Role of the Prison Officer - Justice Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 300-319)

MARIA EAGLE MP, PHIL WHEATLEY CB AND STACEY TASKER OBE

9 JUNE 2009

  Q300  Alun Michael: I would like to know more about the measures.

  Stacey Tasker: We have changed our approach to training so now it is up to the governors or heads of policy group to decide on their business needs from their business objectives what training it is they want. It has become much more demand-led rather than supply-led, so they demand training off us. We have got a new training planning tool. Before we used to schedule all our training on an historical basis, for instance, that was how many adjudication courses we had last year or incident command courses, but now we are rolling out a new training operating model where they tell us exactly what are the courses they want. In the old days we had three residential colleges. Training was about putting people on a bus, sending them away to a college and then coming back trained. Now we have got only one Prison Service College which can handle 250 people but there are 13 different local learning centres, 13 different POELT centres, so people can actually go on training courses in a much more modularised fashion and not have to stay away from home. So for primary carers, who are normally women, for example, that has been very beneficial. We are looking at different ways of delivering training, so e-learning, for example—we have just had a really good e-learning pilot which has been five courses in 10 prisons, including the all important key talk. There are over 200 courses in our portfolio of training which the governors, having done a training needs analysis and decided where the skills gap are in their staff, demand off us centrally and it is our job to deliver. It was an average of seven days per member of staff, £37.8 million spent on it, and 350,000 days training delivered in 2008-09 for what the field's requirements were. Like Phil says, there is still mandatory training but it is what is business critical to them and having the portfolio of courses available from which to choose. Every week we have a new demand. We have just got a new extremism package developed, another one on managing indeterminate sentences, mental health awareness etc, so all the time we are increasing our portfolio, looking at how we can change it and coping with the demand that they present to us.

  Q301  Mr Turner: Why is the Ministry of Justice still pursuing the building of enormous new prisons when its own research, as well as the HMIP indicators, shows that smaller units reduce re-offending?

  Maria Eagle: The primary reason why we are building new prisons and more places is to be able to do the job that we are here to do, which is to accommodate those sent into custody by the courts, which is item number one on the list of things the Ministry of Justice has to do. Obviously it is not easy or quick to procure a new prison, whatever size it may be. Our planning is done on the basis of various projections and item number one on our list is to make sure we can accommodate those sent into custody by the courts. The answer to your question primarily is the trends that we expect to see in terms of people sent into custody mean that we need more places than we currently have. We have plans for 96,000 places by the end of 2014. The Committee will be well aware, because it press-released its response to the statement at the end of the consultation we had on what became known as the Titan prison building plan welcoming the fact that we had listened to what we were told and changed our plans, that we are now planning on building a greater number—five—of smaller prisons, not the three containing 2,500 places that were planned.

  Q302  Chairman: But 1,500 places though.

  Maria Eagle: But 1,500 places, which we think is a better balance, having done extra work and having consulted widely, in terms of balancing value for money, the economies of scale that one can have from size but also being effective at reducing re-offending and doing the job properly. We are still planning for the 96,000 places by the end of 2014 because we think that is what is required on the basis of projections we have, but we are now not planning on building such large prisons as we were.

  Q303  Mr Turner: So 1,500 is twice as much as most in my constituency anyway, the three prisons until they were wrapped up together and made one, which I suppose makes them 2,000. What is it that tells you this is the right size, 1,500, 800 or 2,000?

  Maria Eagle: It is a combination of experience, because not only with clustering, and you have an awareness of that from your own constituency, but also our operational experience we do have a number of prisons, about seven or eight, which are lined up. We have got Wandsworth, which is 1,600-plus and we have seven others which are between 1,200 and 1,500, so we do have some experience of dealing with prisons of this kind of size. Obviously we did not have experience of dealing with prisons of 2,500. We are clearer that we are capable of handling that but we also think it is better. We do not want to warehouse offenders. There was a concern expressed that the very large prisons were just about locking people up and warehousing them and that was a concern that was widely expressed. That was never our intention. It was not our intention to do that because it is tremendously important that we continue our work to reduce re-offending. Part of what we want to do with people in prison for their time in custody is try and make sure they do not come back. Therefore, we have to have a balance that will enable us to get the economies of the scale and the efficiencies that can come from greater size balanced against the work that can be done to reduce re-offending. The conclusion that we have come to at the end of the consultation having done further work and also drawing on our own operational experience, which Phil will be better to talk to you about than I would be, is we think that size is more appropriate to get a better balance between efficiency gains from back office savings whilst having units—we are looking at at least two units in each of these larger new prisons—which mean there is a smaller number of people within who can be helped in the appropriate ways in terms of reducing re-offending. We just think it is a better balance than the original plan.

  Q304  Mr Turner: Our evidence tells us that the ratio of officers to prisoners is significant in prison officers' capacity to spend time, and form relationships, with prisoners with benefits for both pro-social modelling and rehabilitation—I understand the latter word—and incident avoidance and control. How can reducing this ratio by building prisoner warehouses, as it were, be a prudent and effect way to use public money?

  Phil Wheatley: I think the case for large prisons is made by the efficiencies you get which allow you to have more staff in contact with prisoners. A small prison typically will have its own security office, its own gate, all of its own support services, most of which do not have staff who have any contact with prisoners at all. A larger prison will allow you economies of scale on most of things, you have still got a single gate in a prison with 1,500 prisoners in, so you are able to deploy more resources out on to the wings dealing with prisoners and you save yourself a lot of back office work by having a larger establishment. Genuinely, I think it enables us to use resources in a way that is more likely to reduce re-offending and allows us to use public money carefully, which we are trying to do. If you said to me, "You can run lots of bijou establishments of 120 prisoners each or even 400", I could do that for you but it would cost a lot of public money.

  Q305  Mr Heath: That was what Baroness Corston advised, was it not?

  Phil Wheatley: For a small group of women one can see why that makes sense, given their very great needs, so I understand the thinking behind it but, nevertheless, it costs money and you as Parliament and the Government of the day are always interested in making sure that money is used to maximum effect. The 1,500 gives us genuine efficiencies. We have been running large establishments now for a number of years: Liverpool, Wandsworth, Wormwood Scrubs, Manchester, all very big places up or near the 1,500 mark. Because we have expanded existing establishments we have got lots of establishments that are now over 1,000 and we are still managing to perform well, we have become more confident about managing big establishments. Again, if you had asked me 10-15 years ago I would have been less sure that we could do it but I am now confident we can manage big establishments, we have the skills to do it. You have got to create as you build establishments that are not thought of as a giant factory but as a succession of small units within a perimeter with regimes that match the populations in those units.

  Q306  Mr Turner: So we can expect perhaps on the Isle of Wight the three prisons coming together as one without one single wall around it?

  Phil Wheatley: No. The advantage we get on the Isle of Wight by clustering the prisons, which is a separate issue, is that we save ourselves some management and admin overheads and you can have a bigger specialist input, so if you are doing offending behaviour programmes you can have an offending behaviour programme that covers the three establishments and gives you greater expertise and makes better use of your specialist staff. To me, although it may be uncomfortable for the staff who have been used to being in a separate establishment, and Parkhurst Prison always thought it was the senior prison on the island because it had the longest past and it had Category A prisoners and an SSU, a special secure unit, they probably do not like the fact they are no longer seen like that but as a way of using public money it is much better.

  Q307  Mr Tyrie: You have been briefed that the capacity of Wandsworth Prison, Minister, is 1,600-plus, I think you said a moment ago. Is that the normal operating level or the operational capacity level? Perhaps one of your colleagues might answer.

  Phil Wheatley: It is its operational capacity, and Wandsworth runs very near to its operational capacity. We have been running in the estate as a whole at about 98% of operational capacity, and Wandsworth is no different from anywhere else. So operational capacity is now what I am expected to work prisons at or very near to.

  Q308  Mr Tyrie: What confidence can you give us that the new prisons you are going to build are not going very quickly to rise in capacity to what is known as the "safe level of overcrowding", which is the extra 15%?

  Maria Eagle: One of the reasons for building the five larger size prisons that gets us up to 96,000 by 2014 is to try and get ourselves ahead of the curve of the increase in population. Obviously some of that increase in capacity is about taking out old-fashioned, inefficient and not very nice capacity that currently we have to use because the system is not quite as full as it was last year, but it is still pretty full. I think one of the benefits of getting these prisons built is that it takes us ahead of the curve enough to start removing some of that capacity, and that is part of the plan. So the plan is not to then start overcrowding the new capacity that we have. Of course, trend predictions of prison population is not an exact science. As the Committee will be well aware, we tend to have a range of planning assumptions from high to low and then we see what transpires in terms of how many people actually get sent to prison by the courts. So certainly at present we are not planning to overcrowd the new capacity. The idea of building the five new prisons at the sort of size that the Committee is expressing a bit of concern about is to get us ahead of the game, to hopefully prevent us from having to overcrowd.

  Q309  Mr Tyrie: I would like to ask Mr Wheatley about the value for money in the decision to abandon Titan prisons. When you last came before us to give evidence on Titan prisons you told us that a key driver for the cost, and you have indicated it again today, is the cost of the perimeter wall. What leads you to suppose that you are not going to get extra costs pro rata if you have a larger number of somewhat smaller prisons?

  Phil Wheatley: It is not the cost of the wall; it is the cost of the gate and some of the staffing that goes with supervising the grounds. You have got to have a gate in a prison and the gate has to be staffed, so if you are staffing it for 400 people, you are staffing it for a smaller amount of work.

  Q310  Chairman: It does not alter Mr Tyrie's question though.

  Phil Wheatley: Bear with me. I am just explaining, it is not the wall where there is a saving; it is the costs that go with the wall where there is a saving.

  Q311  Mr Heath: The Secretary of State mentioned walls quite a lot in his evidence.

  Phil Wheatley: Yes. It is primarily the cost of the security that goes with the wall that we save, or at least we get the maximum by having a wall round a big establishment. Obviously, if we have slightly smaller establishments the economies of scale are slightly smaller, and that is the trade-off between the Government's view having consulted, that is the Secretary of State's view having consulted—

  Q312  Chairman: Three hundred against 2,500 is not slightly!

  Phil Wheatley: Well, 1,000 less. Proportionately it is a reduction, and the smaller the prison, the less the economies of scale. On the other hand, 1,500 is quite a big prison. It gives some economies of scale as opposed to a prison of 400. Those are political judgments, not my judgments. My job is to run what I am given and make it work effectively.

  Q313  Mr Tyrie: I think that is a very fair and honest answer. You have told us that there are economies of scale from larger prisons and that because we are building somewhat smaller prisons than had been intended, some of those economies of scale will be lost.

  Phil Wheatley: Yes, and if we build a Rikers Island prison of 5,000, there would be even more economies of scale.

  Q314  Mr Tyrie: Would you be prepared to provide us a note with the amount that is lost as a consequence?

  Phil Wheatley: I am sure it is for the Secretary of State to decide what to provide the Committee on this, but I am sure we can provide something.

  Maria Eagle: Yes, we will try and provide you with some illustrative examples of the planning assumptions, but obviously it is not all fixed and, again, there is a range of possibilities. There is always a range of possibilities.

  Q315  Mr Tyrie: We have got two very clear sets of numbers, Minister. We have got the plan for Titan prisons before us and we have got another plan now, which is to have these prisons of 1,500, so let us compare those two.

  Phil Wheatley: Obviously, there is a difference between the two. I should say one thing that I do know for certain, as we have done the business case, is there is a clear business case for building new and closing old, because that is part of this equation. This was not just a build for capacity.

  Mr Tyrie: That is not changing. I do not want to muddy the waters with all sorts of other demands on you. I just want to find out what the extra cost to the Exchequer of this decision is.

  Q316  Mr Heath: Workforce Modernisation did not go down extremely well with the staff at any level. It is just a way of saving money, is it not?

  Phil Wheatley: It is a way of using the public money to better advantage. The proposals were to reduce the overall level of management, to put together layers and, as we de-layered, have less spend on management that should nearly match the sort of structures that the private sector have, which tend to have less managers and give, I think, as the Alison Liebling evidence indicated, a rather clearer link between managers and staff. It also involved splitting the prison officer grade into two, because within the current prison officer grade there is a giant tranche of work from the relatively easier prison officer terms through to the highly skilled. For me it makes sense, and I am conscious of equal pay risks, which are part of my job to make sure that I manage, to have that big range of work split into too narrow a range of work because it ranges from sex offender treatment down to straightforward landing work and in any job evaluation system they evaluate quite differently.

  Q317  Mr Heath: There was a legitimate concern, was there not, that you were setting aside governor grades and senior management grades, cutting at both ends. In other words, you were reducing initial training, putting those people then into prisons, whilst at the same time losing the principal officer grade and a lot of the potential mentoring and support that would otherwise be available to those junior officers?

  Phil Wheatley: We were not cutting the training at all. That was simply not true. Training remains exactly the same under the proposal. We will train new prison officers in the same way. The only minor change was to lose the week in the middle of the course to the end of the course, but we think it made better sense to make it a solid induction for new staff.

  Stacey Tasker: We are also introducing training for operational support grades that we have never had before, a two-week course, which will give the underpinning knowledge for a Level 2 custodial care NVQ. There is no question that we are reducing the prison officer initial training course.

  Phil Wheatley: So we improve training for the non-officer operational grades and have kept the training for officers steady.

  Q318  Mr Heath: Have you seen the package for the level of training? We are talking about the level of training that is currently the case rather than what it was a few years ago because there has been a reduction, has there not?

  Stacey Tasker: I arrived in 2004 and it was increased then by a week. You were saying in your day, Phil, it was—

  Phil Wheatley: I remember when I first joined the service, for what it is worth, we spent four weeks in an establishment before doing eight weeks training, with one brief gap in the middle, or seven weeks training with a week's gap in the middle, as I remember it. I am relying on my memory. The four weeks' training at the beginning of my service, I can tell you, was largely wasted. I remember that well as not being a very helpful period. In practice, prison officer training has remained largely the same. We have changed the course, made the course more focused, made sure we have used every space we have got to great advantage and we have not expanded it, and we were not proposing to make any changes as a result of Workforce Modernisation but we were going to cut management layers and reduce the number of layers. I think the advantage to the public purse in that, in terms of making us more efficient, should mean that any Member of Parliament thinks that is a good thing to do.

  Q319  Mr Heath: What are you going do now?

  Phil Wheatley: We are consulting on introducing the new two-tier prison officer grade, and that will be for new entrants, it will not change conditions of service for people who have not volunteered to change their conditions of service. I expect, as a result of that consultation, to move to selection to the new tier of prison officer. So we are doing that, though we cannot change existing staff.



 
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