Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
TUESDAY 10 JULY 2007
MR MARTIN
NAREY, MR
PHILIP CULLUM
AND MS
ALISON HOPKINS
Q240 Paul Flynn: We did not
realise how bad conditions in care were, but we know that now.
Mr Narey: There have been improvements;
the educational performance of children in care has improved but
it has still lagged so far behind, and in fact the gap has widened
because most of our children have continued to do better and better
educationally, so the gap between, as measured by five GCSEs,
for example, all children and children in care has widened, even
though the performance of children in care has increased a touch.
But it is still far behind those of our children and not something
which we should accept.
Q241 Paul Flynn: You praised
the role of voluntary bodies in prisons in drug treatment—and
I presume that is the treatment you mentioned—but there
is not a prison in the country that is free from illegal drug
use, is there?
Mr Narey: That is correct. I do
not think there is a single answer to that question.
Q242 Paul Flynn: You could
say that the state imposes a regime in prison on drug testing
and knowing what the situation is, that drug use in prison is
endemic, and yet the state pretends that we can do something about
it with drug testing. What effect do the charities have in prison?
Surely it is minor?
Mr Narey: I think it has a significant
effect. It is important to be clear that although the drug use
is common in prisons the extent of drug use, the numbers of prisoners
taking drugs and the depth of drug use is very much reduced. There
are still very many prisoners who go to prison and get clean.
Q243 Paul Flynn: Okay, let
me give you an example. Two constituents of mine, one a man, one
a woman. The man left prison—and this has happened in the
last 12 months—he was cleaned up in prison, he left the
prison and went out on the day he came out and had a meal with
his mother, went down to get his usual dose of drugs and he died
because he could no longer tolerate the dosage. Two months later
a woman came out of prison and within a week died in identical
circumstances. Is that an example of a charity's success?
Mr Narey: I think it would be
very unfair to blame whichever charity work and whichever prison
it was there. What has happened, though—and it has been
a particularly critical phenomena in Scotland—is that prisoners
have been taking much lower doses, of heroin usually, and then
have over estimated their capacity to cope with heroin when they
have gone out and taken it again. It is a tragic ending but actually
is a consequence of the availability of drugs. But I am not trying
to say that prisons have got it right, and indeed my job is not
to speak for prisons any more. I have been to prisons around the
world where there are no drugs at all and the cost in terms of
treatment of prisoners, their isolation from family and visitors
in my view is too big a price to pay.
Q244 Paul Flynn: Is it your
opinion that the problem of drugs in prison arises from—from
what, would you say? Is it because the prison service is lubricated
by a process of corruption by which the drugs come into prison?
Mr Narey: No, I think it is a
consequence of the fact that such a vast proportion of young men
and women entering prison have been abusing drugs, as they do.
Q245 Paul Flynn: How do the
drugs get into prison?
Mr Narey: Drugs get into prison
in all sorts of ways; some are brought in, some are thrown over
walls and fences, some are smuggled in by staff, some are brought
in by visitors.
Q246 Paul Flynn: Visitors
turn up with big vanloads of the stuff, presumably?
Mr Narey: No, visitors hand things
over in prisons. A large amount of drugs are concealed in bodily
orifices, and prison staff—and I am not suggesting they
should—have no legal right to search bodily orifices, so
with women, for example, it is particularly difficult to stop
drugs getting into women's prisons. I am not defending that, what
I am trying to suggest is that contrary—and I think you
and I might have had this argument before in a different life—to
popular belief that prisons do nothing to get people off drugs,
I think they do. Three weeks ago I was in Sheffield and I met
an ex-prostitute who was doing some work in a European working
party on looking at how we should handle prostitution in the UK
and Europe, and she explained to me, without being asked, that
the turning point in her life was going to Styal—not a very
pleasant place—serving a long sentence there and taking
that opportunity to finally get herself off heroin and her life
had turned round from there. I wish there were many more cases
than that, but there are still quite a few. Lots of people use
the time inside to get off drugs and some of them succeed.
Q247 Paul Flynn: You mention
in your report the example of the Hive organisation you have and
you say the people using it are unlikely to use social services.
Why?
Mr Narey: As I explained, I think
in answer to the first question from Dr Wright, it is rather unfair.
When I speak to some of our users who say that they will come
to our service but would not go to a statutory service I think
it is because they think, rather fancifully, that social services
or children's services might be too close in line to the police,
that information would be shared with other agencies. I think
that is unfair. I do not doubt for one moment the integrity and
dedication of social workers working in the statutory sector;
they almost certainly have a more difficult job than social workers
working for me. But whether or not it is right that there is something
about us being trusted because of our brand—and I do not
just mean us, I mean the Children's Society or NCH—we are
trusted because of our brand and we are seen as a little more
distant from other statutory authorities.
Q248 Paul Flynn: You do not
get any money from commercial organisations at all, do you?
Mr Narey: We certainly do; we
are the Lloyds TSB charity of the year and we hope to take a lot
of money from them. We do a lot of work with corporate organisations
to support our work.
Q249 Paul Flynn: You do not
get any money off the people who make lie detectors?
Mr Narey: No, certainly not.
Q250 Paul Flynn: Why do you
recommend them then?
Mr Narey: Because I want to make
the lives of children safer.
Q251 Paul Flynn: Are you convinced
they work?
Mr Narey: I am. Having undergone
a polygraph test, Mr Flynn, I would recommend one to you; I think
it would remove any doubts you might have about them.
Q252 Paul Flynn: It might
cause havoc in this place!
Mr Narey: I am not suggesting
that we use it in Parliament! Most sex offenders, contrary to
popular belief, know that their behaviour is reprehensible and
most of them want to stop doing it and they need constant supervision
to help them stop doing it. One of the things I witnessed in Northumbria
where we trialled polygraph testing, in my previous job, was the
fact that somebody knew that every week they would face a polygraph
test and would have to say whether they had been near a school
playground, have to say whether they had been fantasising about
a child they had seen on the bus, and instil some discipline into
them. It is not a panacea but I think if we want to keep our children
safe from dangerous sex offenders when released into the community
we should subject them to both satellite tracking and regular
polygraph tests.
Q253 Paul Flynn: There is
no question of your being influenced in any way, your organisation
being influenced in any way by the commercial contributions you
get?
Mr Narey: No, absolutely no, Mr
Flynn. I have no commercial links with any companies involved
in that sort of work. It is not work that Barnardo's would dream
of going into, but I do think it is work which will keep children
safe. I could introduce you to probation officers who have experienced
this in the North East, who believe it has transformed their ability
to have confidence in what a sex offender is doing. Probation
supervision of a sex offender without technology cover is a myth.
Even if somebody is being seen every day for half an hour a day
we do not know what they are doing for 23 and a half hours otherwise,
and we need to give probation officers all the help they need.
Q254 Paul Flynn: Can we take
up the answer that Jenny Willott had about the nature of charities
and the public services and the American experience? We went to
America and one of the impressions we had from America was that
the charities had grown to such an extent that they had become
enormous organisations and this reduces their ability to innovate
and to compete, and one area that was raised was the question
of what happens to charities when the problem they are dealing
with shrinks. In New York homelessness has gone down to a tiny
amount, 5% possibly, of what it was a few years ago, yet the great
varieties of charities are spending enormous amounts, the same
as they always did. Is there not a tendency among charities to
expand the definition of what they are doing in order to keep
their empire intact, rather than a public organisation who would
benefit greatly by seeing the problem shrink, the money spent
on it shrink and money to be spent on something else. Is this
not something that is part of the character of charities? You
acknowledge what is happening in the United States where they
have gone further down the road that possibly we will be going
in this country?
Mr Cullum: I suppose the most
interesting example that we came across was in social housing
where a lot of the results were really pretty deplorable, so less
than half the tenants being satisfied with the service they are
getting, so 46% of people saying that staff treat you with dignity
and respect, 45% saying they are organisation you can trust, 38%
saying they think they make you feel part of the community, 26%
extras you would not expect. So really poor and in some cases
a little bit better than the public sector, but only a little
bit. I think one question is: has the social housing sector, which
is one that is becoming more concentrated, so more housing groups,
more housing associations coming together, lost in some way the
essence of what they were originally about and becoming almost
indistinguishable from the private sector, a house builder, and
not building particularly good quality houses? It is work we have
done on this both through our Chief Executive, Ed Mayo, chairing
the Tenant Involvement Commission and also our submission to the
Cave Review of Social Housing, and to us this is a sector which
is just not focused enough on the users and the regulator is not
focused enough on the users.
Q255 Paul Flynn: What does
conclusion does that lead you to, that it is not the nature of
the organisation, whether it is in the third sector, public sector
or the private sector? Is it the size of the organisation perhaps,
the scale on which they organise it? Do they become bureaucratic
because they become a very large organisation.
Mr Cullum: I think that is something
that you need to be wary of. You get some very good organisations
that provide services very well, just as you get some absolutely
hopeless small organisations. You have to try extra hard to be
closer to your user the bigger you get and I think the sign is
that we have picked up a culture in housing—and we have
done other work in the housing sector in terms of bringing in
tenants and housing officers together—it is a very confrontational
sector. Each side feels rather hard done by—the housing
officers feel that they are rather the victims of the tenants
and the tenants feel that they are beholden to the housing officers.
When we brought them together actually there was more of a common
agenda and shared solutions coming out, but there is a problem
culture there and having big organisations which have gradually
become a bit disconnected from users is not helping to tackle
that culture.
Q256 Paul Flynn: Your conclusion
is that there is not a great deal of difference when houses are
provided for rent by the council or a social housing private body.
The problem is, presumably, that people want to have control over
their own space and have control over their own houses and that
is satisfactory, but there is resentment when they rent them and
are told what to do. There really is not any worthwhile difference
between the two different bodies.
Mr Cullum: I think social housing
is marginally better, but really only marginally and in our research
we visited 19 key factors which we developed through the policies
of research and they did not really come out much better. There
was one quote from somebody, which I thought summed it up rather
nicely, who said, "My social landlord asked me when it would
suit me to come round to put in a new radiator and so I told them,
and they came on a different day." So there is something
slightly misfiring there.
Paul Flynn: Thank you very much.
Q257 Kelvin Hopkins: The impression
given of the Government raising up the third sector is that it
is all part of reversing the 20th century when there was mass
expansion of state provision. The Government now and indeed successive
governments have wanted to go in the other direction and move
things out of the state into these other sectors. Do you feel
in a sense that you are being driven by ideology rather than evidential
argument?
Ms Hopkins: No, we definitely
do not feel like that at all. Our position has always been that
what matters is the quality of the service that is being delivered
and the quality of service users' experiences, and in that sense
who provides them is less important when we do not have any ideological
attachment to any party in particular. There do seem to be some
benefits from having a little bit of flexibility within a market
of provision if and when it is done properly, so what would be
ideal would be to have very skilled, competent and well-informed
commissioners within public authorities who knew their local territory
well enough to be able to put together very successful mixes of
providers, be they from the in-house public sector side, private
providers or indeed from the third sector because there are slightly
different contributions that come from those areas, both in terms
of culture and expertise. Perhaps this is a bit utopian, but the
best thing for service users would be to mesh the best of those
together and have some across service, across sector learning
driving up quality across the piece.
Q258 Kelvin Hopkins: In your
opening statement you said it is such a vast area that it is very
difficult to generalise about it, you must look at specifics and
I agree. You used the word "niche" and I think there
are certain niche areas. For example, in my constituency there
is an organisation that deals very quietly with youngsters who
are self-harming, and there is also an organisation called CALM
which helps young men who may have had suicidal tendencies. There
are all sorts of areas which perhaps the public sector and private
sector would have difficulty with. They are run partly by volunteers,
and sometimes by religious organisations, and they are concerned
about fringe groups who have difficulties rather than providing
mainstream services. When it comes to providing general services,
I think Martin was saying that there are areas where the third
sector ought to move into where the public sector is generally
providing. That is a very different order of things, is it not,
and are you convinced that that is a good idea?
Ms Hopkins: I am not sure I am
in a position to be convinced or not but our argument would be
along the lines of what we have just said really, that actually
if it was demonstrated that a third sector organisation, either
on its own or in partnership with others, could deliver those
services best and deliver the best quality service, good value
for money and all the other criteria that were required, then
we would not see any reason for that not to happen. But we are
not here to advocate that kind of development.
Q259 Kelvin Hopkins: Is not
the motivation of people employed in these different sectors—and
perhaps Martin can answer this—different, between working
for a public service and being employed to do a job, but also
having a very strong sense of public service, and a private organisation
driven in the end by profit. There are differences there. But
the third sector tends to have another motivation, which is often
a personal involvement—a relative, a friend who suffers
from HIV or something of that kind. So in a sense there are different
kinds of motivations. In some areas, keeping things in the public
sector where there is accountability and sense of public service
is much more important and therefore the profit motive would be
inappropriate.
Mr Narey: My experience as a commissioner
was that despite my earlier and traditional antipathy to the role
of the private sector in prison there was no conflict whatsoever
between prisons and between making profits and commitment. It
is important to keep an eye on the size of the profits but I think
the organisations which run prisons and in the main still do run
prisons make modest profits—not particularly large, there
is open book accounting to check they are not excessive—and
I think run decent, compassionate, value driven services. I am
certainly not here to speak for them but I know, for example,
that a number of the operators who work in prisons in this country
have refused to work in countries where capital punishment takes
place, in some South American countries, because they are value
driven. While I would say that yes, of course, we employ a lot
of people who are hugely vocational and we have the benefit of
a lot of volunteers, I think it is arrogant to suggest that just
because it is the voluntary sector that somehow we have better
people—I do not think we do. Certainly my experience as
a public servant for 30 years was that there are lots of people
who are hugely dedicated to the job in the public sector every
bit as much as the people who I now employ in the voluntary sector.
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