Role of the Prison Officer - Justice Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 268-279)

MARIA EAGLE MP, PHIL WHEATLEY CB AND STACEY TASKER OBE

9 JUNE 2009

  Q268 Chairman: Ms Eagle, Mr Wheatley and Ms Tasker, welcome. In particular welcome to our new Minister who we congratulate on taking up this appointment and commiserate on the fact that you have to appear before the Committee after barely 24 hours in post and to do so taking over when, although not in mid-sentence, David Hanson was actually answering questions when we were interrupted. We do not expect you necessarily even to say the same things, let alone take up exactly where he left off.

Maria Eagle: It seems like a lot less than 24 hours.

  Q269  Chairman: One of our witnesses, Professor Andrew Coyle, identified a lack of trust throughout the National Offender Management Service, and he referred to a culture of "avoidance of doing wrong, rather than encouragement to do right". I appreciate that after 24 hours you will not be in a position to decide whether this is true or not, but is it a worry that you recognise and one that you would want to have a look at?

  Maria Eagle: I think it would be fair to say that even after a short period of time in post I recognise the fact that there is potential defensiveness in culture just by the very nature of the business that the Prison Service is engaged in, which is primarily keeping the public safe from some very serious offenders and making sure that the sentences of the courts to loss of liberty are carried out. Obviously there are other purposes and tasks which the Service also has to carry out, for example primarily trying to reduce re-offending and tackle the factors which have led individuals into the system that they find themselves in, but they are there to carry out the sentences of the courts, to protect the public from sometimes dangerous offenders and they are also closed institutions, so one can see why there may be a certain defensiveness and that is bound to be a part of culture. I think that has been changing significantly over the past few years, certainly I imagine that Phil Wheatley would have seen big changes in the time he has been in the Service, and I am sure anybody working for it who you were to ask, were you to ask them, would be able to point to significant examples of increasing openness and activity focusing on the needs of the individuals in the care of the Prison Service.

  Q270  Alun Michael: I wonder if we could clarify some things with Mr Wheatley in particular. Towards the end of last session you were making some comments about the figures which were about to be published, and of course they have been published now. You referred to the best escape figures and suggested that we should have a look at the figures as soon as they were available. Looking at them, juvenile re-offending figures seem very encouraging but when you look at adult re-offending across all disposals they rose by 2.3% between 2006 and 2007, with the rise for custody alone appearing to be much higher than that. Are we seeing the start of an upward trend? Was that what you wanted us to draw from the figures which of course had not been published when you last spoke? Can you help us on this?

  Phil Wheatley: I did not know what the figures were when we last spoke, they were a secret from me at least, I had no idea what they were going to be. They are slightly worse than the previous year, your figure is correct. Short-term custody looks slightly worse than before. There is a skew towards older offenders doing less well and some of the increase is also in women offenders, which is a bit counterintuitive from my point of view because there is probably more resource deployed to women offenders, and we are drilling down into that to understand why. Having said that, we are already hitting the end target at the moment of making a 10% reduction in re-offending, so although it is slightly worse than the previous year it is still a 10% reduction in re-offending on the base year, which I think is 2005, so we have made improvements. The improvements were very good in the year before and the 2007 results are slightly worse than the 2006 results.

  Q271  Alun Michael: That does suggest, does it not, that we need to look very carefully at the year-on-year figures?

  Phil Wheatley: Yes.

  Q272  Alun Michael: You are not suggesting, are you, that we should discount the latest figures?

  Phil Wheatley: No, not at all, and I am not trying to discount them. What I think we are seeing, and we are doing more careful analysis on, because you are quoting the straightforward re-offending, the reduction in frequency of offences, we are also looking at the drop-dead measure of do people offend or not within the one year period, which you can do a prediction on so I can see with that whether there has been an increase in the risk of the offenders we are receiving. I do not think that is the explanation.

  Q273  Chairman: Can you just define that again?

  Phil Wheatley: There are two measures. There is the measure that says what is the frequency of re-offences committed by people who are discharged from custody or on community sentences, and the older measure which says within a fixed period, now a one year period, how many of that same number actually re-offend. Some of them may re-offend on 10-15 occasions but it is one conviction when they are dealt with. They are two different measures. You can predict the number of people who may re-offend on that drop-dead measure—

  Q274  Chairman: An unfortunate phrase.

  Phil Wheatley: Yes, sorry. It is a phrase that the researchers use and I have picked it up from them. I shall try and do better. It is the simple "did they offend or did they not" measure. What we think is going on is that with the big increase in offending behaviour programmes and provision for education, because it was not just offending behaviour programmes, improvements in resettlement work was funded by substantial increases that came in the post-2000 period and we are now in steady state, we have that investment, which is still there, but we are not increasing the investment in that group at the moment. I think that is what causes it.

  Q275  Alun Michael: What is the timescale of doing that drilling down and would it be possible to share the more detailed conclusions with the Committee fairly quickly?

  Phil Wheatley: The timescale is within the next month. I am not sure how that fits with the Committee's timescale.

  Q276  Chairman: It might be too late for us, it might be helpful, but we would love to know anyway.

  Phil Wheatley: Some detailed work is being done by the researchers to drill down in the data which is literally very recently out. I was at a meeting yesterday at which we were asking these questions to try to understand precisely what is happening, which offenders are most affected by any changes. The changes are small, you are right, but they are in the wrong direction.

  Q277  Alun Michael: Will you be looking at not just whether there is any explanation but whether there is any trend in terms of those figures?

  Phil Wheatley: Yes, we have been doing. As I say, the trend we have identified so far is that performance is worst for the older offenders. Although they re-offend less we are making less reductions with them. By "older" I mean the 40-plus group, I am not speaking about 21-plus. With the younger age group we are doing better. We have looked at the data on the women offenders we are dealing with, which probably relates to the selection of the women in that group because there is a disproportionate number of women in our custody who have got substantial drug problems. Some of this may relate to how we deal with people who have got drug problems. This is all speculative and I am sharing that speculation rather than having a pat answer. I do not have an answer.

  Chairman: That is very helpful.

  Q278  Julie Morgan: I was just going to pick up that point about women offenders. I am slightly dismayed to hear that because of the extra efforts the Government has been putting into women offenders. You do not have anything more to add to that at this stage?

  Phil Wheatley: Certainly as we looked at the detail yesterday in the discussion, which is all out on the website so I am not using information that is not public if you look at what is on the website, in our women's population there are a large number of women who have substantial drug problems. At one point, and the older offenders are also affected, I would have expected, perhaps 15 years ago, those who are 50-plus not to use drugs, they might have drunk too much but did not use drugs, but that is no longer true. I have now got offenders who are in their late 40s who have had a lifetime of using drugs and they are working through the system. If you do not break clear of drugs you are likely to commit prolific and relatively minor offences to fund a habit. Getting people off drugs is one of the key things with that group. There is probably a disproportionate number of them in the older age group, but that is speculation rather than based on enough hard analysis for me to say it is certain.

  Q279  Julie Morgan: So you will be able to give us more information?

  Phil Wheatley: We may be able to give you more information as we drill down into it. It may still be speculative because there is a limit to the amount we can get out of the data we have got.

  Chairman: It will be relevant to other inquiries as well as this one, so we will be very happy to have it.



 
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