Role of the Prison Officer - Justice Committee Contents


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.



 
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