UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be
published as HC 788-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS
MONDAY 19 DECEMBER 2005
NATIONAL OFFENDER MANAGEMENT SERVICE:
DEALING WITH INCREASED NUMBERS IN CUSTODY
HOME OFFICE
SIR JOHN GIEVE KCB
PRISON SERVICE
MR PHIL WHEATLEY
NATIONAL OFFENDER MANAGEMENT SERVICE
MR PETER BROOK
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 131
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Oral evidence
Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts
on Monday 19 December 2005
Members present:
Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair
Mr Richard Bacon
Greg Clark
Mr Ian Davidson
Helen Goodman
Mr Sadiq Khan
Sarah McCarthy-Fry
Jon Trickett
________________
Sir John Bourn KCB,
Comptroller and Auditor General, National Audit Office, gave evidence.
Ms Paula Diggle,
Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, gave evidence.
REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL
NATIONAL OFFENDER MANAGEMENT SERVICE:
DEALING WITH INCREASED NUMBERS IN CUSTODY (HC 458)
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Sir John Gieve
KCB, Permanent Secretary, Home Office; Mr
Phil Wheatley, Director General, Prison Service; and Mr Peter Brook, Director of Finance, National Offender Management
Service, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman:
Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are discussing the
National Offender Management Service's responses to rising prisoner numbers,
which is the biggest operational issue it has to contend with. We note that prisoner numbers are at record levels
and that the Service has accommodated this rise without significant prisoner
unrest which is a tribute to the professionalism of those working in the Prison
Service. I start by making that point
which I hope you will pass to your staff, Sir John. We are joined by Sir John Gieve, who of course is the Permanent
Secretary to the Home Office. Would you
like to introduce your team?
Sir John Gieve: On my right is Phil Wheatley, who is the
Director General of the Prison Service, and on my left is Peter Brooke, who is
the Financing and Commercial Director in NOMS, the National Offender Management
Service.
Q2 Chairman: The first question I have to ask, Sir John,
and I hope you will forgive me if I ask it, is why you failed to anticipate the
rise in prisoner numbers and, therefore, the number of places you would have to
provide between 2002 and 2004?
Sir John Gieve: Well, you will see from the graph on page 19
that - I do not think this would be any different if we did it for a different
period of years - it is very difficult to get the projection right and
sometimes we overshoot and sometimes we undershoot. The reasons in 2002 and 2004 in particular - Peter may want to
add to this - were there were some changes in policy which we did not
anticipate the impact of and, apart from that, we were out by about 1%.
Q3 Chairman: We accept that forecasting numbers is a
problematical business, we accept the point that you are making, so why do you
think that the forecasts still provide you with a realistic guide to estate
planning?
Sir John Gieve: This is rather like forecasting any other
field. I remember doing it on the
economy for many years in the Treasury.
You cannot do without forecasts or, at least in this case, projections
which are based on an analysis of what is causing offending to rise and the
work with the criminal justice system.
You cannot do without them but you have to recognise their
limitations. If you look back to the chart
on page 19 you will see that at the least they were telling us to expect a continuing
rise. We know that at any time we have
got a margin of error around that and we need to have contingency plans in
place for dealing with the situation if the population goes up a bit faster
than planned as well as for dealing with it if it goes down.
Q4 Chairman: Would you look at figure 13 which you will
find on page 32. This is an analysis of
different types of quick-build accommodation provided by the Prison Service. Looking at this figure, I am wondering why
you are contemplating still using these modular temporary units, otherwise
known as Portakabins to the rest of us, since they obviously have so many
problems, they have proved unsuitable for most prisoners and they are the most
expensive?
Sir John Gieve: I will ask Phil to comment on this. We have got them and we need to use them,
that is the first point. We have got
about 1,000 places and they are more or less fully used. The costs are higher here, look higher and
are higher, because they have got a limited lifespan so you are spreading the
capital cost over a shorter period of years.
The costs would look even bigger if we stopped using them now. Phil, do you want to add to that?
Mr Wheatley: Only to say that operationally we are making
them work quite well, providing they do not make up the majority of
accommodation in category C establishments and we use them for prisoners who
are behaving well as an incentive. They
produce what for prisoners is quite good quality accommodation in spite of the
physical weaknesses in the accommodation.
So we are making them work and we do not have to use very high levels of
staff to supervise them because we are selecting carefully before putting these
prisoners in these units, as the report makes clear.
Q5 Chairman: Okay.
Going back to the rise in prisoner numbers, we know they have gone up
over the last ten years and we know from what you say that forecasting is a
problematic business, so why have you not developed contingency plans, Sir
John, for your emergency building programme?
Sir John Gieve: Looking back to 2002 I think we had a prison
building programme in course then but our plan, if you like, when the prison
population increase accelerated was to commission some MTUs and RTUs, the two
more easily constructed structures, so in that sense that was our plan.
Q6 Chairman: I understand that governors have autonomy
over who comes into their prisons. Does
that not lead to increased bureaucracy and wasted time in vetting and
re-vetting, for instance, building workers?
Sir John Gieve: No. I
think the fundamental principle here is that governors are responsible for the
security and safety of their prison and that is the reason why they have got
authority over who comes in and what security clearance to ask them for. I think in general that works reasonably
well and for a lot of local works that works well. We agree with the report that there should be scope for a more
national scheme for big contracts where one contractor is working in a number
of different prisons. We are working on
that, are we not, Phil?
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
We accept that recommendation actually.
We think that if we staged another campaign of this sort we would plan
to clear centrally because we are using the same firm to deliver on several
different sites. We have just got to be
a bit careful that we do not raise the level of clearance because we are
building in high security sites to such a high level that we actually make it
more difficult everywhere because there are different security risks. Working
in Belmarsh, as an example, requires a higher security clearance than working
in an open prison. We just have to be
careful that we do not end up ramping everything up. We think we can find a way round that.
Q7 Chairman: Mr Wheatley, when your predecessors have been
here before this Committee has been particularly anxious about the need to
provide proper education courses. Why
do you still allow the scandal of partially completed education courses and
continued reassessment so that people are not getting a proper education in prison? Is this not something that should be a
central part of your duties which you are failing to deliver?
Mr Wheatley: It is a central part of what we seek to
do. We do not aim to move prisoners on
education courses and we do our best to avoid moving prisoners, when we do have
to transfer, who are undertaking key skills training, particularly their basic
educational training. In extremis,
because it is more
important that we get every prisoner into our custody, if the only people we
can move to make space for people coming in from the courts are people doing
education courses, we will have to move them.
That is very much a last resort and we do it relatively rarely and only
when we are operating at maximum pressure.
We are seeking to get the gain that you see, which is to make sure that
people can complete their courses, and we are managing that because we are
hitting all our educational targets and this year, in spite of the population
pressure, at the moment we look as though we are substantially exceeding them.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Q8 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Mr Wheatley, can you clear something up here
before I go any further. Figure six on page 13 of the NAO report: why does the
prison population show a fall every December?
Do we send people home for Christmas?
Mr Wheatley: There is a seasonal fall at Christmas and has
been for as far back as I can remember, and I go back to 1969. It is primarily caused by the courts not
sitting over the Christmas period so that the number of sentences that can be
given because the courts are not sitting over Christmas is much reduced. Although this is entirely speculative there
may also be a bit of Christmas spirit on the part of magistrates' courts
thinking about bail near Christmas. The
primary effect is the Crown Courts in particular not sitting over the Christmas
period and the magistrates' courts usually not sitting over the Christmas
holiday. All the rest of the year they
sit nowadays so there is no other seasonality of great significance.
Q9 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I think that has cleared that one up. Sir John, in your view does prison capacity
determine sentencing policy or does sentencing policy determine prison
capacity?
Sir John Gieve: They are inter-related in a complex way. I think that in principle we need to provide
the prison places to match the sentences, so it is the sentencing policy that
determines prisons. There is, in fact,
a sort of feedback loop both in a conscious and less conscious way. We have found on occasion that it has seemed
as the prisons began to get fuller that judges did change their practice, so
that is one feedback loop which is, if you like, the sense gets around that
prisons are filling up. Of course there
have been times, and the Carter report was one of these, when we have suggested
to the judiciary in general terms that we think community penalties are more
appropriate for some things and custody for others. Sometimes those have been influenced by the prison population.
Q10 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I can ask you the question, does the fact
that the prisons are getting full determine whether we should have more
community sentencing or are we saying that prison is not appropriate for some
people, therefore we should have more community sentencing?
Sir John Gieve: I think our argument is for many non-violent
and less serious offences a community penalty is the most appropriate,
especially if it is properly enforced, and we are taking steps to ensure that
sentences are more rigorously enforced.
We are starting there, if you like, from what is best in terms of
reducing reoffending and protecting the public.
Q11 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Do you think the high number of reoffenders
has contributed to the increase in the prison population?
Sir John Gieve: It certainly has. Most people before they get to prison have had a number of other
sentences. It depends on the nature of
the crime but you will find very often that the first custodial sentence is not
for the first offence.
Q12 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Can we move on to the Offender Learning Journey. In the NAO's report at page 25, the NAO
found the link between the provision of basic education and the level of
reoffending was an indirect link. If it
is only an indirect link, how do you know that your Offender Learning Journey
is going to help prevent reoffending?
Sir John Gieve: I think what they were pointing to there was
that there are a number of social factors that contribute to reoffending, and
personal factors. What we know is that
people who have settled accommodation, a job, established social relations, on
the whole offend less than the people who do not have those things. What we also see is that it is difficult to
get a job if you do not have basic educational qualifications. That is the indirectness of the link. Peter, do you want to add to that?
Mr Brook: No, I think that is right. There are a number of inter-related issues
that we are trying to address with most offenders. What we have not demonstrated yet is a direct link between basic
skills courses and reoffending but there is a firm belief that they are linked,
if indirectly.
Q13 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: So there is a belief but you have no evidence
to back it up. Are you looking to get
the evidence?
Mr Brook: Yes, we are aiming to get better evidence of
the inter-relationship between all the ways we deal with offending behaviour in
the prisons and the effect on reoffending.
It is very difficult to isolate individual bits of the coherent
programme we give to offenders and say what effect that does have. It is easier to look at the package and what
impact that has on reoffending.
Q14 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Do we have any progress reports on the pilot
schemes of the Offender Learning Journey?
Mr Wheatley: Not in terms of reducing reoffending because
we normally use a two year follow-up and nothing has gone far enough for a two
year follow-up. I am not aware of
anything that links directly to reducing reconvictions that is solid and
reliable.
Q15 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: But you are still proposing to do a national
roll-out next year even though you have no results from the pilots?
Mr Wheatley: I am trying to make sure that people get the
sort of basic education that gives them a chance of getting jobs. What is quite plain as I deal with
prisoners, and have done for most of my life, is going straight is very
difficult if you cannot get any successful honest form of income. There are very few jobs nowadays that you
can gain access to if you have not even got the basic level of normal school
leaving education, you are simply ruled out of most jobs.
Q16 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Have you done any evaluation of these pilots
at all?
Sir John Gieve: The pilots of the Offender Learning Journey?
Q17 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Yes.
Sir John Gieve: I was just going to make one other point,
which is we are spending money on education in prisons which we believe will
help to reduce reoffending and tackle adult illiteracy and so on anyway. This is more about doing it better. In a sense it is not that we have decided to
suddenly start doing education, this is about how we make it more effective by
tailoring it more to the needs of particular offenders.
Q18 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: What I am trying to tease out is, is it just
warm words or is there anything tangible you are getting back from it? The words, "Offender Learning Journey" sound
great but what I am saying is do you have any feedback?
Mr Wheatley: The tangible things are qualifications gained
by prisoners who did not have qualifications before, so we can show that last
year we had 60,000 basic skills qualifications for prisoners who did not
possess those before they came in, many of whom could not even read and write
in any recognisable form. I think that
is likely to make it easier to gain employment and there is solid evidence to say
that those who gain employment are less likely to be involved in reoffending.
Q19 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: So those who have been on the pilot of the
Offender Learning Journey have had better results in getting their basic skills
than those who have not been on the journey?
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
In terms of gaining the skills, there is no doubt the programme is
working. Those who are on the programme
gain the skills; those who are not, do not.
Q20 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: In paragraph 3.10 on page 25 it says you have
an aspirational target to get 50% of prisoners involved in learning. Why is it only aspirational?
Mr Wheatley: This is, of course, the Learning and Skills
and Department for Education target with their money which is being spent in
prisons. It is aspirational because the
money has not yet fully arrived as we are now increasing the amount of money
that is coming in and changing the organisation so that Learning and Skills
Councils from next year effectively will be responsible in all prisons for
delivering education in prisons. It
will not be education contractors working for me, it will be education
contractors working for the Learning and Skills Councils on their instructions,
as it were.
Q21 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: So you have put the target on the Learning
and Skills Councils?
Mr Wheatley: No, not me.
The decision has been taken within Government that this is how education
should be funded in prison. It is
important it is mainstreamed and it is linked to wider education targets. Within the public sector Prison Service I am
acting as the host for this to happen and making sure that governors select
prisoners, get them to the education facilities and make sure they monitor what
the contractors do, but we no longer control it, it is being run by education
as part of the mainstream learning and skills in the community.
Q22 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: My time is up, but whose is this 50% target
then?
Mr Wheatley: It is the Department's and Learning and
Skill's target.
Q23 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Do they set their own target or is it a
target that has been set by you for them to achieve?
Sir John Gieve: No, it is agreed with us and with NOMS. We have just published a plan called Reducing Reoffending through Skills and
Employment which was jointly promoted by the Home Office, DFES and DWP.
Q24 Mr Khan: As you can tell, time is limited and the ten
minutes we have is precious. On my
first question, if you could limit your answer to no more than one minute. Can you give me your views on the report and
in particular the recommendations on page 21?
Sir John Gieve: It was a good report. We generally agree with the recommendations,
which I do not find on page 21.
Q25 Mr Khan: That is fine. Wandsworth Prison is in my constituency and we have an excellent
governor who took over relatively recently.
Can I draw attention to table five, page 12. Can you put your finger there and then look at table 21 on page
36. When you look at the figures for
both sharing cells and overcrowding, do you not think that the governor of
Wandsworth has an almost impossible task bearing in mind the conditions placed
upon him in terms of the aspirations we have to prisoners to rehabilitate?
Mr Wheatley: There is no doubt that the governor of
Wandsworth has a very challenging task and the levels of overcrowding in
Wandsworth are high. Of course,
Wandsworth is one of the few prisons serving the capital where much crime is
committed and brought to justice. All
the London locals are under great pressure.
We have to move prisoners out of the London locals into the surrounding
training prisons, which is what we hope will happen to prisoners once they have
been sentenced, in order to make room for those coming in from the courts. The London local prisons are particularly
pressured and Wandsworth is one of the most pressured prisoners and it does not
make his life easy at all.
Q26 Mr Khan: Bearing in mind there have been four suicides
in Wandsworth since January 2004, as reported here, what are you specifically
doing to alleviate the problems Wandsworth has outside your control, for
example overcrowding?
Mr Wheatley: We are trying to make sure that Wandsworth is
able to manage the overcrowding better ----
Q27 Mr Khan: How?
Mr Wheatley: ---- hence the governor that we have been put
in that you correctly draw attention to as being very capable running a
difficult establishment, the introduction of a new anti-suicide monitoring
measure, the so-called AST scheme, which involves much more detailed
decision-making about individuals and much more support to those individuals,
by putting mental health in-reach into all prisons, including Wandsworth, so we
can support those who have mental health problems, and the initiative with the
Department of Health which delivers health with health money into prisons
commissioned by PCTs, also happening at Wandsworth. There are a number of initiatives designed to improve the
situation but I do not want to mitigate the fact that Wandsworth is a very
challenging environment and requires a high class governor.
Q28 Mr Khan: None of the things you have mentioned, all of
which I welcome, deal with numbers.
Mr Wheatley: I am not pretending that we are dealing with
the numbers. As long as the population
remains as high as it is, although numbers recently have come down quite
significantly during November, for which I am very grateful, and that has moved
----
Q29 Mr Khan: Christmas spirit?
Mr Wheatley: That is before the Christmas spirit, so it is
not the Christmas drop and it is really quite striking. As long as the numbers remain so high, if we
want to stay out of police cells, and I do, we have to use those Wandsworth
places to their maximum. It is not the
most overcrowded prison but it is one of the most overcrowded.
Q30 Mr Khan: Of the 77,000-odd prisoners who are guests of
Her Majesty's Prisons, how many of those are foreigners convicted, how many of
those are asylum-seekers and how many of those are people on remand waiting for
trial?
Sir John Gieve: I can give you some of those. Nearly 13,000 are on remand. Just over 10,000 are foreign nationals. I do not know how many of those are
asylum-seekers, I would have thought only a minority of those. I forgot the other question you asked.
Q31 Mr Khan: That is fine. The report also says that between 2002 and 2004 there has been a
70% increase in prison numbers without there being any significant increase in
prisoner unrest. Is that a fair
summary?
Mr Wheatley: Certainly there has been no significant
increase in prisoner unrest.
Q32 Mr Khan: What is the breaking point?
Mr Wheatley: The breaking point would be population levels
in prison above the safe operating capacity, operating at the maximum
operational capacity, which is an assessment of the maximum number we can hold
without significant risk to safety and security. It is absolutely crucial that we do not exceed that.
Q33 Mr Khan: Do you not accept the implication and the
inference one draws from that phrase is you have scope to go higher vis-à-vis
overcrowding because at the moment there is no prisoner unrest?
Mr Wheatley: No, I would not say that. The reason why there is no prisoner unrest,
and I have made this point on a number of occasions in a number of different
arenas, is we do not take more prisoners in any prison than it can safely hold
and that operational judgment, which is not a question of space it is an
operational judgment of what we can manage in that prison, is a robust
operational judgment which I will not have challenged by other people.
Q34 Mr Khan: You will have seen that the report at
paragraph 1.49 on page 12 deals with the number of changes that are supposed to
limit the rise in population in the long-term.
Can I ask you, Sir John, to give me your views on those things set out
there? How likely are they to achieve
what they want to achieve?
Sir John Gieve: Sorry, I was just looking for ----
Q35 Mr Khan: Paragraph 1.49. Is that pie in the sky or will it happen?
Sir John Gieve: It is very difficult to say. We know that there is greater use of
electronic tagging. We know the
Sentencing Guidelines Council have issued some guidelines which taken by
themselves would tend to reduce the prison population and, similarly, the
Criminal Justice Act has a mix of measures, some of which could increase it and
some of which would reduce it. At the
moment, on our latest projections we have got ten scenarios and I think two of
them show us living within the 80,000 projected population limit more or less
indefinitely, some get very close to it or cross at points, others go upwards
and break through that limit in the next two years. We are trying to work on all the scenarios. In particular, both the Criminal Justice Act
and the Sentencing Guidelines Council are very new and we are not yet at a
point where we can say what the overall impact has been.
Q36 Mr Khan: If I was to ask you how optimistic you are,
would you give me an equally long but no clear answer on that as well?
Sir John Gieve: I am not confident.
Q37 Mr Khan: That is helpful. Can I ask you then about the National Offender Management
Service. Is this a drama turning into a
crisis, the setup, the objectives not being achieved, the holistic approach? We know, of course, that the reoffending
rate is 40% in the first two years, as referred to Mr Wheatley. It has not turned out how we hoped it would,
has it?
Sir John Gieve: NOMS is still at the early stages and the
main point of it is to draw the Prison and Probation Services together into a
single system which is based around concerted offender management from the
point of arrest through to the point of resettlement and all of that is very
sensible. I do not see it as a prison
number control mechanism. Over time, we
hope it will reduce reoffending and we have set a target of 10% by the end of
the decade. That would make an impact
on the prison population, although it is not the only driver of it because a
lot depends on the criminal justice system and the police. If they are more active, if they drive up
the number of arrests and convictions, then even with a reduced level of
reoffending we could see a rise in prison population. I do not see the level of the prison population as the measure of
success for NOMS.
Q38 Mr Khan: Would you like to see judges around the
country monitored in their sentencing and consistency?
Sir John Gieve: I think that is very difficult. What, league tables for how tough they are
and that sort of thing? I do not think
it would be right for the Home Office to do that.
Q39 Mr Khan: Final question: bearing in mind we have had one piece of good news about the
November figures, do you have anything positive to say about the reforms in
this area, any good news around the corner that we can expect?
Sir John Gieve: Yes, I think there is a lot of good
news. Firstly, on education, as you
have heard, there has been a massive increase in investment in education in
prisons and we are carrying that forward.
Secondly, the same thing has been happening on health. The healthcare for prisoners is much better
now than I should think it has ever
been and is getting better still.
Thirdly, we have got the outcomes in terms of not just basic skills
awards but also behaviour programmes and so on which we are still delivering
despite the pressure on the estate.
Finally, we have not even discussed security and that is because
security has been outstanding for a number of years and remains outstanding.
Mr Khan: Thank you very much.
Q40 Mr Bacon: Mr Wheatley, you said earlier that the
modular temporary units are used to house prisoners who are well-behaved and
you treat it as some sort of incentive.
Are you really saying that you are saying to your prisoners, "If you
behave well we will put you in a leaky Portakabin"?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, that is right.
Q41 Mr Bacon: And they like it?
Mr Wheatley: They do - I think the report brings that out
quite nicely - because it offers them individual rooms of a good size without
oppressive security compared with living in one of the big houseblocks.
Q42 Mr Bacon: You mean, as in paragraph 4.16, you have to
give them their own keys?
Mr Wheatley: No.
Prisoners in the houseblocks also have keys to their doors, which are
privacy locks which we can override.
That is very useful because that prevents prisoners stealing each
other's property or otherwise.
Q43 Mr Bacon: The keys that are referred to in paragraph
4.16 are not of that nature, are they?
They are there because of fire risk because of the poor quality of the
buildings, that is why you have to give them keys. Is that not what it says?
Mr Wheatley: As I said, we certainly could not make these
secure buildings. The keys are keys to
their rooms, they are not keys to get out of the building, though the doors are
unlocked so they can get out of the building, you are quite right. They need to be able to get out of the
building if there is a fire.
Q44 Mr Bacon: It is almost unbelievable. You are saying that you went to a contractor
and said, "Build us some accommodation but it will not be secure. For the
internal doors to their rooms, although they are locked, we will give the
prisoners keys and the external doors will not be locked". Is this a prison or not?
Mr Wheatley: We have lots of insecure accommodation in
prisons. These are all in either open
establishments, which are by definition insecure, resettlement establishments,
like Kirklevington, where prisoners are working out during the day, or category
C establishments which are only of low security, they are a bottom security
category. All those different sorts of
establishments have insecure accommodation that is not traditional, as we would
see it, prison accommodation like the Victorian prisons. This has been useable accommodation and is
used alongside some other accommodation which is also relatively insecure. It is okay providing the numbers are small.
Q45 Mr Bacon: But it was quite expensive, was it not? According to the chart in figure 13, the
cost per place per year is £5,600.
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
Q46 Mr Bacon: Can I just confirm for the avoidance of doubt
that the photograph on page 31 in figure 11, the top photograph, the green one,
the two storeys, that is the unit we are talking about that costs £5,600 per
place?
Mr Wheatley: That is right.
Q47 Mr Bacon: And the one beneath it, the rather more
robust brick looking one with the lawn in front of it and the flowers, that is
the brick-clad steel framed unit that costs £1,700 per place, is that right?
Mr Wheatley: That is correct, yes.
Q48 Mr Bacon: I have not done it but I will, 5,600 divided
by 1,700, so it is 3.2 times more expensive to have the insecure flabby
temporary structure at the top than it is to have the rather more robust
structure in the photograph underneath, is it not? Why is that?
Mr Wheatley: The actual build cost, and Peter has the
detailed figures if we need to refer to them, is substantially on the
MTUs. They are not more expensive to
put up, they are more expensive because they have got a limited life, so their
whole life costs are higher because they have a limited life.
Q49 Mr Bacon: You mean there is constant maintenance?
Mr Wheatley: They will need replacing. It is not that they need maintaining, they
will need to be replaced. One cannot
expect Portakabins to last.
Q50 Mr Bacon: What is your present estimate of the life of
one of these units?
Mr Wheatley: We think we will probably get about ten years
out of them.
Q51 Mr Bacon: What was the estimate when they were built?
Mr Wheatley: About the same.
Q52 Mr Bacon: It has not changed?
Sir John Gieve: I think the figures based in table 13 assume
a five year life, so if they do last ten then the figures will come down.
Q53 Mr Bacon: They are still very expensive. They take about the same amount of days as
the brick-clad steel framed ones, 183 days versus 143 days, but they are not
robust.
Mr Wheatley: In terms of this campaign, when the decision
was taken to go with them they were less expensive in the initial capital
costs. You are quite right, they have
got a higher cost eventually because of the need to replace them. We were able to build them faster, 134 days
against 180-plus, and some were delivered very quickly indeed. There was a need to build urgently at the
time.
Q54 Mr Bacon: I have read paragraph 4.14 several times and
I was hoping that you could write to the Committee with a bit more
information. Could you write with the
total amount that was spent on modular temporary units, how many there were and
what the total cost was, and the same for the brick-clad steel framed
unit. Is that possible?
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
Q55 Mr Bacon: Could I ask you about paragraph 4.13 where it
states that the contract was let, the specification drawn up by the Prison
Service was a generic design but did not provide detailed site drawings for
each location, "Comprehensive site plans were subsequently drawn up once
project managers had been appointed".
Why were the project managers brought into the programme so late in the
day?
Mr Brook: It was really to do with the speed of the
build and construction. As soon as the
decision had been taken we then got the contractors on board and the project
managers on board, but when we started the programme all the sites had not been
located to put these units on.
Q56 Mr Bacon: You had not located the sites where you were
going to put these but you still let contracts for people to erect them, so it
was a case of giving them the details when you could basically. That is what you are saying, is it not?
Mr Brook: Yes.
We gave them the details as we developed them and, indeed, the plans
changed as we went along. Initially
they were all going to be in open establishments but we decided part way
through the programme that part of them would go into category C establishments
and that was partly to do with why the costs increased.
Q57 Mr Bacon: One of the things that I find extraordinary
in reading this report is that the contractors were clearly ill-equipped or
unable to do some of the work that you were asking them to do. They were manufacturers of prefab buildings,
constructors of prefab buildings, were they not, not construction companies to
do work on site and yet you were asking them to do this work. It says in paragraphs 4.12 and 4.14 you were
basically asking them to do work that they could not do, were you not?
Mr Brook: They certainly said they could do the work
when the contracts were let. They
obviously had the ability to subcontract that work to other contractors. We knew they would have to do that. This was the first time we had ever tried to
build units of this sort.
Q58 Mr Bacon: In paragraph 4.13 towards the end there on
the top of page 34 it states that every prison required its own security
checks, which could take 21 days before workers were allowed on site. Even when the clearance had been obtained,
it could take a very long time for staff to access the site: "One of the
contractors, Elliott Redispace, explained that out of a contracted seven hour
working day, their working time in winter was often as low as four hours,
because of entry and security restrictions for contractors working within
establishments", so in effect 20 out of 24 hours of the day they were not doing
anything productive in terms of meeting your goals, were they?
Sir John Gieve: The point is the difference between, if you
like, once you have got your clearance and how long does it take to get on site
which is to do with the security of getting in and out of prisons because there
are always a lot of movements in and out of prisons and they have to take their
turn with people bringing in food, people bringing in materials, people taking
new prisoners in and people taking prisoners out. That was increased become some of these were being placed in
secure prisons, whereas the original plan had been to put them in open prisons
where it was less of a problem.
Q59 Mr Bacon: Some of the modular temporary units?
Sir John Gieve: Yes.
Q60 Mr Bacon: The ones that Mr Wheatley said earlier were
insecure?
Sir John Gieve: Yes.
If you look at chart 14 on page 33 you will see that is a mix of open
prisons, and the open prisons on the whole had these things built very, very
quickly. The main problems occurred in
category C prisons.
Mr Wheatley: Which are medium secure prisons.
Q61 Mr Bacon: Do you think that the modular temporary units
are fit for purpose?
Mr Wheatley: They are doing the purpose at the
moment. Would we build them again? I think we have said we accept the
recommendations of the report and we would not. Are we able to use them?
Yes, we are. They are not out of
use and the prisoners quite like being in them and we are continuing to run
secure and controlled establishments with drug use down this year as against
last year and escapes down this year as against last year.
Q62 Mr Bacon: What discussions have you had about finding
cheaper ways to do not necessarily temporary but fast construction? McDonald's hamburger restaurants are
delivered on the back of a lorry and erected in one week when they start
generating money. Plainly it is
different because they are not trying to keep people in, they do not seem to
need to do that, people stay in of their own accord, but the fact is they are
robust structures, they are designed to last, they are designed to have low
maintenance costs and one would have thought that with the developments in
modern methods of construction it would be relatively simple, notwithstanding
the security aspects, to have evolved something that could be erected much,
much more quickly than in the 100 or 140 or 180 days, indeed in seven, 14 or 21
days. Have you made any progress in
looking at that?
Mr Brook: We have let strategic alliances with eight
new build constructors, so we have gone through a process partly of learning
from what happened in this case ensuring that people have got the right skills
and the right investment in order to build accommodation for us. We are exploring with the people who have
developed ready-to-use units which are robust and are delivered relatively
quickly but they are an awful lot more robust than the sort of things that you
are talking about because they are due to last 40 years with prisoners in them.
We are talking to them about how we can do something much quicker but along
those lines, so something much more robust than modular temporary units but not
quite as robust as the current RTUs.
Q63 Mr Bacon: I am a bit of a fan of these brick-clad steel
framed units. They are £1,700 a place
and you spend £2 billion a year, I think it is, in total in the Prison
Service. That was what Mr Narey once told
me, I have not looked up the recent figure but I am sure it is not less than
that, is it, Mr Wheatley?
Mr Wheatley: For the overall system it is above £2
billion, yes.
Q64 Mr Bacon: Yet, at £1,700, for £17 million you could
have 10,000 extra places per year. It
does not sound to me an awful lot of money compared with your total budget if
there were a commitment radically to increase the number of places.
Mr Brook: That of course does not cover the running
costs of these, just the building costs.
Q65 Mr Bacon: This is true.
Mr Brook: Yes, we can build places relatively cheaply.
Q66 Mr Bacon: So is the main restriction the running costs
that evolve from the extra staff that you require? Is that the main constraint?
Mr Brook: Yes, that is the main cost that is
significantly more than the capital cost of building.
Sir John Gieve: There is also a space requirement. On the whole we are putting these into spare
space within prisons walls. If you are
building a whole new prison and getting planning permission that obviously
takes a much longer time.
Q67 Helen Goodman: Sir John, on Friday I went to visit the local
fire station, and I think you are also responsible for the Fire Service.
Sir John Gieve: No, we are not any longer.
Q68 Helen Goodman: The Home Office is not responsible for the
Fire Service?
Sir John Gieve: No.
Q69 Helen Goodman: I beg your pardon. The point is the Fire Service have an estimate for the value of a
human life which is £1. something million pounds and I wondered what the value
of a human life was calculated to be in the Prison Service?
Sir John Gieve: I do not know that we use a financial
equivalent for the value of a life. I
do not think we do.
Q70 Helen Goodman: Do you think we should?
Sir John Gieve: I am not sure what we would use it for.
Q71 Helen Goodman: One of the problems that has been brought to
our attention is that the level of suicides is much higher in overcrowded
prisons and I was wondering what value the Home Office and the Prison Service
place on avoiding suicide in prison?
Sir John Gieve: We put a great value on that. I do not think that it is straightforward to
say that suicides are higher in overcrowded prisons. This year, for example, so
far we have had what seems to be a significant reduction in prisons despite the
fact that the estate has been more crowded than before and that suggests that
there are other factors at work.
Mr Wheatley: There does not seem to be a straightforward
link between overcrowding and suicides.
The number of suicides this year so far is 72 as against 92 in the same
period last year, although we have just been through a period of peak
overcrowding, so whatever is going on is more complicated. We can mitigate the risks by the sorts of
interventions I was speaking about before.
In fact, we use cell sharing as a protective measure because being on
your own in a cell and depressed and facing a long sentence and possibly coming
off drugs is probably one of the things that is most likely to precipitate
suicide in a long night on your own with nothing else to think about. Having company can reduce the risk. At the same time, if we crowd prisoners so
much that staff cannot care for prisoners and the place begins to feel just
like a big sausage machine, that is dangerous.
We try to play that into the judgments we make about the level of
overcrowding that prisoners can bear.
Q72 Helen Goodman: I appreciate that it is complex, but do you
dispute the research by the Howard League that, of the 159 suicides between
January 2004 and October 2005, 90 were in the 35 most crowded prisons?
Mr Wheatley: But the reason for that is that the most
overcrowded prisons are local prisons, those who are receiving direct from the
courts. The greatest risk of suicide is
on first arrival in prison and immediately after sentence. Within the first day there is a high
risk. That risk then reduces. If you can get somebody through the first
week they have a substantially greater chance of never committing suicide. If they have not committed suicide within
the first month of either coming into custody or being sentenced they are very
unlikely to commit suicide. The prisons
that are overcrowded look after the most at-risk people, those who are coming
in straight from the streets in many cases with a multitude of problems. It does not necessarily relate to the
overcrowding. If you do the same
equation and say are the most overcrowded prisons the places with the most
suicides, the link is not clear. There
is a link of some sort but it is not as clear as that.
Q73 Helen Goodman: Can you explain whether you are trying to
eradicate all overcrowding in prison because it would appear from figure 4 that
you are quite content as long as overcrowding does not exceed 24%?
Mr Wheatley: I think that is a question for Sir John. I personally would prefer to be running
prisons at their ordinary uncrowded capacity but I am not usually able to do
that. I am concerned to defend that we
never have places that are more crowded than we think we can safely look after
people in.
Sir John Gieve: I agree with that. Obviously, we would like to reduce prison overcrowding. We have not been able to do that in recent
years. In fact, it has got a bit more
crowded although still not to the sorts of levels that were common in the late
eighties. Whether we can do that depends
a lot on the trend in sentencing over the longer period.
Q74 Helen Goodman: Could you explain why your target for
overcrowding is different as between the public and the private prisons, which
is set out in paragraph 1.6?
Mr Brook: I am happy to do that. The main reason for the differences in the
targets is the differences in the types of prisons. Most of the private prisons are comparatively new and therefore
built better for overcrowding and they are comparatively small and a lot of
them are local prisons and we have already talked about local prisons on
average being more overcrowded than other prisons. It is a fact of the type of prison rather than any difference in
treatment between the two.
Q75 Helen Goodman: Mr Wheatley, do you want to comment on that?
Mr Wheatley: Victorian prisons that have had integral
sanitation put in, and most of my local prisons are Victorian prisons, have had
what are called three-into-two conversions.
In other words, we took three cells and turned the middle cell into two
separate toilets, put a wall in, and those cells are certified in uncrowded use
for two people because they have got a separate sanitary annexe. You physically cannot overcrowd them. If you put another bed in you cannot get at
the toilet. Those places, although
prisoners are sharing cells, cannot be overcrowded further and that affects the
public sector estate, not the private sector estate which is newly built and
does not have that system.
Q76 Helen Goodman: Do you not see that there is a paradox in
this, that it is the newer estate where you have already agreed that there
should be a higher level of overcrowding?
That does seem to be somewhat counter-intuitive, does it not? If it is new should it not be built more fit
for purpose than something that was built 150 years ago?
Sir John Gieve: It depends which way you look at this. The fact that they are better equipped to
take more people is the reason we put more people in them.
Q77 Helen Goodman: Yes, but more people is not the same as
overcrowding. You have got a different
overcrowding target, not just a higher target to take people into prison.
Sir John Gieve: But, as Phil has said, it depends on the
overall estate and the split between public and private also covers the split
between different ages of prison and different types of prison. We did not start out by saying that these
new private sector ones should be more overcrowded. We look at the operation of what is safe to operate within each
individual prison and then, when you add it up a certain way, you get different
numbers for different categories.
Mr Wheatley: In building design, in both the public sector
and, as we specified for the private sector what we wanted, we asked people to
build so that it is possible to get flexibility out of those goals, not to
build such small cells that one can only squeeze one person in. We deliberately built to allow some
flexibility because we will need the flexibility to cope with the seasonal
fluctuations that have already been referred to and changes in sentencing
policy. I do not ever expect to have no
overcrowding, and having some capacity to overcrowd in new builds is very
sensible. It would be silly not to do
that.
Q78 Helen Goodman: The forecast has been quite difficult. Do you have a mathematical model for the
size of the prison population? How do
you go about forecasting?
Sir John Gieve: Phil may want to say some more about this but
yes, we do model it and we do some short-term projections based more on recent
trends and longer term ones running for seven or eight years which are based on
a criminal justice model which tries to model the impact of different changes
in court and other behaviour and offender models, and a re-offending model, if
you like, which tries to pick up what is going on in the population. Yes, it is based on mathematical models.
Q79 Helen Goodman: Are you confident that the prison population
will not rise above the 80,000 that is the currently projected figure?
Sir John Gieve: I have said already that I am not confident
it will not rise. We are taking various
steps at the moment to live within that figure, which is what we have budgeted
for, for example, to try to reduce the number of foreign nationals in prison,
particularly those who have reached the end of their sentence and are awaiting
deportation, to encourage people to use tagging rather than remand for people
who are not thought to be dangerous to the public and so on. It is not by any means inevitable that we
will need more prison places than the ones we currently have planned but I
would not be confident that we will not have to add to it further.
Q80 Jon Trickett: In paragraph 1.8, it is referring to Lord
Carter's report and it says that far greater use is being made of prison and
yet the number of people being arrested and sentenced is more or less the same. Does that not demonstrate that prison does
not work?
Sir John Gieve: No, I do not think it does. Perhaps you would like to take that a bit
further.
Q81 Jon Trickett: If the number of arrests is broadly the same
and the number of people being found guilty is broadly the same and yet the
number of people going to prison is rising, it is counter-intuitive, is it, not
since one of the primary arguments about imprisonment and incarceration is for
it to be a deterrent to potential criminals from entering into criminality? You
would expect, would you not, if that case was correct, that more use of prison
would reduce the number of people being arrested and convicted?
Sir John Gieve: Ideally in the long term but actually only a
minority of all offenders are arrested and so it is perfectly possible for the level
of offending to go down and the level of arrests and convictions to go up, and
that is precisely what has been happening over recent years. The police are becoming more effective at
bringing people to trial and yet the total number of crimes is going down. The real measure of success on the prisons
is protection of the public and the level of crime because if prison was
working to reduce crime and protect the public it would be contributing to a
reduction in the level of crime.
Q82 Jon Trickett: Can you submit evidence in writing that the
conviction rate is increasing? I do not
need it now but you are resting your case on that to some extent and I am not
quite sure that the facts bear you out.
Is there not a series of measures which might be taken in partnership
with other agencies to reduce the number of people in prison? I want to go through a number of
categories. The first is the mentally
ill. How many mentally ill people are
in prison rather than being cared for in an appropriate institution?
Sir John Gieve: There are different categories of mental
illness and Peter probably has the figures.
A high proportion of prisoners have some addiction, for example, or
other problems.
Mr Wheatley: At the very acute level where prisoners are
thought by appropriate psychiatrists to need admission to hospital we get them
admitted. The waiting period is
slightly reduced on that. The biggest
issue that you are homing in on is the number of people who are still in our
custody who have some mental problems and for whom we are using mental health
in-reach workers to assist them. They
in the main are the people who would have been cared for in the community. They would not have required to be put in
hospital.
Q83 Jon Trickett: According to the Howard League there are
5,000 profoundly mentally ill people in prison at any one time.
Mr Wheatley: I do not recognise those figures in that
form.
Q84 Jon Trickett: What are the figures then?
Mr Wheatley: There are acutely mentally people in prison
whom we are moving into psychiatric hospitals.
Q85 Jon Trickett: How many of them are there?
Mr Wheatley: We will have to get you the figures
separately on those, which I do not think you have available, so we will have
to write with those. They are monitored
as a group. We monitor their waiting
times and they are being moved into psychiatric hospitals. It is the group above that who do have
mental health problems and are receiving mental health treatment in prison who
would, if they were in the community, have been being cared for in the
community.
Q86 Jon Trickett: I am not asking about them. Here it is the profoundly mentally ill. I do not know if that is a category defined
by the Mental Health Act 1983 but this paragraph seems to imply that. There are 5,000 who should properly be dealt
with in a secure hospital rather than in a prison.
Mr Wheatley: That is not a figure we recognise at all.
Q87
Jon Trickett: What are the figures then?
Mr Wheatley: The figures are, as I say, that the people
who are profoundly mentally ill and who require hospitalisation we gain
hospitalisation for -----
Q88 Jon Trickett: That is not the question I am asking you.
Mr Wheatley: It is much less than that and we will write
with the details, is the answer. It is
not 5,000.
Q89 Jon Trickett: I asked you a simple question: how many are
there? I did not ask you at what rate
you are getting them out of there because, as fast as they are going out, there
are other people coming in, and therefore there is a population which is
transient.
Mr Wheatley: You are quite right. The number of people who have moved into
psychiatric hospitals is monitored and we can give you those figures. From memory I think it is 700 but I do not
want to give the committee a figure from memory. I think we should write with the figure. It is well below 5,000.
Q90 Jon Trickett: What I would like from you is the number of
people who the Prison Service or the medical profession regard as being
inappropriately housed in a prison because they ought to be in a place of care
provided, presumably, not by the Prison Service, whether that would alleviate
overcrowding or not. Can I just ask you
the simple question: if all those people were appropriately housed presumably
would that alleviate overcrowding?
Mr Wheatley: If I am right from memory in thinking that is
700, and I would like to check that but it is about that, then 700 people in
the course of a year, that is, spread throughout the year, would have made a
slight difference to overcrowding but a very small one.
Q91 Jon Trickett: Hang on.
Is it 700 people or 700 places because, as fast as somebody is put in
who needs care, there are other people being identified in the community for
whom there has been a crisis of some kind which has led to some kind of
criminality and they have been incarcerated? Seven hundred people doing a couple of months each in a prison is
not a huge number of places but if it is 700 places annually occupied by a
rotating number of people that is a different matter, is it not?
Mr Wheatley: No, it is 700 for two months' waiting.
Q92 Jon Trickett: I think we will wait and see what the figures
actually are. Sir John, would it be the
Home Office which would provide alternative secure accommodation for these
people or is it the NHS?
Sir John Gieve: The NHS would provide the secure hospitals.
Q93 Jon Trickett: Do you pay for it or do they pay for it?
Sir John Gieve: They pay for it. They pay for mental health treatment in prisons now as well.
Q94 Jon Trickett: What discussions take place between yourself
and the NHS to secure an adequate number of places, whatever that number of
places is? It is obviously
inappropriate to have somebody who is acutely mentally ill in a prison, is it
not?
Sir John Gieve: We work very closely with the Department of
Health, much more closely in the last couple of years than ever before, which
is one reason why the waiting times are much reduced. It is partly because the Department of Health has the
responsibility for the quality of health care, mental and physical, inside
prison and they are committed to achieving the same standard of care in prisons
as outside. There are a large number of
disturbed people in prisons, going well beyond hundreds into thousands. In fact, prisons are in many ways a sieve
for collecting some of the most disturbed people in our society, so I can well
understand why the Howard League and other people may say, "It is many more
than the people you actually shift into hospital care". There are many more people who are in need,
I do not think we are disputing that, but we do have a system of getting
clinical judgments made as to who needs to go and that is what Phil is
referring to.
Q95 Jon Trickett: That is the question which I want
answering. How many children are held
by the Prison Service?
Sir John Gieve: The figure I have got is 2,500.
Q96 Jon Trickett: And that has doubled, has it not, over the
last few years?
Sir John Gieve: I have not got that figure.
Q97 Jon Trickett: Perhaps you could provide the committee with
a figure for, say, over the last ten years, the number of children held in
prison or in accommodation provided by the Prison Service. Is that the most appropriate way of
incarcerating children?
Sir John Gieve: The YJB, as you know, who do the
commissioning here, have a variety of types of custody in local authority
secure homes, in their own STCs and in prison.
I think prison can offer an appropriate form of care and often does, and
I have visited special units in East Anglia, for example, which I thought were
doing an excellent job.
Q98 Jon Trickett: My time is out and I would just like you to
provide us with information in writing because it is something I would like to
pursue further but cannot. I think that
the Lord Chancellor's report indicates that there is huge variation in the courts'
operation in terms of remanding people into custody and about half the people
who are held in prisons on custody are not then given custodial sentences but
the practice of different courts varies very widely. If we were able somehow or other to encourage the criminal
justice system to operate at the mean, if all courts operated at what is now
the statistical mean, how many people - and I do not expect you to answer this
now - would that mean would not be incarcerated? Do you understand the question?
There is a huge variation in practice between the courts in remanding
people into custody.
Sir John Gieve: I think if it was at the mean it would be the
same.
Q99 Jon Trickett: If the maximum was the current mean, is what
I am trying to say. I understand that
it is thousands of prisoners at any one time.
Sir John Gieve: There is certainly a very wide variation.
Q100 Jon Trickett: Would that make a contribution, do you think,
towards reducing the numbers?
Sir John Gieve: Someone has just passed me an estimate which
says that it would be 1,200 fewer people in prison, but we will send you a note
on how we come to that figure.
Q101 Greg Clark: If people are sentenced to a spell in prison
there is a sense in which that is a very precious time to use to their
advantage, to rehabilitate them so that they can take something from the
experience other than just punishment.
One of the things I found rather depressing about this report was the
consequences of overcrowding for education.
The Howard League have given us a memorandum which suggested that the
Prison Service used to have a target of 24 hours a week purposeful activity
across the Prison Service but that has been abolished. Is that the case?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, that is the case, mainly because what
that prioritised, if we were not careful, was just getting people into bulk
activity rather than getting people into activity like education. The easiest way to occupy people and hit
that target was simply to put people in workshops doing relatively mindless
activity, because lots of workshops have to have semi-skilled work in them,
rather than to prioritise education and the offending behaviour courses which
usually look after a smaller number of people rather more expensively but have
a much greater effect on rehabilitation.
Q102 Greg Clark: Has that been replaced by a comparable target
for education?
Mr Wheatley: It has been replaced by the education targets
to make sure that prisoners get basic skills awards, and we are faced within
the public sector, quite correctly, with increased targets each year so that makes
us prioritise our efforts to get people into what we think is purposeful
activity.
Q103 Greg Clark: Is there a replacement for the number of
hours a week?
Mr Wheatley: No.
We maintain the target, although it is not a key target for the
agency. We keep an eye on the
target. I can get you details of our
current performance. In fact, the
amount of hours we have in purposeful activity has gone up slightly this year.
Q104 Greg Clark: But you are still monitoring it, even though
it has gone up?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, we are still monitoring it because it is
important for us. Our key targets
prioritise us to get people into education, to get people onto offending
behaviour courses and to get people into drug treatment and detox, which are
more important than simply getting people into workshops.
Q105 Greg Clark: Since you have the figures, and you say they
have gone up a bit, what percentage now of prisoners have 24 hours a week
purposeful activity?
Mr Wheatley: Again, I will write to you carefully with
accurate accounts of that. It is
slightly up on what it was last year. I
do not want to overstate the case. We
will write separately with the details of that.
Q106 Greg Clark: What percentage of prisoners take educational
courses in prison?
Mr Wheatley: At the moment I cannot give you an accurate
account of that.
Q107 Greg Clark: Roughly.
Is it half of them, 80%?
Mr Wheatley: I hesitate to give you an assessment.
Q108 Greg Clark: It is a very crucial area. You must have a feel for it. Is it most prisoners who take educational courses
or not?
Mr Wheatley: During the course of imprisonment most
prisoners will have done some educational course.
Q109 Greg Clark: At any one time what is the proportion?
Mr Wheatley: It will vary from prison to prison because
the educational provision in prisons still varies. We have still got to try and even out the education input. We are aiming for 50%.
Q110 Greg Clark: 50% of what?
Mr Wheatley: 50% is what the Learning and Skills Council
is aiming for and the estimate at the moment we think is about 30% who have
some sort of involvement.
Q111 Greg Clark: So 30% of prisoners at any one time or 30% of
prisoners during the course of their career in prison?
Mr Wheatley: During the course of their career in prison
is my view on that, not at any one time.
Q112 Greg Clark: 30% during their whole career in prison have
any educational input?
Mr Wheatley: During their sentence, not their whole
career, because many of them will come in and out several times over. One cannot keep on educating people in
things that they have already done. If
somebody has done their basic skills on their last sentence we cannot repeat
the process.
Q113 Greg Clark: You could have a course on intermediate
skills, I would have thought.
Mr Wheatley: Yes, but there is probably a limit to the
education one should reasonably do with prisoners.
Q114 Greg Clark: I am sorry; I do not understand that. I do not think there is a limit to the
education one has reasonably done. If
somebody has done a basic skills course I do not really regard it as acceptable
and desirable that the box should be ticked and they have done their
education. They should be doing higher
skills training.
Mr Wheatley: We are trying to prioritise.
Q115 Greg Clark: Just on that point, are you saying that if
someone has done their basic skills then they have had the education that you
can offer?
Mr Wheatley: We try and prioritise the sorts of skills
that will get people into employment.
If somebody comes back we do not automatically follow people through to
Open University level, although some people do do Open University while they
are in prison. We are trying to
prioritise our resources towards what we think will make people employable and
that is a quite deliberate policy.
Sir John Gieve: Can I make one other point, which is that quite
a high proportion of people going into prison stay there a very short time in
any year. Obviously, at any one time
most of the population is made up of long stay prisoners and it is much easier
to organise education for them.
Q116 Greg Clark: Can we come back to that point,
Chairman? Just on this point about your
resources being constrained and you having to prioritise your resources, can
you give me an indication of how you have to ration this? What is the budget that you have and what
ought it to be so that you would not have to make these rationing decisions on
education?
Mr Wheatley: I suspect there will always be a choice to
make unless we provide education for every prisoner with no limit.
Q117 Greg Clark: That is not acceptable.
Mr Wheatley: At the moment we are spending about £110
million on education and Peter has the figures.
Mr Brook: There has been an increase in funding from
£57 million in 2001/2002 to £151 million in £2005/2006.
Q118 Greg Clark: Is that a level, Sir John, that you feel has
hit the right level to go forward or do you think it should increase more?
Sir John Gieve: No, I would like to see it increased
more. We are also looking at education
for people on probation, which has been a relatively neglected area and which
we are also trying to expand, but I would like to see it expanded on both
fronts.
Q119 Greg Clark: Mr Wheatley, what should it be? I am surprised at your lack of ambition in
this. It strikes me that every prisoner
ought to be having the level of education that they could benefit from. Is that a long way from the aspiration of
the Prison Service at the moment?
Mr Wheatley: The aspiration of the Prison Service is to
take the money we have got for education and spend it to the maximum.
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 -----
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 with 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
the longer period and try and 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 not even the National Audit Office report 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.
