Role of the Prison Officer - Justice Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 320-326)

MARIA EAGLE MP, PHIL WHEATLEY CB AND STACEY TASKER OBE

9 JUNE 2009

  Q320  Mr Heath: You are going to end up with a big muddle, are you not?

  Phil Wheatley: No, it is not a big muddle. Changing conditions of service is always slightly difficult. We have done that before. There are pre Fresh Start staff in post and Fresh Start staff, that has never caused us a particular problem, and it is a sensible thing to do, and we have to do it more slowly, so it has to be done as we recruit.

  Chairman: The problem is enabling prison officers to understand more fully what the real implications are. We have encountered genuine uncertainty and anxiety from prison officers because they did not know what this was going to mean for them.

  Q321  Mr Heath: Principally on the grounds that it was reducing the safety of the environment in which they were working. That was their concern.

  Phil Wheatley: I know it was their concern, and this goes back to the negotiation. We successfully negotiated with the POA NEC, who recommended the changes. They faced a conference where some of their activists did not like the changes. As an NEC, having recommended that, they changed their mind. They then told everybody that what they had previously recommended was dangerous and unsafe. It is very difficult when you are dealing with people who, from my point of view, were saying things that I do not think were accurate, but they were entitled to say them, and they said them very persuasively and very loudly, and that made it very difficult to sell the deal to prison staff. Prison staff will see what happens when we introduce the new grade. As Members of Parliament interested in how the public's money is spent, it looks to me like the best thing to do genuinely. Similarly, I think we have got an over-complicated management structure which we should be simplifying and, at the same time as we have done that, we have also reduced the demand on the management structure to engage in audit tasks. Before we were over auditing and a lot of management time was spent on management checks, more than I think we needed to deliver a good product. We thought we were over auditing and misusing our managers in that way, so we freed up management time, we will need less managers and we will de-layer. We are going to do that in any case but we will not be doing it with quite the same co-operation with the workforce that I would have liked.

  Q322  Dr Whitehead: Could I turn briefly not to the training and arrangements involved in prisons but the issue of sharing best practice between private prisons and public prisons. Do you think that there is a problem in principle in sharing best practice in an area of contestability and market testing, and, indeed, do you think that is reflected in what Professor Coyle mentioned to us in his evidence, that there had apparently been very little sharing of best practice really since Titan prisons were introduced? Is that an in-principle problem or an in-practice problem?

  Phil Wheatley: I think at one point it was an in-principle problem. It is less though since we have reorganised the agency. The last time you saw me, I think, I was running the public sector Prison Service with a business model that said all the separate services were separate and in competition with each other. We have now recognised that although we will use competition from time to time, and there will be competition, the vast majority of sites will not be facing competition and we will be running a joined-up service. I am now responsible for public sector prisons and private sector prisons and the Probation Service. I think that new agency model makes it much easier to dig out best practice and share it between the sectors. I welcome the fact that although we have real competition on some sites done carefully and that all sectors should face the fact that they have to show they are the best one for doing the job from time to time, we are not overwhelming the system with competition and we can look to achieve better join-up and learn better from each other. For instance, the public sector is learning from the private sector that leaner management structures work. There is a quite clear message from the private sector, probably helped with the distrust divide, which I think was earlier commented on, that sometimes does exist between managers and staff, and it is not helpful. After all, we are all working together, not in some sort of 1970s state of trade unionism really, and that tighter management structure is learnt from the private sector. We are looking at making sure that good public sector systems that enable prisons to exchange information are available to the private sector and I think that degree of co-operation with a bit of competitive tension is probably the best balance. I am quite pleased with the current balance, I just think we are now in a much better place.

  Q323  Dr Whitehead: Does being pleased with the present balance mean that you can clearly say that you do not find yourself ever in circumstances where you are really having to cajole, persuade, hold a gun to the head of particularly the private sector in sharing information and best practices where they may come back to you and say, "Actually, this undermines our ability to act in a reasonably contested manner"?

  Phil Wheatley: No, that has not been the problem. Bearing in mind we have got our monitors in establishments who can see everything that establishments, private sector establishments, do—they have absolute access to what happens there—we are not short of information about how they operate. I do not need their commercial in-confidence information, whatever that might be; so I am not aware of what their profit level is particularly. I can see how they operate, I can see what works, and that is not a constraint. Similarly, I have got to make sure that where the public sector develop good systems that, for instance, protect people from the risk of suicide, I do not want to hold those back as a competitive edge to the public sector, I want to make sure that those sorts of things are available to make prisons safer.

  Q324  Dr Whitehead: Can I ask the Minister: I appreciate you have had a day's history on this, but your predecessor told us, told the House, in fact, that the public sector does a good job and the private sector can do a good job too. That does appear to suggest some cooling towards the role of private prisons in the service as a whole. Does that reflect your thinking on the relationship between public and private prisons in the service, or do you share that view?

  Maria Eagle: In under 24 hours, I have not come to a completely settled view about where the balance ought to be. One thing is certain, however, and that is we are not going back to either having 100% public sector prisons or planning on having 100% of prisons in the private sector, which means that for the foreseeable future there is going to be balance of some kind. The Committee will be aware that we do have a strategy on competition. We have some prisons, some in the public sector and some in the private sector, that are run on contracts that are coming to an end where one has to decide either to re-compete or how one is going to take that forward. We are also building new prisons and we also have some poorly performing existing prisons that we feel could benefit from having a competition to see if there are any other potential providers who might wish to provide them. I am not, by the way, ruling out the public sector from bidding. We have fairly recently published a strategy on competition and contestability and at present I see no reason to be resiling from that. It has been relatively recently announced. We are planning, I think, this year on four prisons, either because the contracts that they are currently operating to are coming to an end and have to be, therefore, re-tendered one way or another, and I think a couple of the poorly performing public sector prisons we are planning on having competitions in respect of this year. That is where we are at present, so let us see how it goes. I certainly have no reason to resile from that relatively recently stated policy at this stage. What we want is what works. We want good prisons across the board in various sectors, we want to make sure that good practice is spread and do a good job across our entire system and that, I think, is what matters. I will have to come back to you in another year or so and answer that question again.

  Q325  Chairman: We did not really think that you would resile from stated policy in your first 24 hours in office!

  Maria Eagle: There are some brave ministers around, but perhaps I am a little more cautious than to fall into that particular trap quite so soon.

  Q326  Chairman: Thank you very much, and your officials, for the time spent with us this afternoon. Thank you very much.

  Maria Eagle: Thank you.





 
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