Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
280-299)
MARIA EAGLE
MP, PHIL WHEATLEY
CB AND STACEY
TASKER OBE
9 JUNE 2009
Q280 Dr Palmer: During our preliminary
session, Mr Wheatley, you said: "If somebody ... is not capable
of completing the NVQ ... then that is evidence of not being competent
as a prison officer, and we expect to remove them". How many
such removals have there actually been since the NVQ requirement?
Phil Wheatley: The reasons for
removals are usually complex, not simply they failed to do the
NVQ. People who fail to do the NVQ normally are failing to do
other things. In the first year we retained about 92% of people,
we removed just under 2% and the rest left. The people who leave
are normally those who are frankly not managing to do the job
properly. That is the normal reason for leaving. We have got a
high retention rate, which I would expect because we have selected
carefully, which was a point I also made at the last hearing.
We put people through a job simulation rather than a simple interview.
We should be good at picking people who can do the job.
Chairman: Thank you, by the way, for
the information you sent us about that before this meeting.
Q281 Dr Palmer: We had some quite
alarming evidence from the Prison Governors' Association that
described at least one occasion when all the candidates failed
and, despite that, they all passed at the end of the course.
Phil Wheatley: I would worry about
prison governors who let that happen because the people who decide
whether prison officers are to be kept are prison governors. The
initial training then leads to the NVQ, which we expect people
to pass within the first year. The people responsible for decisions
on whether we accept or reject during that probationary period
are prison governors. It is not under central control, it is under
the control of the prison governors, and the clear message to
these prison governors is do not keep people who are not capable
of being good prison officers, and we expect good prison officers
to get an NVQ in 12 months.
Q282 Dr Palmer: Is there a general
problem about attracting sufficient adequate recruits? We have
seen that you are reducing the minimum age to 18 and the Prison
Governors' Association said the standard of literacy is declining
among recruits. Is it a fact that you are desperately trying to
get as many people as we need almost at any cost?
Phil Wheatley: No. People make
statements that the quality of recruitment is going down and I
am afraid it has been said for as long as I can remember, usually
with no substance. Certainly there is no substance at the moment.
We have not changed the standards. As we worked up the job simulation
we set quite high standards. We have got more people stacked up,
selected, who want to join us and are qualified than we can use.
The last recruitment campaign was very successful. At the moment,
certainly in a lot of the country, the mere whisper we might have
vacancies would lead to us being overwhelmed with quality candidates.
In my experience, bearing in mind I joined in the 1960s and saw
the entries in the 1970s and 1980s, we are now recruiting better
people. For example, the London prisons, which have the highest
level of churn, if I had been here probably in the period when
Lord Ramsbotham was reporting on prisons, they would have been
the prisons I would have been most worried about. They would have
been bad in terms of performance, many of them very worrying,
but that is no longer the case. When you speak to a London prison
Governor and ask, "What has made the difference?", one
of the main things that has made the difference is new recruits
which has enabled us to change the culture and approach of staff
to get a much better performance. Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth
and Holloway are now decent establishments with good inspection
reports saying they are good establishments and they are the places
that have seen the greatest churn and recruitment of staff. I
think what that suggests is that getting new staff properly recruited
in and well-led with good governors produces better performance.
Q283 Dr Palmer: Do you see a significantly
different approach for prison and probation officers? For probation
officers one of the established routes is to take a course to
become a trainee probation officer and when you have completed
it you then try and find a suitable place. I have been approached
locally in the East Midlands by people saying there is a severe
disjunction between the number of TPO places and the number of
provisional probation officer places so that an entire cohort
has been told in De Montfort University that there are potentially
no places available. How much manpower planning is actually being
done?
Phil Wheatley: I understood you
were looking at the role of the prison officer.
Q284 Dr Palmer: Yes, we are.
Phil Wheatley: From the role of
the prison officer point of view we are recruiting for real places.
We do not recruit trainees and then think, "Oh, what shall
we do with them?", but then we have not got two year training
courses which are largely academic, which is a quite different
approach to training for a different job. The key skill of a prison
officer is actually the ability to deal with people.
Q285 Chairman: Do probation officers
not have to deal with people?
Phil Wheatley: Yes. Probation
officers have to do much more complex risk assessment, reports
to court, it is probably a job with a higher technical component,
certainly a higher component in terms of analysing information
and presenting it to magistrates and crown courts, which prison
officers do not have to do. The core skill of a prison officer
is the ability to deal with difficult people, not a skill I want
to be flip about because it is a skill that is difficult to find,
difficult to train for and at its best gives you some really high
quality prison officer work. It is not a skill that I think would
be honed a lot by a complex training course of the sort that probation
do for, as I say, a different job. Probation officers and prison
officers are not doing the same job. That is one of the reasons
why we use probation officers in prison to do some particularly
skilled jobs that have a probation component to them.
Q286 Chairman: Do you get much transfer
between the two professions?
Phil Wheatley: Very little transfer.
I do not remember a probation officer becoming a prison officer.
I do remember probation officers becoming prison governors. I
have not seen a lot of transfer the other way round. To some extent,
the probation training approach as it currently is makes it difficult
for people to change because it does require you to invest in
a two year training course under the current construction, although
we are about to consult on a new approach probably. It does require
you to apply to do training and hopes that you will find a job
at the end of two years which depends upon the rate at which people
have retired, got promoted, what is happening to crime, what is
happening to the economy, a whole series of things that are very
difficult to predict probably two and a half years out when you
applied for it.
Q287 Chairman: Although it is not
within this inquiry, you can be sure the Committee is particularly
interested in this mismatch between the numbers of people being
trained as probation officers and the numbers of places available,
so on other occasions we may ask you more about it.
Phil Wheatley: Yes, and we would
be pleased to contribute to that. There are changes that we are
about to propose probably that mean you will be looking at some
fresh proposals.
Stacey Tasker: That consultation
paper has now gone out and is in the field. In future, the Probation
Boards and Probation Trusts will be doing their own workforce
planning. At the moment they are not doing that, they are bidding
to the centre and the centre is providing the training of probation
officers without the boards or trusts having to find them a job
at the end of it.
Phil Wheatley: We have not yet
gone out to the full consultation. We have shared the thinking
with the field but there is a more formal process to go through.
At the moment we are just honing our proposals so that we can
go through that formal process.
Q288 Julie Morgan: Can you tell me
what is the situation in the private sector?
Phil Wheatley: Yes. The private
sector is mine. The private sector is responsible for doing training.
NOMS are responsible for ensure that training will produce people
of a sufficient quality to be custody officers because we certify
that custody officers are custody officers and fit to do that
work. That involves an individual decision so you want to make
sure that the contractor has got proper recruitment methods and
the training programme is adequate. Most of the training programmes
are very similar to prison officer training, they are variants
of that. That means NOMS can then certify that produces a proper
custody officer. A custody officer can have their accreditation
withdrawn, so if we find that an individual custody officer has
done something inappropriate NOMS can withdraw the accreditation.
Q289 Julie Morgan: So does NOMS sit
in on the training in the private prisons?
Phil Wheatley: In each establishment
there is a monitor. The training is done in establishments, that
is the way private sector contractors recruit their people, they
train them on site, so the monitor is able to see how training
is done and what the quality of the trainees is like. The monitor
is a NOMS employee who is independent of the contractor.
Q290 Julie Morgan: Are there any
particular differences in emphasis in the training?
Phil Wheatley: I saw the evidence
Alison Liebling has given you, which is probably as comprehensive
as there is, which shows a much higher churn rate in private sector
staff than typically seen in public sector staff. Some of that
may relate to conditions of service rather than training. Obviously
in the vast majority of public sector establishments you have
got staff who have been there for many years in those that have
been open for many years, or when a new establishment has opened
it has had staff transferred in from other establishments. There
is lots of long-term knowledge about being a prison officer which
you are less likely to find on a new site where they have been
recruited afresh and that produces differences between the two
groups. I think the description you were given looked to me to
be entirely accurate of the advantages and disadvantages of recruitment
afresh on a brand new site.
Q291 Julie Morgan: What about exchange
between the private and the public, does that happen?
Phil Wheatley: It does happen.
We tend to get prison officers joining who have been custody officers
attracted by the better career prospects of joining a national
system and the substantially increased wages you would get in
the public sector fixed by the Pay Review Body, so fixed independently.
There is a difference between what the public sector and the private
sector pay. The public sector pay more, particularly when you
take into account the pension. We see the movement of governors
the other way, although we have seen some governors coming back
from having been directors in the private sector. The private
sector normally pays their directors more than my prison governors
are paid in the public sector. The private sector has typically,
although not exclusively, recruited existing trained governors
to be their directors, although we have had some movement the
other way.
Q292 Julie Morgan: Is the training
accepted in both? Because it has been accredited is the training
accepted for transfers?
Phil Wheatley: The answer to that
is yes. Where somebody has passed their, what used to be called,
"suitable to be in charge" we know they have reached
a standard and they could move between the two sectors. Like most
senior jobs, you are recruiting on the basis of what you know
somebody's track record and experience has been.
Q293 Alun Michael: I wonder if we
can just probe a little further in terms of in-service training.
In the previous session the Minister talked of a "rigorous
approach" to ongoing training but what some of our witnesses
have told us is quite worrying, whether it is academics, unions,
the Chief Inspector, the Prison and Probation Ombudsman and individual
prison officers, that it is not like that. There is an impression
that training gets squeezed by operational and financial considerations
in individual prisons with it being left to individual governors.
Is there a need to bring back the oversight of training for those
individuals to a national level in order to make sure there is
the rigorous approach the Minister talked about?
Phil Wheatley: No, I think is
the answer to that. It was my decision originally not to maintain
a mandatory approach to training. The effect of the mandatory
approach to training was that we at the centre decided what training
everybody should do, we did not give governors any discretion,
we did not treat them like they were grown-ups and could think
about the problems of their establishments and culture change
they were trying to create, the particular problems their establishments
faced, and when we added up our mandatory training, which we cheerfully
signed up to at the centre, we knew it was more than the resources
that any individual governor had to do it so we could come here
and say, "We have got really tough mandatory training ..."
Q294 Alun Michael: Does that mean
you have now devolved the blame?
Phil Wheatley: No, I have allowed
people to make informed decisions. I know at the moment they are
doing seven days training per member of staff, which is more than
we were doing when it was mandatory training. Governors know it
as prioritised training. I know that the training is more relevant.
I will give you an example. We were doing training on preventing
suicide in open prisons to the same standard we were doing it
in local prisons. I cannot remember the last suicide we had in
an open prison. I am not saying it is impossible but I do not
remember the last one we had, whereas I know in local prisons
assessing incoming people, many of them distressed, is a major
task. To me it made no sense to say you do it equally even though
the problems facing you are different. Allowing governors to use
judgment has given us much improved focus, which is one of the
reasons we are producing better results. I would not want to go
back to central mandating. I am not a centrist where I believe
the centre gets it right and good quality governors do not how
to take decisions.
Q295 Alun Michael: I would accept
that as a matter of principle, but does it not worry you that
the evidence we have received from that variety of witnesses is
very much at odds with your description?
Phil Wheatley: No, frankly I think
they are wrong. Lots of them have a tendency to hark back to a
dim and distant past that is not actually as rosy as they think.
There is still lots of mandatory training. We have not removed
the fact that some training is mandatory. For instance, we monitor
the proportions of staff who are trained in the use of control
and restraint because I do not want untrained staff using control
and restraint. There are lots of jobs that can only be done by
people who are trained. We send out auditors as well as our management
system to check that nobody is breaking the rules on that. We
have some training that remains essential to do things that we
insist on. What we do not do is say, "We're the only people
who decide what training is required". Under the old system
you could only do mandatory training. I know if I added up all
the mandatory training it was more than the resource available
and I do have to accept that training is resource constrained
and in practice it has to be because training costs money.
Q296 Chairman: In our previous session
you rather indicated that you would extend at least initial training
if you had more resources.
Phil Wheatley: No. What I said
was if the Government told me that I had to do more training and
gave me the money to do it, I would use it. That is part of my
job as a good civil servant.
Q297 Chairman: Unwillingly you would
provide more training than you thought was necessary.
Phil Wheatley: This is a hypothetical
question, but if the Committee was in the position of giving me
new money to spend at the moment I probably would not spend it
on expanding training right now, there are other things that I
think are more important to delivering safety for the public,
which is what I am trying to do.
Q298 Alun Michael: Could we ask one
thing about the way in which you measure the value of investment
in training. We have seen an improvement in high-level failures,
which you referred to last time, on things like escape, absconding,
suicide and re-offending, but have you undertaken any work in
identifying the gearing between more investment in training, and
obviously it has to be the right training, and further improvements?
Phil Wheatley: The answer to that
is no, not in the process way you describe, mainly because it
is very difficult to do, to see whether a new course in suicide
produces a substantial change. It is difficult to tie training
hard into the deliverables we are looking at. There are some things
we can measure which are fairly soft measures but we think relate
to outcomes. That is particularly the relationship between prisoners
and staff which we measure using a servey that Alison Liebling
developed for us (MQPL). We know that some of those measures are
affected by the way in which governors communicate, brief and
also train their staff. So we can see the linkage between a good
MQPL, which shows that relationships are right in an establishment,
and the whole approach the establishment takes to delivering decency,
which includes the training, briefing and motivation of staff.
Q299 Alun Michael: Can I just suggest
that you might want to supplement this, as you did on earlier
evidence, because I am still concerned about the dissonance between
your evidence and that of others and it may be that looking at
the evidence we have been given you might want to be specific
in your comment on it. Secondly, this issue of there not being
enough in the pot for training so by devolving it that did not
increase the pot.
Phil Wheatley: Interestingly,
it has increased delivery over the period because we are now at
seven days per member of staff and the old KPI, as I remember
it, was five days per member of staff. We are getting more training
than we used to. It is also better focused. The central decision
we took was to invest in the first year's training by adding in
at some considerable expense, I do not think it was an enormous
amount of money but several million pounds, to create the NVQ
training which we though was a good investment in initial training.
|