I did not seek to judge it. I noticed it was in there. It is something that matters to me and I have to spend quite a lot of time on, as we have been seeking to consult about what is a good and appropriate Halal diet that will meet most Muslim prisoners' needs.

Q37 Mr Khan: What have you done to make sure that all of your prisons serve prisoners who are of a certain faith a food that does not breach their faith?

Mr Wheatley: We already serve Halal meat in all establishments, certified as such. What we have discovered in the process of consultation with our Muslim imams and leading Muslim organisations is that that certification does not, by itself, satisfy all Muslims.

Q38 Mr Khan: So you are aware some of our inmates and detainees are boycotting your Halal food? They do not trust you.

Mr Wheatley: Yes, they are. It is all certified. The issue, and it is quite an important issue for Muslims, is what Halal food is. It varies depending upon the exact state of your Muslim faith, whether you believe, for instance, that an animal stunned but nevertheless individually killed by a Muslim using a knife saying the appropriate words, would be regarded as Halal or not. There are all those variations.

Q39 Mr Khan: Come, come. Are you suggesting that the concern that a high proportion of your 7,000 prisoners have is around the method of slaughter?

Mr Wheatley: Yes; the method of slaughter has been very important.

Q40 Mr Khan: May I take you to page 15 please? One of the three paragraphs referring to this important issue is paragraph 2.15 and it gives some ideas: for example, inviting local religious leaders to prisons to inspect preparation and storage; for example, discussing any concerns with prisoners and caterers; for example, observing major religious festivals. Then it goes on. Where do you see mention of the method of slaughter?

Mr Wheatley: I am saying that in terms of what I have had to think about in developing the Halal food standard, that has been one of the key issues.

Q41 Mr Khan: The Committee of Public Accounts of this House is investigating prisoner diet and exercise. Almost 10% of your prisoners are Muslim. Did you not think it important to raise with the NAO this huge omission from the three paragraphs that they devoted to this?

Mr Wheatley: I do not regard it has a huge omission on the NAO's part. I am saying that that is one of the things we have been consulting about and is a crucial issue in developing the new standard for Halal food. There are also important issues around making sure that food is kept separate, that when it is served it is served in a way that is appropriate and given separate status and we have just issued, as part of that process, labelled, completely separate utensils to be used only for Halal food.

Q42 Mr Khan: When was the last time you spoke to a governor about Halal food?

Mr Wheatley: The week before last.

Q43 Mr Khan: Which prison was that?

Mr Wheatley: That was at [?], the last prison I was at. It is an issue in most prisons now, so it is a thing I would mention and that happens to be the last prison I visited.

Q44 Mr Khan: How do you convey to those governors who you do not visit the seriousness of this issue?

Mr Wheatley: By speaking at conference about the importance of getting all issues to do with our black and minority ethnic prisoners right and particularly about being sensitive to issues around the Muslim faith.

Q45 Mr Khan: Which prisons do you hold out as beacons of good practice that we should all aspire to and aim towards?

Mr Wheatley: I would hesitate to name any.

Q46 Mr Khan: Just name five.

Mr Wheatley: No, that would be an inappropriate thing to do.

Q47 Mr Khan: Just name one good prison.

Mr Wheatley: At the moment one of the places which is most careful in doing their work, because of the concern, is Belmarsh where a lot of work has been put in to make sure we get the diet right for prisoners who are Muslim. That has required a great deal of effort. There is some good work being done at Bullingdon; that is another example. Actually, the big thing we need to get right to make sure that I am content that we have got the food right for Muslims is to make sure that we have a very clear standard for what is Halal food and an excellent supply certified to an appropriate standard.

Q48 Mr Khan: May I move on to another issue? Is obesity a problem in your prisons?

Mr Wheatley: Obesity is a problem for some prisoners. It is not a problem in prison. The prisoners who become obese in prison are few and far between. The number of prisoners who arrive in prison who are obese is significant, though actually we have probably got a slightly larger problem with people coming in under-nourished, usually because of substance abuse.

Q49 Mr Khan: May I take from that the answer is "not really"? It is not really an issue?

Mr Wheatley: No, it is not a big issue. There will be exceptions.

Q50 Mr Khan: Does that explain why you are taking no steps to prevent obesity in prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: No, it does not explain why we are taking no steps. We are taking steps. We are changing the diet as a result of some of the research that has been done for this report. We have done work to try to make sure that we reduce the amount of frying we do; we do more oven baking which is one way of reducing the amount of frying we do while still producing food that is acceptable to prisoners. We are increasing the supply of healthy options, particularly fruit versus sweet, which will make a difference.

Q51 Mr Khan: Are you educating your prisoners about the importance of certain types of food?

Mr Wheatley: Yes, and we are employing somebody centrally to help us to work up advice on that and working with the Department of Health, which nowadays supplies our health provision in establishments.

Q52 Mr Khan: Exercise?

Mr Wheatley: Exercise is to make sure we make the best possible use of the PE facilities we have.

Q53 Mr Khan: Right. That leads me on to the next question.

Mr Wheatley: We have over 40% take-up in PE which, compared with the world at large, is probably pretty good actually.

Q54 Mr Khan: That is a very good answer. What does take-up mean? How do you define take-up?

Mr Wheatley: Take-up means people are going to the gym and engaging in activity at least once a week.

Q55 Mr Khan: Male prisoners and female prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: The overall figure I have is for all prisoners and it varies prison by prison.

Q56 Mr Khan: Do the figures for male prisoners not mask how appallingly badly female prisoners are vis-à-vis exercise?

Mr Wheatley: I would need to go back and look at that in more detail. I do not have the detail to give you an accurate answer to that at this point. I can write to the Committee separately on that.

Q57 Mr Khan: You are not able to say whether physical activity female prisoners receive is much worse than male prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: I do not think it is much worse but I do not want to invent figures and I do not have the figures in my head.

Q58 Mr Khan: Two final issues. Is there an issue for you about over-crowding, low numbers of staff and lack of facilities impeding your ability to provide the physical education that your prisoners deserve?

Mr Wheatley: If we over-crowd too much and we do not have sufficient staff, there would be a real risk of that and it is one of the reasons ---

Q59 Mr Khan: Is it an issue at the moment?

Mr Wheatley: It is not, providing we keep the population under the operational capacities we have certified as being safe. That is why it is crucial we do not over-crowd more than we think the facilities will allow us to do in a reasonable way.

Q60 Chairman: Do you want to ask the National Audit Office why they have only devoted three paragraphs to Muslim diets, as they wrote the report?

Sir John Bourn: The fact that there were three paragraphs does not mean that we did not take this as a serious matter. I absolutely agree with you Mr Khan that it is and the way in which you have developed the issue has reminded me that we might have paid more attention to it; that does not mean to say we disregard it and do not think it is important.

Q61 Mr Khan: You were in discussions with the DG obviously as you always are when it comes to these reports with permanent secretaries and so on.

Sir John Bourn: Yes.

Chairman: We can make an issue of it in our report Mr Khan. Thank you for raising that.

Q62 Mr Bacon: Mr Wheatley, I should like to go back to this question of the link, whether there is a link, between diet and behaviour. You referred to some research but you said that more was needed. Do you believe there is a link between diet and behaviour?

Mr Wheatley: I have seen nothing in my career in the Prison Service to say there is a strong link between diet and behaviour, but I am capable of being persuaded by the evidence. I have not seen the evidence at the moment. I have not seen the evidence from 35 years working in the Prison Service.

Q63 Mr Bacon: I did not say a strong link. Most people would assume as a matter of commonsense that there is a link between diet and behaviour. We all have experienced not having had a meal or not having had a proper meal and how we feel about it, feeling grouchy, feeling bad-tempered, feeling hungry, or even if we do have a meal but not a proper meal, it affects our behaviour. It is commonsense that it affects our behaviour.

Mr Wheatley: That does go back to what I have said quite plainly, that actually giving prisoners a decent diet that they think is a good diet is an essential part of running a controlled prison. I can tell you that when I did do research, which I did when I was responsible for security and order in prison at an earlier stage in my career, into disturbances pre 1994, a number of those disturbances, in fact the biggest portion of the disturbances, if you are looking for a single cause, was caused by poor prison food. That is not true at the moment.

Q64 Mr Bacon: Good. It does say in the report that food is important for control in prisons.

Mr Wheatley: That is slightly different from saying that particular vitamins will produce a mood change one way or the other.

Q65 Mr Bacon: It is a much higher level of specificity if you are talking about the fact that eating porridge helps your brain produce serotonin, which lifts the spirits and reduces the appetite. However, I shall not go on about porridge because I know Mr Clark is very keen to ask you about porridge. I have established that he has it with cream and not skimmed milk. Surely there is plainly a link. The question then is to what extent there is a link. The question is really how strong the link is. I notice on page 46 in appendix three it says "In January 2006 the Minister of State at the Home Office asked Natural Justice to conduct further research into the effects of nutrition upon the behaviour of prisoners" and an eminent team of scientists has been assembled from Oxford University, the Medical Research Council and so on. Later on it says "Before the researchers can start", so obviously three months later this research has not yet started, or has it now? This report was published on 9 March. Has the research started now?

Mr Wheatley: It has not. We stand ready as the Prison Service to help them do it and we have volunteered establishments to participate in that with governors very keen to be part of it.

Q66 Mr Bacon: How long is it going to be before this research starts?

Mr Wheatley: My understanding is that we are waiting for the formal proposal from the Natural Justice group and this can then go to the Ethics Committee.

Q67 Mr Bacon: Then they need to submit it to the Project Quality Approval Board of the Home Office and also obtain ethical approval from the NHS Multi-centre Research Ethics Committee. Is there anyone else who needs to look at this before it can start?

Mr Wheatley: No; that is an accurate description. Before you do research, in this case into young people, which involves giving vitamins, you do need to make sure that you have looked at the ethical implications of what you are doing and, like any research, we have simply put it through the ordinary process of approving research.

Q68 Mr Bacon: When do you think this research will start?

Mr Wheatley: It depends when the proposal comes forward and I would not like to guess that process of approvals. I simply stand ready, as the person leading the public sector Prison Service, to work with them as soon as they have approval. I have worked hard to make sure we have governors keen to participate. I am keen to be involved in the research and happy to learn from it. I want it to have a sufficient sample and be done in a rigorous way so we know what it proves at the end of it.

Q69 Mr Bacon: This sample was 231 young people. It was not an insignificant sample.

Mr Wheatley: Normally, when you are looking for changes in behaviour, you would look for a bigger sample than that.

Q70 Mr Bacon: How big?

Mr Wheatley: I would not claim to be an expert; you would be looking at probably 1,000 people, at least something like that, to see the small variations and make sure you were not looking at something that was just a random variation.

Q71 Mr Bacon: Will you be writing to Natural Justice to encourage them to get on with sending in their proposal?

Mr Wheatley: I have written to those responsible for Natural Justice to encourage them and to express my support for their proposal when it comes forward. I have made it quite plain that the Prison Service stands ready to cooperate.

Q72 Mr Bacon: If they do not get their finger out, will you ask someone else since there is plainly some sort of link?

Mr Wheatley: I shall not, because I do not control research funding, to be honest; I do not have the funding for doing that sort of research. As the person responsible for the operation of the Prison Service, I am happy to cooperate in that research, to allow it to take place, we have volunteer establishments, we have volunteered more than one so there is a bigger group, and we are anxious to participate in it as and when the research is approved.

Q73 Mr Bacon: I should like to ask you about these breakfast packs that you referred to. They cost 27p each and you dwelt on the fact that they enable you to start the prison day sooner, get more activity going and so on. Is it not the truth that they mainly save money and that they are done for cost-cutting purposes? If you are a prisoner alone in your cell and locked up quite early and you have nothing to do except perhaps eat some food that is put in front of you, the chances are you are going to eat it before seven or eight o'clock the following morning? You go on about choices, but you do not have a lot of choice when you are sitting in a prison cell with nothing else to do and they are not going to be reading Dostoevsky; well maybe one or two of them are, but most of them are not.

Mr Wheatley: There is nothing to stop them. We have good prison libraries.

Q74 Mr Bacon: They have to be literate, do they not? We know from the report on prison re-offending that 58% of the people in prison re-offend and that of that universe, two thirds are unemployable in 96% of all jobs. So they probably will not be reading Dostoevsky, they will probably be eating a breakfast pack, if it is put in front of them and they are locked up with nothing else to do, and you are doing this to save money.

Mr Wheatley: We are doing it to save money, but not on food. What we are trying to do ---

Q75 Mr Bacon: On staff. No, no, no. I appreciate that you do not save money on food, I appreciate that. This is the cost of running a hot servery in the morning.

Mr Wheatley: We are not saving money; we are using the money to do something different. I am trying to make sure that we use the money supplied to run the Prison Service to maximise our chances of reducing the risk when prisoners return to society, therefore trying to get them into an active regimes, active for resettlement.

Q76 Mr Bacon: Is not starting the day with a good meal, perhaps even porridge, who knows, probably one of the best things you can do?

Mr Wheatley: If it takes an hour off the chance of engaging in education, it may not be the best thing to do.

Q77 Mr Bacon: There are 168 hours in a week, Mr Wheatley. Surely there are plenty of hours available to do education.

Mr Wheatley: It is the hours with funding that matter to me. The other way of putting it is that if I waste an hour's worth of full staff time to take people down to breakfast, supervise that process and go back up to their cells, then unlock them and send them off to work as opposed to sending them straight into education and offending behaviour programmes, that may be a better use of scarce resources.

Q78 Mr Bacon: You are saying that is money you cannot spend on a teaching programme basically?

Mr Wheatley: Yes and on getting the prisoners to the teaching programme. In some places I am in danger of having teachers available who are being paid to come in but not getting the prisoners there because they are busy eating their porridge.

Q79 Mr Bacon: Why do you not ask the teachers to start later and pay them for the hours they do rather than start them at 8:30 in the morning or whenever it is?

Mr Wheatley: But then I end up, if I am not careful, not getting a proper period in education that is sufficient to do the work that is required because we spent a long time doing breakfast and using a lot of resources to do it. Serving meals is a resource-intensive business because it involves a lot of staff supervision.

Q80 Mr Bacon: They cost 27p each. What is in a breakfast pack?

Mr Wheatley: A breakfast pack has cereals, a roll, jam usually, a hot drink, materials for a hot drink, milk in order to make a hot drink, that sort of thing.

Q81 Mr Bacon: May I come on to the wider questions about what the Prison Service is doing in order to encourage better diet? As you said yourself earlier, notwithstanding that plainly there are things you must do in relation to respecting religious preferences and so on, you are in what is plainly a very controlled environment. You do not have to serve any unhealthy food, do you? You do not have to procure from suppliers any food that has too high salt content. You have a very high buying power. You could use your buying power to buy only healthy food. You could ask your suppliers to supply only food with low salt content.

Mr Wheatley: That is accurate to a point and that in effect was the answer I gave earlier. In the next range of contracts, as we let contracts in May, we are moving to make some changes; by the autumn as we do the major grocery contracts, we certainly can and we intend to reduce the amount of salt and fat in the food sharply using our buying power. That is an intention and we are doing that at the moment. We do have to make sure we are feeding food which is acceptable to the population. I do remember the days when we served very healthy cabbage regularly; there was nothing wrong with it, it was cabbage. It was not taken by prisoners, it was not eaten by them and was cordially detested by them, but it would have allowed me to say that I was supplying a lot of dietary fibre. It went mainly in bins. That was before we moved to a system in which we allowed caterers to buy the produce which they cooked and we made them cook from the prison dietary. That was a worse approach and in the long run not good for prisoners.

Q82 Mr Bacon: It is possible to create very tasty, very healthy meals.

Mr Wheatley: We think so, which is why we are working with our suppliers to do just that actually. The research which has been done since this report has been very helpful to that process. We are using that research to drag down the salt content in particular, which is a significant problem. Although it may be they are using no more salt than apparently the average member of the public does, as you point out we are in a controlled environment. We have removed free flow salt, so we do not have salt around for spreading on these foods and we are now trying to work on the salt that is added to food and trying to make sure it tastes good and we do not run into acceptability problems.

Q83 Mr Bacon: I should just like to ask one more question and that is about the extent to which the Prison Service uses its buying power to buy British food products. Do you at all focus on sourcing either local food or domestically produced food?

Mr Wheatley: No, we focus on purchasing what is the best value for money. That is our overriding concern.

Q84 Mr Bacon: For example, the British pork quality standard mark is not something you take into account.

Mr Wheatley: No, we are not buying British for the sake of buying British.

Q85 Mr Bacon: No, no. When you buy because of the pork quality standard mark, you are buying because of quality and because it meets animal welfare standards which many people regard as even more important than other considerations such as meeting religious preferences and so on. Are animal welfare preferences in the production of food something that you take into account at all? I have constituents producing a lot of food who are forced to compete with foreign importers from elsewhere who produce meat to lower standards.

Mr Wheatley: We make sure we buy to standards which are acceptable for sale and for producing for the general public. We do not set a higher standard for prisoners and we buy on the basis of the best price we can get on some big regional and national contracts nowadays, which is how we have managed to reduce the cost of prison food in real terms.

Q86 Chairman: When was the last time you went 14 hours between meals?

Mr Wheatley: It was the week before last when I ended up missing my lunch entirely and not getting home until 9 o'clock.

Q87 Chairman: Did you feel irritated at all? Grouchy perhaps?

Mr Wheatley: My wife did manage me reasonably when I got home. I confess that I had forgotten I had missed my lunch until I began to go home for tea.

Q88 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: You pointed out in a previous answer that the uptake of exercise in prisons is 40% across all prisons.

Mr Wheatley: Yes, it is just over 40%.

Q89 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: In paragraph 4.15 it says you ask prisoners on a regular basis in which activities they would like to partake and the NAO found 13 prisons had carried out surveys and three had not. What do the prisons do with the results of these surveys? Do they amend their exercise programmes or do they just mark it away and file it and say "Oh, yes"?

Mr Wheatley: The intention is obviously that we do not want them doing surveys to which they do not pay attention and we are using our PE advisers who visit establishments to make sure that the PE staff in establishments are using that information to feed back into planning, while at the same time trying to make sure that they do not just provide the sort of PE that people want. It is important that we meet needs and use PE for training, because PE is one of the major sources of awards for prisoners because they have gained a qualification or gained some key skill.

The Committee suspended from 4.24pm to 4.38pm for a division in the House

Q90 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: We were talking about surveys and what happens to the results of these.

Mr Wheatley: Yes, the surveys are fed back into planning. We need to be careful that we do not just give prisoners exactly what they want. We might at that point end up for instance with a lot of weight training, which would not be appropriate. We try to get a balance of things which give qualifications, are aimed at some of the hard-to-reach groups, particularly older prisoners or prisoners who have substance misuse problems and we need to build up their strength, while providing also access to activity for the majority. We try to get that programme balance and we use the surveys to do that and they have proved useful in making sure that PE does reach more than just the young and the fittest in the population.

Q91 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: In your view, is the opportunity to do exercise part of your duty of care or is it a privilege?

Mr Wheatley: It is part of our duty of care to make sure there is adequate access to exercise. The words get used in the report, understandably, in a way that does not match ordinary prison powers. Exercise was often used in prison terms simply to describe time in the open air; the traditional exercise period was time in the open air, as opposed to access to PE which gives a chance to do what most people would call exercise. We have to make sure that prisoners have access to adequate physical exercise and adequate time in the open air to a level which is compatible with decency. It is okay beyond that to use access to things that people value as an incentive and that helps us to run stable and ordered prisons that are safe for prisoners.

Q92 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I was a bit concerned by paragraph 4.12 which says "At two prisons we visited segregated prisoners did not have access to any organised physical education activities on a regular basis because their privileges had been removed. Do you think that is acceptable?

Mr Wheatley: Again, it depends on why we are holding people. If a prisoner is in the segregation unit for a short period of punishment as a discipline award, it is acceptable, unless they have particularly pressing needs, they need remedial PE or something like that, to simply regard that as a punishment that will be completed quickly and they will then return to ordinary location. If somebody has had to be segregated because they are in danger or they may be a danger to others and we are holding them in long-term segregation, it is not acceptable and our standards are designed to make sure that in those circumstances nowadays - it was not the case in the past - we do provide access to other regime opportunities and not simply say they are segregated in a cell 23 hours a day, except for access to the open air for an hour, which they will get.

Q93 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: So they still get that?

Mr Wheatley: Oh yes, they still get that. For any prisoner in segregation, that is the standard right. There is a period of an hour's exercise, in the prison term, that is a chance to walk around in the open air.

Q94 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: You are saying that all prisoners do have access to the open air.

Mr Wheatley: Yes. All prisoners have the chance of access to the open air. Not all take it and nowadays, as opposed to making prisoners walk round and round an exercise yard in the manner that you see occasionally on television, in prisons where there is substantial access to workshops on an open site, then we do not stage separate exercise periods, but prisoners will have access to the open air as part of the ordinary regime of the establishment. It is true of most open prisons for example.

Q95 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I was sent a briefing note from the Howard League for Penal Reform and they said that they have recently found in one prison catering for juveniles, that boys never went outdoors for exercise. Is that something you recognise or do you think they are mistaken?

Mr Wheatley: I do not recognise that and I would like to know the establishment to be able to check carefully on what they are saying. Certainly when we are involving groups of juveniles in exercise and that exercise in the sense used in the report, then you will do that in a very focused way. Forgive me saying so, but you do not let a crowd of young children just wander around as though they were on the street. That is a recipe for disaster. You involve them in activities and a number of those activities will take place in the gymnasium and it will take place on the sports field in the summer and at times when the weather is better and we will move them around in escorted groups because young children, as they are actually, 15- and 16-year-olds, if not supervised and involved in doing something, are potentially fractious and dangerous to each other. So making sure we supervise them and have them involved in activities is crucial, not just saying "Here, wander around outside and enjoy yourselves".

Q96 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I shall be happy to make this note available to you, because I am glad to hear you say that because I thought that was very worrying, particularly for juveniles. If you could send us a note when you have looked into that, we should be very grateful for that. You were talking about women prisoners and in the NAO report on page 35 paragraph 4.11 "Women prisoners told us that the facilities and activities available were not tailored to the requirements of women. You mentioned the fact that very many women come in having abuse of substance issues and they are not in a fit state to do physical exercise. As an aside, is that peculiar to women? Are you saying there is a higher incidence of substance abuse amongst women?

Mr Wheatley: There is a higher incidence with women. Of people coming in with significant health problems, so you actually look at them and do not need to be a medical expert to see that they are people in real difficulties, you are more likely to see those coming into women's prisons. We know the scale of addiction problems with women prisoners is higher and the density, the extent of the addiction we find amongst some of the women, is greater than in the men's prisons. We still find a problem in male prisons, but not actually amongst young offenders. Young offenders, as far as one can generalise, tend not to come in with extensive substance abuse problems, not ingrained ones. We do need to do quite a lot of work to try to build back up the health of people in that position and we do need to make sure we get PE right for women. Aerobics and yoga and things like that are the sort of things we try to include in the programme in women's establishments because just doing a traditional "Would you like to play five-a-side football?" is not likely to appeal to a number of the women entering our custody and some simply will not be fit enough for it.

Q97 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Do you think the women prisoners that spoke to the NAO were the ones who were unable to do exercise because of their substance misuse or the ones that wanted to do exercise but the facilities that were there were not appropriate?

Mr Wheatley: I suspect that people would want to do more than we have on offer and trying to get the balance right, because there are women in prison who want to do things that are much more obviously ordinary gym activity and want to do fitness improvement, want to do weight training, as indeed do people in the community, so getting the balance right is difficult. I am sure we will find people in most establishments who think we have not got it right and we need to be careful in women's establishments that we have a range of activities which appeal to people who would not normally go to a gym in the community.

Q98 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: May I refer you now to page 36, paragraph 4.18, which is the scheduling of physical exercise? It says in the paragraph "Some prisoners who were either working or attending education classes could only exercise in the evenings or at weekends. Although most prisons offered full weekend and evening programmes of activities, others did not". A similar thing came out earlier on in the diet theme. There seems to be a theme coming through that the timing of meals and the timing of exercise are far more geared around your staff's needs than your prisoners' needs. Do you think that is a fair comment?

Mr Wheatley: There is a risk of that: it is not a fair comment. The amount of staff time we have is dependent on the amount of money we have. We buy staff time and we have to therefore use that staff time very carefully. It is not given for free. We are buying 39 hours of a prison officer and we have to make sure that is used to maximum effect. If you use it in one place, you cannot use it somewhere else. The amount of staff time I can afford to buy and the amount of staff time we have to use because of the things which have to happen - a busy local prison must have reception open in an evening to receive people from the court, it must have a gate that is running, it must have its security precautions in position - the number of "musts", constrain what else is possible. With more resources somebody like me can always do more, though there is a limitation in prisons because of the physical plant we are working with, particularly older prisons which were not built by the Victorians with extensive facilities outside the cell blocks. We are still living with the legacy of that in a number of establishments. There are constraints. We make sure, as we both review using the PE advisers and review our staffing systems, that we do not let them be designed to please the staff, so we only have people on when it pleases staff. It is an efficient way of using resources to end up with a very tight day in which the maximum numbers of things take place at once and prison officers and other people in the prison are all busy, so there are no gaps in their time and we pack the day into a relatively short period. That has disadvantages from a prisoner's point of view because it can mean quite long periods locked up.

Q99 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: It is the use of civilian PE instructors which would be a way of you saving money. Obviously you would have to put it in the lower security prisons rather than the maximum security ones. Do you think you should be encouraging more of that?

Mr Wheatley: I am sure it is an option and we need to make sure that governors know it is an option. We are using it in some of the lower security establishments, for instance Latchmere House, where they are only doing evening PE actually because most people are involved during the day in going out to work. It is a re-settlement prison. It would not make sense to have a full-time person to do that, so we buy in somebody to work in the evening. In those circumstances, it makes sense. Our experience to date of those contracts has not been very encouraging. Some are quite expensive and the quality of work we get for working with prisoners, which is a skill that you need and it is a different skill, is not always there in the civilian employees we have brought in. It has some capacity to be stretched in the low security estate: it is not the answer for the majority of the estate. Most governors would rate the PE staff we have very highly and their ability to motivate and control large groups of prisoners and get them involved in doing things.

Q100 Greg Clark: In terms of this research about the effect of food on behaviour, did I hear you correctly in the response to Mr Bacon that you do not have a research budget?

Mr Wheatley: The Prison Service within the national offender management service - we are part of the national offender management service - does not have its own separate research budget. Research is funded by the Home Office, the national offender management service through the RDS, the Home Office research group.

Q101 Greg Clark: That seems extraordinary. You are the Director General of the Prison Service. You would think, in order to make sure you followed best practice, both to save money but also to ensure that your prisoners are cared for to the best available extent, you should be able to research best practice. Are you saying that you do not have any ability to do that?

Mr Wheatley: I have very limited research funds that I can put out and there is a small scale research, actually funding PhD research, specifically about prisons which the Prison Service funds directly. The budget for research is held centrally within the Home Office. There are efficiencies out of that and it is available for all the suppliers because there are several providers in this area and I am a competitor against the private sector. The fact that the research is done centrally has some advantages.

Q102 Greg Clark: Have you asked the Home Office to conduct this research? Have you said that it would be important?

Mr Wheatley: In this particular case I have said I am very happy to cooperate with this research, I have volunteered establishments - I did not have to work hard to do that because governors of those establishments were pleased to volunteer - and I have made sure that those who are supporting a Natural Justice approach know that I am a supporter of getting the research done.

Q103 Greg Clark: How much does it cost to do this research?

Mr Wheatley: I do not know because I am not paying for it; I could not give you an accurate answer on that.

Q104 Greg Clark: It seems a bit passive. It strikes me that this is a crucial question. You have an NAO report into diet and exercise. I should have thought you would be very eager to know the answer to the effects of diet on behaviour so you might ask how much the study would cost and, whether from your own resources or by leaning on the Home Office, pester to get it done.

Mr Wheatley: I am eager to know the answer and that is why I am anxious to cooperate with the research. In the way we are structured, as a provider of prison services within the national offender management service, I do not have a budget for doing major research.

Q105 Greg Clark: I understand that, but you have a direct line to the Home Office and if they hold the budget, presumably you can put some pressure on them to spend it in a way that would be of most help to you.

Mr Wheatley: As I have made plain, I have happily agreed to cooperate with this and there is a proposal. The thing is expected to come forward shortly.

Q106 Greg Clark: It is not the same to cooperate with the project as to actually try to secure a project that would be very helpful.

Mr Wheatley: It is probably helpful to ask me precisely all the dealings I have with the main Home Office. It is something I am pleased to see done, but the Home Office must decide the best way of spending their research money and they are accountable for that, not me.

Q107 Greg Clark: For us to write the report, would you mind asking the Home Office how much the study would cost and perhaps write to us?

Mr Wheatley: As I understand the proposal at the moment, Natural Justice actually have funding for this and are proposing to fund it themselves. It is a question simply of getting clearance for the research.

Q108 Greg Clark: Perhaps you could give us an indicator of the cost.

Mr Wheatley: Certainly I can give you an update on the position, but, as I understand it, there is the funding available. Funding is not an issue; it is just getting the proposal forward to go through the approvals process I have already commented on.

Q109 Greg Clark: It seems a bit frustrating I must say to have the funds available and not to be getting on with it. Mr Bacon indicated that I am very interested in porridge and I am sure that you have noticed that porridge has become rather fashionable these days as a foodstuff. Are you aware of the research?

Mr Wheatley: I am aware that it has become a fashionable thing to eat. I am afraid I eat fruit in the morning myself, but I can see that it is much more fashionable than it used to be and has a number of health benefits claimed for it.

Q110 Greg Clark: In particular, it is full of soluble dietary fibre which, according to paragraph nine of the report, is something that the prison diet is lacking in. It is low in fat, salt and sugar, three things that, according to the report again, paragraph nine, the prison diet is lacking in and it helps the brain release serotonin which helps keep the spirits up, which I would have thought would be pretty important in a prison. Do you serve porridge in prison any more?

Mr Wheatley: Because we have no firm policy which says that any food must be served, the answer to that is that we do not have a policy which says that porridge should be served or should not be served. There will be a number of establishments serving porridge, but I do not know how many there are.

Mr Tuckwood: There are some jails, I could not name them here for you, which serve porridge.

Mr Wheatley: The diet is a locally controlled issue rather than centrally mandated.

Q111 Greg Clark: The impression the report gives is that this breakfast pack is the kind of standard way of providing breakfast these days.

Mr Wheatley: The breakfast pack is used in a number of establishments and it is used only because it facilitates moving prisoners first thing in the morning using the oncoming staff to roll check and move to labour. That is the only reason it is used.

Q112 Greg Clark: Okay. We shall talk about the reasons in a second but I am interested in knowing how many prisons use the breakfast pack and how many serve porridge in the morning.

Mr Wheatley: We should have to research that and write separately to you about that.

Greg Clark: Would you write so that we can reflect on it?

Mr Bacon: You do not have a research budget.

Q113 Greg Clark: Exactly; you do not have a research budget, so how are you going to find this out?

Mr Wheatley: This is a question of asking; I should not call this research which will cost money. It will cost some money as we organise it, but it is a reasonable request.

Q114 Greg Clark: So you can send an e-mail out to all your prisons to ask them to report whether they serve porridge.

Mr Wheatley: Yes.

Q115 Greg Clark: Okay, I shall be interested to hear that. It does seem paradoxical that when the nation is eating porridge, the one place you cannot get it any more, at least in the quantities that you used to be able to, is prison. You might have expected to go to prison in order to improve your diet in this respect, but not here. On the breakfast savings, when did you introduce this requirement or this policy to move to breakfast packs in order to save?

Mr Wheatley: It is not a requirement in that you must do it. We have made it plain that we think there are advantages in extending the regime by unlocking first thing and moving straight into work, bringing your staff on slightly later, so you keep patrol staff on typically until 8 o'clock, quarter to eight, in the morning, bring on the staff, do a roll check and then unlock and prisoners can move straight on to activities. That was advertised as a sensible way forward, relying on memory here, from about 1999 onwards and the take-up has been higher obviously in establishments where there is a regime to go to. Establishments with extensive regimes can make much better use of the facilities by doing this.

Q116 Greg Clark: Does Belmarsh have a regime such as that?

Mr Wheatley: Belmarsh does not have an extensive regime, but is trying to make sure it shares its regime. There are very limited regime facilities for prisoners at Belmarsh so it does a morning and an afternoon.

Q117 Greg Clark: Does it have a breakfast pack?

Mr Wheatley: I am not sure.

Mr Tuckwood: Nor am I.

Q118 Greg Clark: Perhaps you could let us know about that as well.

Mr Wheatley: What Belmarsh is doing is sharing a limited regime amongst the prisoners. Because the number of workshops is small it splits the days: you are either in in the morning or in in the afternoon.

Q119 Greg Clark: In doing this, presumably some assessment has been made as to how much it saves.

Mr Wheatley: Yes; or how much it gains in terms of activity is the way we look at it. It is not saving money as such, it is enabling us to use the money to do something else and it enables us to get people into activities and extend the prison day with purposeful activity.

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 letter 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.

Q140 Mr Williams: They may be. Then give us a note from them about this, about the background to it, about the amounts per head, per day, for all the other juvenile prisons and we want to know why there are any major disparities so we can perhaps follow up on that. What is absurd about it is that, if you go to the next page, there are various comparisons which are not terribly relevant in figure eight. The one which does interest me is that for three meals a day, the range for the Ministry of Defence is £2 to £2.20. The Ministry of Defence is not feeding prisoners: the food is part of a soldier's pay. You get pay plus provisions as your terms of enrolment. Here you have a bunch of young prisoners at Feltham having food provided at £1.40 per head more per day than a soldier is getting to carry out his duties as part of his pay. If you put it in a broader perspective, that means you are talking somewhere way over £500 a year more to a prisoner in Feltham than to a young man who is serving the country in the Armed Forces. It is crazy, is it not?

Mr Wheatley: When you are using that data which indicates that the Ministry of Defence spends more you have to take account of the fact that the allowances assume that all personnel eat all meals, but actually the take-up is only 50 to 55% because people eat off site. It is a bit like my open prisons: not all soldiers eat all the meals. This is one of the reasons why you have to be careful with that comparison. My prisoners do not leave Feltham and go outside to other places, it is a secure establishment.

Q141 Mr Williams: The provision here is on the basis of three meals a day; that is what it says.

Mr Wheatley: "Additionally the allowances assume that all personnel eat all meals, however, average take-up is actually 50 to 55 per cent allowing more to be spent per meal served". That is in the comment column next to it.

Q142 Mr Williams: So you are saying that a lot of it is just wasted.

Mr Wheatley: No, because fewer people eat the food if you work out the cost per person and assume they are all there. Obviously if you actually divide by the number of people who really eat the meals, the cost is greater per meal served.

Q143 Mr Williams: Coming back again to Feltham and the responsibilities within your Service, does the Youth Justice Board report to you? What is the relationship?

Mr Wheatley: It does not report to me; it is a non-departmental statutory body set up under legislation with its own separate board to whom a chief executive is accountable.

Q144 Mr Williams: So you think they are allocating between about a dozen prisons and we do not have any knowledge of the variation. C&AG, your report came up with some very useful information. Do we know whether that is the extremity of the gap within the youth service, or is it just the example you have managed to get hold of?

Ms Murphie: That is the top and bottom of the range according to each different type of prison.

Q145 Mr Williams: Was that figure provided by the Youth Justice Board?

Ms Murphie: No, it was provided by the Prison Service.

Q146 Mr Williams: I assume the Youth Justice Board is a body which is accountable eventually to you?

Ms Murphie: Yes.

Q147 Mr Williams: Could you, Sir John, ensure that we get a most detailed report from them on the variations between the youth prisons and with a rational explanation of why those differences exist, so we can include them in our report?

Sir John Bourn: Yes, I shall certainly do that.

Q148 Chairman: I am just intrigued why in some prisons you are not using outdoor facilities, such as Belmarsh and Lincoln. This is mentioned in paragraph 4.10. You are worried about helicopter escapes. Is there not some way in which you can make some provision by stretching wire across the fields?

Mr Wheatley: We are worried about two things in high security prisons: one is helicopter escapes, which are a real risk. Putting anti-helicopter wires across the establishment helps but it does not entirely remove the problem. As you will realise, having watched rescues on television, a dangling rope may well allow them to go through the wires without actually having to land the helicopter. It is a point we need to remember. The other thing is that in spite of all the security we put in at entry - and we put in a lot of security at entry to prevent people bringing escape material, saws, anything which might help people to climb and particularly guns and other weapons - there is a risk that stuff is thrown over the wall. Prisons do not have roofs on and if prisoners have access to the wall area, we have a significant risk that things will be thrown into the establishment, often disguised. For instance, one of the things we found recently was a dead pigeon, but actually stuffed full of contraband. It just looked like a dead pigeon which had fallen out of the sky. One might wonder about bird flu nowadays, but actually it is a way of passing contraband in. The risks of a gun getting into a prison with category A prisoners are obviously significant. So we pull back from the perimeter, which is where the playing fields were. Prisoners still get out into the outside air because there are exercise areas in the wings which do not have that same risk. I think that is a sensible precaution, given the people we are holding in Belmarsh, their capacity and the access they may have to guns.

Q149 Mr Bacon: I just want to ask another question about porridge. Do you have any plans to do anything about increasing porridge consumption in prison?

Mr Wheatley: I have no plans to increase porridge consumption as such.

Q150 Mr Bacon: Mr Tuckwood, do you? You are the catering man, are you not?

Mr Tuckwood: We make the choice available.

Q151 Mr Bacon: But you have no plans, despite the well-known benefits of porridge, to do anything to encourage porridge consumption.

Mr Wheatley: We are making sure that we increase the prisoners' awareness and our catering staff's awareness of healthy options and healthy eating. We are using the planned catering conference to do that amongst other things. That may well lead to increased interest in porridge eating which actually, certainly until recently, was relatively low amongst prisoners; it was not a thing which was taken up. I do belong to the era when porridge was served on a regular basis and remember seeing it commented on unfavourably and thrown in bins more often than would be good for people's health.

Q152 Mr Bacon: It was not well made.

Mr Wheatley: It was actually very well made. It was expensive, because we had to open up early in the morning to get the coppers on.

Mr Bacon: You do not have to use cream like Mr Clark; you can use semi-skimmed milk.

Q153 Mr Williams: A thought occurs to me. What about prison staff? Who cooks their meals? Do the same people provide the meals for the staff as provide the meals for the prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: No. Staff are normally catered for either by themselves or their partners, if they are lucky, or they buy their food outside. We do not and have not encouraged prison staff to eat from the kitchen, mainly because we do not want any suggestion that prison staff are profiting from subsidised catering designed for prisoners and funded for prisoners' use or that they are eating rations which should have been eaten by prisoners. For most of my service it has been a sin for staff to take prisoners' food because you are taking from food which has been bought for prisoners with money voted for that use. It is not something we would wish to encourage. Prison staff have often eaten off site in an officers' mess with prisoners working in there and paid the going rate for their food.

Chairman: Thank you very much. Clearly since our last report you have made some progress in reducing your catering costs and you have succeeded in providing a relatively healthy diet. However, we are still very concerned about these areas where there is up to a 14-hour wait between meals and over three quarters of an hour between preparation and serving. We shall wish to return to this in our report and encourage you to greater efforts. Thank you very much.