Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
MR GERRY
MCALEER
AND MR
BOB CROMIE
16 MAY 2007
Q100 Mr Campbell: Would it be the
case that, say, next December or January, after a full year had
gone by, you would want to review it, at that stage, or another
timescale?
Mr Cromie: Everything we do in
the Prison Service has to be subject to review. Yes, certainly,
we will take another look at it, but it is a whole new concept
for us, and to date I think it has been quite successful but we
will just keep watching how we are going.
Q101 Mr Campbell: In terms of the
governors and, as far as you can tell, the prison officers, have
there been any concerns regarding the new regime, regarding safety,
and if there is any distinction in terms of possible safety implications
between before and now?
Mr Cromie: No.
Q102 Mr Campbell: None whatsoever?
Mr Cromie: No.
Q103 Mr Anderson: What sorts of numbers
are we talking about?
Mr Cromie: Republicans 39, Loyalists
42, but there are numerous sub-groups within that; 39 and 42,
as of yesterday.
Q104 Sammy Wilson: Just on the safety
of prison officers and their families, one of the original concerns,
when separation was reintroduced, was that under the old regime
it was believed that it had put prison officers and their families
under very severe strain, in fact there were a lot of representations
from prison officers who said they did not want it. What is different
this time, as opposed to the last period of segregation, or separation,
which has meant that the problems of prison officer safety have
been avoided?
Mr Cromie: The fact there are
low numbers is a big factor in our favour; the fact that we have
controlled movement on the landings is a big factor in our favour.
Gerry and I were both H block governors in our day, in the eighties,
and we can remember walking down on a daily basis into an H block
wing, having 25, 30 prisoners surround us as soon as we went down
there, in our faces, fingers like that, and not being able to
get out of that wing until two hours later, and that was a daily
occurrence. Now, that just does not happen any more and we have
the control. In an H block situation, in the way it was in the
bad old days, the inmates had control.
Q105 Sammy Wilson: Was this through
the limited movement, restricting the number of prisoners who
can be out of cells at any one time, etc?
Mr Cromie: Yes.
Q106 Chairman: Do you see the day
dawning shortly when prison officers will not be required to be
armed in any way? It was very interesting when we were at Hydebank,
for instance, that the Governor pointed out "That's where
the arms are left when they come in." How long do you think
it will be before that needs to be changed?
Mr Cromie: It is a matter of personal
choice. Certainly I am aware that a number of prison staff, in
the recent past, have handed in their personal issue firearms;
equally a number of staff are adamant, never. It is a matter of
personal choice and is reviewed by the PSNI.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Could
we move on to the prison estates.
Q107 Stephen Pound: When we have
taken evidence in the past, the Committee has always been struck
by the extraordinarily high officer-to-prisoner ratio in Northern
Ireland. We have had evidence, not surprisingly, from (Liz Pratt?)
and other people, who have said that this is a transitional issue,
it is one that relates to the previous estate, it is something
which has been worked out, we have the Northern Ireland Prison
Service Blueprint, the staff reduction, and yet it does not seem
as though an enormous amount of progress has been made. I appreciate
that bringing in the night custody officers and different grades
will make a difference but, from your perspective, which is probably
the best perspective we could hope to access, how do you feel
that the staffing ratio issue is developing and do you have any
sort of a timeframe, or do you feel that, uniquely, in Northern
Ireland, they need this sort of ratio?
Mr McAleer: I will try to answer
some of that. First of all there are three different prisons,
and if we deal with them one at a time and then we will come to
the issues. Finn is quite right, of course, we are in a transitional
stage at the minute, and the Prison Service in the next ten years
will be totally different. If you take the YOC, if you took the
inmate, prisoner ratio, which was a ratio we used to use several
years ago, before we talked about the cost per prisoner place
we used to use the inmate-staff relationship, if you looked at
every YOI in England and you compared it with the YOC you would
find that over in England there are YOIs with a higher prisoner
ratio than the YOC and you would find also some with a lower prisoner
ratio. When you have got only one, over here again you have got
economies of scale, and if you lump them all together you get
a better picture; the YOI that we have, considering the complexity
of it and what we actually have in there, and you cannot get another
YOI over here which is quite like that to compare it to, what
we would argue, as an Association, is it is very comparable and
better than in some. When you come to Maghaberry Prison, again
because we have only a small amount of prisons they are very diverse
and to do exact comparisons, there is no such exact comparison,
because Maghaberry Prison has lots and lots of different prisoner
categories which you will not get in England. You have dispersal
prisons here, and in Maghaberry you get everybody in there, you
get all sorts of prisoners, you have remand prisoners, sentenced
prisoners, lifers; if you look at the security aspect of it, bear
in mind that Maghaberry was designed originally as a high security
prison. If you look at a comparable prison in England and you
look at the ratios that they have in their wings, in their secure
ones where they carry their category A prisoners, you will find
it is higher. We would say that, like for like, Northern Ireland
prisoner ratios are very low. It will improve, of course, and
there are new working practices coming in, which I am sure you
are aware of, and the costs will come down and the ratio of prisoners,
and if they build a new prison, on whatever site it is decided
to build it, one of the aspects that will be looked at is probably
the manning ratios and we expect it to change dramatically to
take into account the security aspect. When many of our prisons
were built they were built basically as category A prisons, that
would be an equivalent over here, and that is one of the reasons
why the ratios are a bit lower. If you do "like for like"
comparisons you get a very different picture.
Chairman: We are going to try to do some
of this, because we will be visiting prisons over here too and
some of us know them anyway.
Q108 Stephen Pound: A former member
of this Committee, who then sat for the East Antrim Division,
seldom showed excitement but he was remarkably exercised when
he actually looked at the staff absence statistics for prison
officers in Northern Ireland and he felt he had never seen anything
like it. I remember the session vividly. We were told at the time
that the then high level, we are going back three or four years,
of staff absence was due to a number of reasons, in many cases
physical assault on and off the estate. What are the current sickness
and absence statistics like, from your perspective?
Mr McAleer: About 56% of our prison
officers have no sick record at all; 56% of records, no sick whatsoever.
A smaller percentage of them then probably account for a very
large amount of the sick absence. On assaults, I will let Bob
talk because he was a personnel governor, he will probably know
more about this than I, but when we get an assault on an officer
he tends to be out for quite a long time; so a very small amount
of prison officers can account for a large amount of sick days.
Mr Cromie: From memory, our current
staff sick levels are about 9% in Maghaberry, 4% in Magilligan
and about 9% in Hydebank.
Q109 Stephen Pound: That is about
a third of what they were when last we had evidence to this Committee.
Mr Cromie: They are actually considerably
lower than that. All three establishments, up until recently,
were sitting at just over 5%, all three establishments; now their
sick levels have gone up slightly, about 3% in both Magilligan
and Maghaberry, it sort of coincided with new shift patterns coming
in. We have downsized by 160 staff and new shift patterns have
come in; the staff sickness has increased at the same time. Whether
the two figures are related or not I do not know.
Q110 Stephen Pound: The most dramatic
difference between a prison officer today and a prison officer
certainly before 1998 was that the prison officer then was controlling
security and now a prison officer is more about intervention and
advice and it is almost a pastoral role with some prison officers.
We were told that this was the desired state and we were told
that training had to be provided for this, and now we have got
the situation in prisons where you have priests, ministers and
vicars coming in, so they have more sort of non prison officers
coming into the prisons to engage with prisoners, and hopefully
people in vocational training as well. How do you feel, from your
perspective, the retraining or, in some cases, the training of
new prison officers is proceeding to reflect an absolutely seismic
shift in the core function and duty of prison officers in Northern
Ireland?
Mr Cromie: There has been a management
course for principal officers and senior officers down at our
training college and these new skills, these new targets that
we are trying to do have been emphasised very much on the ground.
Staff are encouraged to use all the skills they have and in the
attainment of new ones, in order to strike out in numerous different
directions in what the prisons are trying to achieve. You will
see it when you come to Maghaberry, but some of the things that
are going on there, as a security governor, make my hair turn
white, but we do it.
Q111 Stephen Pound: Could you give
us an example?
Mr Cromie: For example, we have
had sculptures coming in; a film was made there recently. I had
a 'phone call that there was a guy with a gun at the main gate
trying to get in, and it turned out that it was a prop for the
film. That is the sort of thing that I mean.
Q112 Sammy Wilson: Are the guys with
guns not trying to get out?
Mr Cromie: We had already agreed
it could not come in, but I think one of the film crew—I
hope one of the film crew—was just chancing his arm. Years
ago we would never have considered anything like that; now we
do. We will give it a go.
Mr McAleer: There are other factors,
absenteeism, there are lots of things that can impact on it. When
you have casual absenteeism, lots and lots of it going on, then
you have a major problem. If you have absenteeism from known causes,
somebody has got, say, a terminal illness, or something like that,
then you do not necessarily have a problem. When you are undergoing
a lot of change, in my particular capacity at the moment, in PECCS,
there is a lot of absenteeism which is due to dissatisfaction
because you have people who are doing a job and who now are having
to go back into the prisons and they are feeling a wee bit disaffected
by it. You tend to find it under occasions like that, when you
have got a lot of change going on in an organisation, you will
find an associated rise in sick; but what you will have then,
two or three months down the road, it comes back and as long as
you know the reasons for it. I think the question you were asking
was why should the sick in the Prison Service be higher than anywhere
else, and I think that was what you were getting at. There are
a number of reasons for it, and I do not want to be too controversial,
I know this is probably going to go into Hansard. Civil
Service jobs tend to get paid, this is the first thing, and when
you are sick you get paid. Interestingly enough, if you look at
the PECCS group, we have had 100 staff coming from resource which
was Maghaberry(?), where they had virtually sick-free records,
and in the first four weeks we had eight of them on the sick,
so there is absolutely no doubt about it that if you pay people
when they are off on the sick it has an impact. That is something
outside of our remit; so you have got that. You have also got
the fact that prison officers are in an environment where they
are going to get assaulted, it is part and parcel of the job,
like policemen, if you are in that kind of an environment; so
you will have higher rates of sick than, say, an industry average.
Also, because we are in a litigious society, when you get assaulted
then it is a job-related injury, there is no great incentive on
you to come back within a week, and probably that has an impact.
The vast majority of staff have very, very good sick records and
if you take into account the high-risk character of the job, the
fact that there is a lot of change going on in the organisation,
then really we do not have a tremendous problem with it.
Q113 Sammy Wilson: Since the same
situation, I assume, pertains in prisons here in England, has
any comparison been done on your sick record in Northern Ireland
compared with English prisons?
Mr McAleer: As an Association,
we would not do that. No doubt the personnel department probably
would have that.
Q114 Chairman: Yes, we must enquire
into that; it is quite important.
Mr McAleer: I would suggest it
is higher here. I would think it would be.
Q115 Mr Campbell: Just one statistic;
you said that 56% of your staff have no sick record and then you
gave the different prison absentee records. Do you have within
the three establishments the numbers that make up the 56%; I took
it 56% was for the Prison Service as a whole and you did not have
it for the three individual ones. Do they differ in the way the
absentee rates differ between the three establishments?
Mr Cromie: I do not know.
Q116 Mr Campbell: Is it possible
to supply the Committee with that?
Mr McAleer: Yes; you can get it
from Personnel.
Q117 Mr Anderson: On support staff,
last week we were talking about auxiliary staff being moved in
to replace prison officers; what is the practical difference between
them in a day-to-day role and what is the difference in things
like terms and conditions?
Mr Cromie: At this moment in time,
we have employed night custody officers who work a 44-hour week,
seven nights on, seven days off. I will make a certain stab in
the dark here, I think they are paid about £21,000, £22,000,
around that salary range. We have just started recruiting and
training new PECCS officers to do the court escorts and to take
over the magistrates' courts. We already run the High Courts in
Northern Ireland. I believe their salary range is about £18,000,
£19,000.
Mr McAleer: About £14,000
or £15,000.
Mr Cromie: About £14,000
or £15,000. I am led to believe we will be employing operational
support grade; there will be a competition later this year. I
have heard a figure of about 230, 240 that will be taken on. I
am led to believe that their salary range will be about £21,000,
£22,000. Current basic grade prison officers, I believe it
is two-tier, I think the older prison officers, who are on different
terms and conditions, then the last batch who came in some years
ago they can go to a maximum, I believe, of £34,000 and the
second-tier prison officers are on about £28,000, so there
is a substantial difference. In essence, night custody officers
and PECCS officers and the operational support grade officers,
when they come in, will have very limited prisoner contact.
Mr McAleer: Probably the PECCS
staff have more prisoner contact, actually quite a lot of contact,
because they are in the dock with the prisoners and also they
keep them in their holding cells, and they are pretty poorly paid
in relation to even the night auxiliary officers. That might be
a problem for us later on.
Mr Cromie: Our stance at the start
of this whole process, whenever the High Courts decided they were
going to have three different types of support staff, our argument
was, no, have one type of support staff so that you can move them
between the three different jobs, because there will be times
when you will be short on nights and at the moment if you are
short on nights you are going to have to bring in real prisoner
officers to help out on a night guard. I think it is a missed
opportunity and if you had a generic grade of support staff working
in courts and on nights and doing the jobs that have been identified
at operational support grade, our view was that would be a much
better way of doing it.
Q118 Chairman: That is a very interesting
point. Could you let us have a little paper on that, could you
put your thoughts down, because we would like to take due note
of that for when we come to do our report?
Mr Cromie: Yes.
Chairman: I do not want to get bogged
down in it now, but it is a very, very important point and we
would be grateful. Thank you very much.
Q119 Mr Anderson: Within that could
you give us a note on how well you are recruiting, because I would
have thought, if you are offering somebody £14,000, £15,000
that is not very good money for a job like that?
Mr Cromie: In Northern Ireland,
we had initially 5,000 enquiries and 2,500 applied for 65 posts.
Mr McAleer: I think we are going
to have a problem with turnover.
Mr Cromie: I think they have done
it the wrong way round, in that the people who have been recruited
for the Court Service are on the lowest wages and the people who
are going to be on the highest they are recruiting last, and to
the best of my knowledge everybody who was training to become
a PECCS officer is also going to apply to become an operational
support officer, so we could end up with nobody running the courts.
Chairman: Thank you very much. Can we
move on to health, with Dr McDonnell.
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