Examination of Witnesses (Questions 472
- 479)
TUESDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2008
GENERAL LORD
RAMSBOTHAM GCB, CBE
Q472 Chairman: Lord Ramsbotham, welcome.
I apologise to you in advance because we anticipate that there
will be two divisions. We shall vote quickly and return as soon
as possible. We do not want to keep you much beyond six o'clock
this evening. I thought it best if we welcome you and encourage
you to tell us what you think about what we are doing. We could
ask you lots of questions, but these are issues with which you
have lived over a number of years. Essentially, what we are looking
at is whether the extent of spending on the prison system should
be significantly adjusted so more money is spent at earlier stages
in the process by which people become involved in crime, and,
if it is feasible to do so, what mechanisms would make it possible
to do so?
General Lord Ramsbotham: Chairman,
thank you very much for giving me the opportunity. Perhaps I may
start with some views I have held ever since I first became involved
in the prison system in 1995. They became apparent in my first
inspection of Holloway and they have stayed with me. I should
just like to headline four of them. The first is that nobody knows
the cost of imprisonment. I do not mean that nobody knows how
much money is given to the prison system but that nobody knows
how much it actually costs to do the things that Government says
ought to be done with and for prisoners. My reason for questioning
that is that I came from the Ministry of Defence which every year
had to cost what it was told to do. It then listed what was needed
to do those things, what was essential, what was desirable and
what was nice to have. One then did what was called basket weaving
where one devised a way of mixing them together and went back
to ministers and said, "We have not been given all the money
we need to do everything. What things must we leave out because
we do not have the money, or are you, oh ministers, going back
to the Treasury to try to fight for more?" When I went into
the prison system I fully expected to see a system in which that
worked every year and it went to the Treasury to say, "You
have not given us enough to do this. Therefore, oh ministers,
what should we leave out?" It is not there, so we do not
know how much money is needed or what the gap is.
Chairman: That is your first point. We
shall hear the next three as soon as we come back.
The Committee suspended from 5.36 pm to 6.01 pm
for divisions in the House
Q473 Chairman: Lord Ramsbotham, you
had made the first of your four points.
General Lord Ramsbotham: I shall
be brief. Second, I was very concerned about who was giving the
orders as to what Holloway was to do. I asked the director general
who was the director of women. There was not one. Nobody was responsible
and accountable for what happened in every women's prison around
the country. That worried me because as in everything—business,
schools, hospitals, the Armed Forces and what have you—there
should be responsible and accountable people to ensure there is
consistency in what goes on in a women's prison in Lancashire
and one in Kent, shall we say. There is also the vital question
of identifying good practice somewhere and turning it into common
practice anywhere. Without somebody in charge you have an incoherent
structure. What you have in the system, except for high security
prisons which have a director who was appointed after the escapes
from Whitemoor and Parkhurst on the advice of General Sir John
Learmont, are incoherent prisons of different kinds throughout
the country with no consistency between what they are offering
to prisoners. I think that is a pity. Therefore, to my mind the
second millstone round the neck of the prison system is that it
does not have a coherent management structure. Management is about
budgets, not prisons, prisoners and prison staff. Leading on from
that, I discovered that Sir Raymond Ligo had been commissioned
by the Home Secretary in 1991 to go into the management structure
of the Prison Service after the riots in Strangeways and had recommended
a different kind of management structure based on a business model,
but that has never happened. The problem is that, excellent people
though they are, the civil servants in charge are constrained
in what they can say particularly in public about what needs to
be done. I believe that that is a problem with the system. The
third one also stems from the riots in Strangeways, that is, the
recommendation by Lord Woolf that there should be community clusters
of prisons. He said that the three things most likely to prevent
somebody re-offending were a home, job and stable relationship
all of which were put at risk by imprisonment. Therefore, one
should try to keep people as near home as possible so that not
only those are not fractured but that all the local organisations
can become involved in the rehabilitation of the offender and
there is consistency in that treatment. One can also much more
easily continue something that was started in prison in the community
by the same people doing it rather than have somebody going off
to Northumberland from London and then going back to another prison
in Northamptonshire. There would be no consistency in what happened
to them. The 1991White Paper Custody, Care and Justice,
to which all parties agreed, said that it would work towards community
clusters of prisons. I would say "regional clusters"
for "community clusters". There should be regional clusters
of prisons so that in each part of the country there is a sufficiency
of prison places to house the people from that part of the country,
with the exception of high security which does not justify a prison
in each region. They need to be held separately. I think you get
all the advantages that Lord Woolf referred to and also the advantages
that have been demonstrated by some very good work under the Pathfinder
scheme in the North West, of which the Committee may have heard,
where prison and probation work together to look after all male
young offenders in the North West, making certain that they decide
when they move to where for which course and do not move on until
after it. The figures are significant. At the present moment this
is not being allowed by the organisation run in London which sends
people to where there is a bed space rather than where they need
to go. The fourth point is one which arose much later, namely
the awful thing called NOMS. If I put that in as a student at
the staff college I would probably have been thrown out. The point
is that all this is about the management of management, not the
management of offenders, and somehow I think that in their haste
to introduce the recommendations of the Carter report rather than
have a discussion with people in which all the things I have mentioned
to you could have been brought out and examined they introduced
something that is now almost unworkable. One hears amendments
of it day by day. As governor of a women's prison you ask to whom
you should go in this mass for advice about such prisons or where
the director of the national Probation Service is in all this.
If you say that the alternatives to custody are strong community
sentences those sentences must be led by the Probation Service
which works closely with courts and so on. Where is the person
leading that in here? He does not exist. The deputy instead of
sitting somewhere sits under the head of human resources. They
have lost sight of the fact that this is all about offenders;
they have made themselves far too complicated. I have always thought
that is because they have not given a straight answer to the first
three questions I posed about how much it will cost, how it is
to be managed so that we have consistency in what is done and
how we make certain that we have manageable size organisations
that exploit local conditions rather than try to do it nationally.
Q474 Chairman: Forgive me for saying
the obvious, but in a military situation if today you are posted
to Iraq or Afghanistan to take charge of some major part of the
operation you cannot say that you would not start from here because
you would have to do so. Clearly, you would be looking for ways
in which to progress matters. In the prison and crime situation
there seems to be an inability to start from here and get to a
very different position. Is that inevitable? What I mean by it
is that many people would balk at the idea that one could, as
it were, snatch money from the prison system and say that one
would never change things fundamentally unless some of those resources
were moved from prisons to a much earlier stage in the process
where people became involved in crime. They would say one could
not do it now because this is where we are with people emerging
from the court system who have to be accommodated in prisons.
Is it impossible to make that kind of resource shift?
General Lord Ramsbotham: I do
not think anything is impossible in this. Perhaps I may quote
one very interesting development which concerns particularly young
offenders and tries to answer precisely the question you pose.
You may have heard of foyers which are places that house the homeless.
There are some hundred of them around the country. In Greenwich
and east London housing associations and the Magistrates' Association
got together to look at what else they could do for the homeless.
They found that the people going in were exactly the same as the
people going into custody and into community service. What they
lacked were all of the things to prevent them going into crime,
that is, the assessment of education, work and social skills and
the opportunities to do other things such as sports, cadet activities,
St John Ambulance, Outward Bound and so on. They have come up
with a scheme to put on one site within a certain radius—an
hour's travel—a foyer, a custody centre for lower grade
custody, not acute, and workshops, classrooms and all the other
activities that are needed to get them all together. The idea
is that by the community preventing them going into the system
early there is consistency of teaching provided there, so initially
you have the "custody" people in there and hope that
the number will reduce. You also hope that by building up something
like that you increase public confidence that you can do this
for people without having to send them to prison while leaving
the option for people who need to go to prison, rather like people
who need to go to hospital, not in that immediate area. I believe
that the exploitation of what local organisations and regions
can do in their areas is not something that we have encapsulated
by trying to make it more and more national.
Q475 Alun Michael: I have two questions
which perhaps can be dealt with separately though they follow
one from the other. The first concerns your emphasis on maintaining
local community links which is very well expressed. What are the
implications of that for the proposal to develop Titan prisons?
General Lord Ramsbotham: I think
that Titan prisons are a complete misconception, frankly. I go
back to the community clusters. If there were regional clusters
of prisons one would be able to know in a region what prison of
what type you needed for how many people in that area because
you were not able to house them. You could break down the requirement
by area. Therefore, acknowledging that there has to be a reconstitution,
if you like, to achieve regional clusters the Titans are a complete
red herring at the moment because that sum needs to be done first.
I am very surprised that it was not done at the start of this
exercise. Unfortunately, I think that the contractors were asked
the wrong question, namely how to house as many people as possible
as cheaply as possible. That was the question which the contractors
told me they had been asked. That is the wrong question. If you
had gone down the regional route and asked what was needed you
would come up with a very different answer. You would then be
able to satisfy the very sensible suggestions in the Corsten report,
for example about the size of women's prisons. Further, young
offender prisons need to be smaller. I was horrified to find that
Rochester had 750. You may then find that you need more training
prisons for males. There is no reason why there should not be
different training prisons for males on one site, but Titan with
2,500 is a dangerous concept because it does not say what will
be done by whom. The sheer task of getting people to work, for
example, have not been thought through, and I do not think they
will respond to all the other pressures which need to be looked
to in a regional context.
Q476 Alun Michael: Perhaps I may
explore the regional context a bit further. Over recent years
organisations, whether they be local government associations,
and links between different agencies including the police and
so on have increasingly been developed on a regional basis. In
Wales it is an-Wales basis; in England many of whose regions are
bigger in terms of population it is the Government regions. You
also referred to things like the foyers linking prison and prevention.
Would you develop that? That would require, would it not, the
planning and co-ordination of prisons and the work that goes on
in them with the work that goes on outside, whether it contributes
to or is involved in prevention or rehabilitation, having a regional
focus in each of the Government regions?
General Lord Ramsbotham: Absolutely.
That is why I say that you need a regional offender manager in
each region but underneath them you need somebody who is responsible
for the prisons in the regions and somebody who is responsible
for probation in each region, not for seeing what happens in the
prisons. For example, there should be somebody responsible for
all women's prisons who goes into all regions. They should be
responsible for seeing that the prisons and probation chiefs get
what they need to do their job, seeing that they are supported.
If you like, there is a matrix with a direction downwards: you
are a women's prison and you will be told what to do; you are
in Lancashire and the regional offender manager will say that
in order to do that you need the following things from Lancashire
and he will make certain you get them. But I would go one stage
further with probation. I think that one of the great successes
particularly of the youth justice board is the youth offender
teams run by local government. Having talked to local government
I would like to see that extended. The ones I have talked to are
quite happy that there should be regional offender teams for adults,
male and female, in each area alongside the youth offender teams.
They would be responsible for the supervision of the lower grade
offender in criminal terms, releasing the trained probation officers
to concentrate on the higher end. At the moment the problem is
that probation is so overwhelmed that it is not sure exactly what
it is doing and is not able to do enough with either group. Its
expertise is needed to guide the offender teams who could be part
of the same structure.
Q477 Alun Michael: I have two questions
of detail to take it one step further. You have given quite a
clear concept of a regional team. Would you include the wider
criminal justice element within that? For instance, in my time
in the Home Office we developed the idea of having a regional
crime reduction co-ordinator to work with the local crime and
disorder reduction partnerships, so we looked at that preventative
element. Do you see that as being part of the regional co-ordination?
General Lord Ramsbotham: Absolutely.
If you ask me where I see this in managerial terms I would say
that at the top you need two government or ministerial-led bodies.
One would be a policy group consisting of all the ministries involved
in the delivery: health, education, local government, work, pensions
and also organisations such as the courts and so on. Sitting alongside
that would be an executive group led by a minister. I have always
thought there should be four people sitting on that: the director
general of the Prison Service, the director of the national Probation
Service, the chairman of the Youth Justice Board and the chairman
of a women's commission as I would like to see it. Therefore,
there is top down direction. They are responsible and accountable
for what goes on in their particular neck of the woods, if you
like. Underneath the policy board I would see regional policy
boards based on the existing ones which I believe are very good
in which all the organisations in that region come together. You
must bring in all things that are currently there like crime reduction
and youth matters.
Q478 Alun Michael: Along with their
budgets?
General Lord Ramsbotham: That
is absolutely right.
Q479 Alun Michael: You referred to
the effectiveness of the youth offending teams which again was
part of the 1998 Act for which I had some responsibility, but
that is at the younger end?
General Lord Ramsbotham: Yes.
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