Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309Tuesday 18 November 2014
Oral evidence, 18 November 2014.
Witnesses
Steve Gillan, General Secretary, Prison Officers’ Association, Sukhvinder Buparai, Branch Secretary, HMP Belmarsh, and Thomas Bailey, Branch Chairman, HMPYOI Isis, gave evidence.
Chair
Mr Gillan, we know you, obviously. Welcome. Mr Bailey, Mr Buparai, welcome. Mr Bailey, you are from?
Thomas Bailey
Isis, Belmarsh.
Chair
From Isis. Very glad to have you here today. You, as prison officers, have been on the front line through the implementation of changes in policy over the last year or so and remain on the front line. How has implementing and enforcing these changes impacted upon you and your colleagues and the prisoners you are working with?
Thomas Bailey
In terms of the staff, it has impacted adversely—
Chair
Could you speak up as much as you can?
Thomas Bailey
Yes, it has adversely affected staff. Ultimately, I suppose, if you want to do more with prisoners with less staff it is always going to cause a problem. Acts of violence, be it prisoner-on-prisoner or prisoner-on-staff, have gone through the roof. The staff feel that they have little support by the CPS, as crimes committed against prisoners or other staff do not seem to lead anywhere. It just seems that the whole system is in a bit of a mess. I have been in the service eight years and this is by far the worst I have experienced in that time.
Steve Gillan
I can only speak on the last three months since we have gone forward on our new benchmark regime. We have seen a significant increase in the number of incidents within the establishment. Everything seems to be a lot more unsettled. Staff sickness is an issue. Work-related stress is part of that. On the whole the impact we seem to be having seems to be deteriorating. We do not seem to be able to provide the same level of service that we historically have. It is clearly about less prison officers—significantly less prison officers— and more and more prisoners being crowded into our prisons.
Chair
How far do you think this is about problems of a process of change, rather than the changes themselves, compounded by the acknowledged staff shortages and the adverse ratios of staff to prisoners?
Steve Gillan
I think what has compounded the problem is that, if you remember, there was supposed to be a rehabilitation revolution that would see the prison population reduce. Well, the opposite has happened. We now have a population of 86,000 prisoners, with 80 prisons or less because of prison closures, and what we are now seeing is a prison service that is in crisis due to the staff shortages. You have seen NOMS’ own data in relation to the increase in serious assaults on prisoner officers, which is now at an all-time high, with an increase of 37%. There has been an increase of assaults of 12%, an increase in self-harm for prisoners, and an increase in self-inflicted death in custody, running at seven a month. Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults are now running at some 15,500 per year. So it has had a massive impact, the benchmarking and the cost reduction exercise. It is prison officers who are picking up the pieces, under difficult circumstances.
Chair
Can I ask the two local representatives what their experience was of the benchmarking process, and were you consulted? The Governors who were speaking to us earlier spoke in positive terms of the help they had in going through this process, and that suggested to me that there was some degree of consultation going on. What was your experience?
Thomas Bailey
There was consultation, but it was almost as if we were being asked for tacit approval. I don’t think our views were really taken as seriously as they should be, which is one of the main problems. In terms of benchmarking, if it has been a success it always comes back to having prison officers on the ground doing prison officer work. The problems around retention of staff mean it is impossible a year down the line to say if benchmarking has been a success, because we have not been able to move fully to what benchmarking was supposed to be, because we just do not have the staff. As quick as they can be recruited they are leaving for other professions. I know Mr Hawkings earlier gave examples of people leaving to go into respectable jobs and bits and pieces. However, we have the case where some staff are leaving and not going into other positions because they find the work of a prison officer, especially at Isis in the dangerous conditions there, to be quite untenable. They would almost rather not be employed than continue to work at Isis, which is a sad state of affairs.
Sukhvinder Buparai
At Belmarsh, we were consulted very early on in the process. I do not think at that point the service fully understood what the consultation process was about. It was almost as if there was going to be change at pace and it was going to be delivered, and we were just going to be told what was going to happen to us and what the end result was going to be. It was only when we followed the channels within the benchmark process to raise our concerns, and we raised a number of concerns—I think 46 in total—and sent them to the national office for resolution, that the Director, Phil Copple, was absolutely clear on the type of consultation that should take place. He was clear on making sure that all consultation was meaningful, whereas previously we were just being told what was happening. The events changed and we were being listened to, our concerns were taken on board wherever possible and positive negotiations then took place. In the end, we ended up with a negotiated, agreed outcome where our concerns were listened to.
Chair
As an association, whether or not you agreed with particular changes, your objective was to see that through consultation and negotiation, the best possible outcome for your members was achieved within the system that was going to happen.
Steve Gillan
Absolutely, because the Committee must understand the backdrop to the benchmark cost reduction programme. Initially it was going to be about 30 prisons going out to be market tested, and NOMS had not won any of the competitions. In order to keep jails in the public sector, we took it to our conference to determine whether we would get involved in the benchmark process. Overwhelmingly, our conference directed that we would. We have, and we have managed to make some changes. We still do not like it—I do not think anybody enjoys seeing the cost-cutting that is going on—but the reality is that the savings had to be made, and I can see the attraction for the Government in the benchmarking process as opposed to the marketisation, because they achieve the cost-cutting. It is not that they have fallen out with the privatisation agenda, it is just that they achieve the savings quicker under the benchmarking process. But we want to make sure in this process that it is safe, decent and secure and that our members and prisoners are safe.
Chair
May I ask the two local representatives what the current position is on staff vacancies at your prison and the reasons for it? You have hinted that one of the reasons is the challenge that it presents with relatively low staff numbers to numbers of prisoners. What is the vacancy situation?
Sukhvinder Buparai
At Belmarsh, it is 17, I believe.
Thomas Bailey
I do not have the exact figure at Isis, but we have never been fully staffed. We think the main issue for us is that Isis is different from a lot of prisons in that it is only four years old, and the staff were recruited on the new terms and conditions, whereby the salary is far less than the closed grade staff, so our staffing issues are compounded by the fact that the wages do not reflect, in my opinion, the challenging work that officers do. As a result, people are quite willing to see the job now, instead of a career, as far more of a stepping stone, unfortunately.
Chair
How do your pay levels compare with Thameside?
Thomas Bailey
I don’t know about the private sector, I am afraid. I don’t know if Steve might—
Steve Gillan
If I can assist in that, I do not know the true picture of Thameside and Isis, but if I could give you a flavour, at Woodhill they are 40 officers short and 43 operational support grades short, and they have a private entity next door where they are paying £4,000 more than in the public sector.
Chair
Which is not always the situation in the public and private sector.
Steve Gillan
Not always the situation, no.
Nick de Bois
Chairman, could I just ask for context on the 17 vacancies? As the percentage of staff, what is that?
Sukhvinder Buparai
That would be 17 of 277.
Nick de Bois
Thanks.
Chair
I do not need the numbers, but is it generally the case that you have members on detached duty, or you are dealing with an influx of detached duty personnel?
Sukhvinder Buparai
Yes. We are sending members of our staff on detached duty, some of whom have been ordered to go to other establishments such as Woodhill, which Mr Gillan has just touched on. It does not go down well with our members, who are being taken away from their private lives and being put up in hotels in Milton Keynes somewhere, especially as, in the context of the detached duty, they go to these other establishments and they are literally there only as turnkeys. They do not have any knowledge of the prisoners or the demographic of prisoners, and they are there just as a member of staff wearing a uniform as part of the numbers. They are there to turn a key, so they do not have the same level of job satisfaction as they would have locally.
Steve Gillan
Just on that issue of detached duty, the national picture is that there are 250 officers travelling throughout the country to hotspots such as Woodhill, Chelmsford, Aylesbury, Nottingham, Bullingdon, Haverigg and various other establishments, such as the Isle of Sheppey, where they cannot recruit at this moment in time.
Thomas Bailey
We have never sent any staff on detached duty out of Isis, because we have constantly had a staffing problem. We have been in receipt of detached duty from other establishments regularly and I imagine we will continue to be so, for reasons I have outlined. Such a large percentage of our staff are on new terms and conditions, and that is the big barrier to recruitment, in that the wage offered, especially in this part of the country, is not sufficient for people to live. We have staff with wives and children who have to work 10, 15 extra hours on payment plus per week just to meet basic costs of living; this is 2014 and we have staff who spend every hour awake away from their family just to provide a basic means of living. That is the current situation.
John Howell
I want to ask you a similar question to what we asked the Governors. Thameside and Isis are very new. The prisons also vary in size. In your experience, how much does the physical infrastructure and the size of the prison affect day-to-day operations?
Sukhvinder Buparai
At the moment at Belmarsh, I would say it is having an impact, because the prison is not designed to hold the number of prisoners it is holding. When it was originally scripted, there was a significant number of prison officers to run the establishment. With cost reductions over the past 20 years, the number of prisoners has gone up by a certain amount. I do not have the figure; our certified normal accommodation that we are meant to have is around the 780 mark, and I think we are holding somewhere in the region of 900 prisoners now and we have significantly less staff. The design model that we started off with, with X number of prisoners and X number of staff, is not being adhered to, so there are ultimately going to be physical problems where staff cannot supervise landings or supervise areas as well as we historically did or as we were designed or intended to. That has consequences for the safety of our staff, prisoners and the establishment.
Thomas Bailey
From my experience, I think prisons need to be of a manageable size. I do not think the answer is to build prisons holding 2,000 or 2,500 people. In most industries, people would take advantage of economies of scale in cost-saving. However, what you have to understand is that this is not a factory where you are putting boxes on shelves, this is people, and people react differently to different situations. With the short-staffing issues that we have, I think the bigger the establishment, the more it is a recipe for disaster. If there was discontent, that would spread easily to large numbers of people. Also, in terms of rehabilitation, I think the statistics prove that people are far more likely to not reoffend if they are in small and more focused establishments.
Steve Gillan
Just to back up my colleagues, who have eloquently spoken on that, if you go back to a variety of inquiries and reports, such as the Lord Woolf report after the Strangeways riot, one of the recommendations from that was to make a prison rule that they could not go above the certified normal accommodation. The reality is that no Government has ever implemented that, and we have what I call institutional overcrowding.
John Howell
Let me ask you some questions on securitisation. The point that I want to know or want to get to is, what is the potential impact of over-securitisation of prisoners? Here we have Thameside and Isis built for category B standards, but taking category C prisoners, and you have Belmarsh with category A prisoners. What impact does over-securitisation have on the prisons?
Thomas Bailey
From our point of view, I would echo what the Governor said, to be perfectly honest. In terms of the public purse, I think you need to have flexibility in establishments, because people change and conditions change, but offenders were saying that they felt like they were being held in conditions that were above the security rating that they required, and I would agree with that. I would agree with what the Governor stated.
Sukhvinder Buparai
Belmarsh has to be fit for the most secure conditions, and ultimately we are fit for the most secure conditions. Unfortunately, that might have an impact in terms of over-securitisation when we are holding category D prisoners. Again, as the Governor has mentioned, there is activity for all within the establishment.
John Howell
Is this security categorisation fit for purpose?
Sukhvinder Buparai
Are you referring to the systems where prisoners are categorised?
John Howell
Yes, the security categorisation.
Sukhvinder Buparai
Are they fit for purpose?
Thomas Bailey
I personally do not think they are fit for purpose. I think currently what you have is an overcrowding crisis where prisoners are matched to a certain category depending on the vacant spaces available in each category. We have prisoners at Isis who are deemed as C-Cat prisoners, but in my opinion they are not. Given the violence that they have displayed, they would, in my opinion, be B-Cat prisoners. It is a case of fitting around what the system has available at the time.
Chair
Do you think that individual security categorisation of prisoners was influenced by the availability of spaces?
Thomas Bailey
Absolutely, absolutely.
Steve Gillan
Without a doubt, because we know as a union, and we have expressed it time and time again, of people being rushed through the system too quickly and then being released from cat D conditions. We have seen, sadly, the results of that happening all too often.
Nick de Bois
Have you published that information? It is quite a powerful statement if you are saying basically that the numbers have been fiddled, and that the prison base has been fiddled to accommodate numbers. What have you done—have you published that information, that evidence you are alluding to? Is it in the public domain? What have you done with it?
Steve Gillan
I think it is in the public domain. We put press releases out to say that people are being categorised wrongly and should not be in Cat C or D conditions, and we are pretty much on record as saying that to NOMS.
Nick de Bois
Yes, but that is a statement. What I am saying is that you made a suggestion, and you are arguing that there have been some tragic consequences, you have evidence of it and you are saying it has happened. Is this just a gut feeling or is there real evidence to back it up? Because if there is, it should be out there.
Thomas Bailey
The problem with it, I think, is that the paperwork would match what is happening. However, it is very subjective, so the paperwork would say this person is a Cat C—
Nick de Bois
But I say you are being subjective.
Thomas Bailey
It is, yes. I am just—
Nick de Bois
If you are right, I think it should be worked on and exposed, but what I am saying is that I think that claim needs the hard evidence behind it to back it up. It is a very serious claim.
Steve Gillan
We stand by that claim, because the reality is that it has gone wrong.
Nick de Bois
But I don’t see it if you do not have the evidence.
Steve Gillan
You are never going to have 100% evidence, but it is pretty clear that if someone goes on to reoffend and murder someone then they were not ready for release.
Nick de Bois
That is in the extreme, and I accept that, but I still think that you are saying it is wider than that. You are talking—
Thomas Bailey
I understand what you are asking for, but—
Chair
I think if you are spelling out the evidential basis for this, we would be prepared to look at it, but of course you would need to demonstrate that those who were making the decisions about the categorisation of prisoners were, either voluntarily or because they were under some pressure to do so, importing issues of available accommodation into that decision about the risk level of the prisoner. We would be happy to look at it if you would like to—
Steve Gillan
We hear what you say, and we will try to get evidence on that, because our members raise it with us time and time again. They say that they are under pressure to clear spaces in certain categories of prison in order to downgrade other prisoners who are not quite ready for that level of trust. It is very difficult to gain that evidence, but we will try to assist the Justice Select Committee in getting that evidence.
John Howell
This is my last question. Is there an effective national policy to prevent radicalisation in prisons?
Steve Gillan
An effective policy?
John Howell
Yes.
Steve Gillan
I think there is ongoing work that has been very good, quite frankly, from NOMS. Are we on top of it? I do not quite think we are on top of it yet, but then again, in this country I am not sure anybody is ideally on top of it. To say that there is still radicalisation going on in our prisons is absolutely correct, but there is also radicalisation going on in society generally. The Prison Service, from discussions that I have had with Michael Spurr and Phil Copple, I think are doing their best under difficult circumstances, but the people on the ground tell me it is a real problem.
Sukhvinder Buparai
I think the service is doing some work behind the scenes. As to whether it is effective or not on the ground floor, the opinion from our staff—and it is just an opinion—is that it does not appear to be.
Mr Llwyd
Mr Gillan, what do you think is the main factor for the increase of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, and also the obvious perceived drop in levels of confidence and safety within the prison system?
Steve Gillan
I think we have been pretty consistent on this as a union over the years. You cannot keep overcrowding the system, putting three prisoners in a cell designed for two and putting two prisoners in a cell designed for one and cutting your staff by 30% by 2010 and making all your experienced staff redundant, because that is what has happened. I was very pleased at the weekend when we saw a very positive statement from the Government and the Ministry of Justice saying that they are going to take more seriously the assaults on staff and that a protocol will be introduced about consecutive sentences. But I need to make this very clear point: that was as a result of my union having to take a judicial review against the Crown Prosecution Service for not charging a particular prisoner when they threw excrement in the face of an officer and the CPS said it was not in the public interest to prosecute. We won that case and that individual will be prosecuted. But prisoner-on-prisoner violence is at record levels as well: 15,000 assaults a year is putting terrible strain on the Prison Service. I do not use the word “crisis” lightly, but there is a crisis, and until people face up and deal with that crisis, then I am afraid it is going to increase even further. We need to reduce the prison population and divert people with mental illness away from prisons in the first instance, and I am afraid that has not been done over the years.
Mr Llwyd
This judicial review to which you referred is, in a way, the tip of the iceberg. There has been evidence over the years that the CPS have been tardy in prosecuting prisoner-on-officer violence for some time.
Steve Gillan
That is correct to say. We have raised it with the Attorney-General, and to his credit, he agrees with us. There has now been dialogue between all parties because—
Chair
As the former Prisons Minister, he should know.
Steve Gillan
He was, Chairman. He was the former Prisons Minister and he is now Attorney-General, and indeed, to his credit, he was very sympathetic to our issues, but the proof will be in the pudding. It has now been said that magistrates and so on should be passing consecutive sentences, yet as recently as a couple of weeks ago, an officer was assaulted at Preston and the perpetrator received a concurrent sentence. Not good, and we will be challenging that once again, but you are right to say that the Crown Prosecution Service in recent years have been tardy. More infuriatingly, they have said because a prisoner is serving a particular sentence, perhaps of five years, 10 years or 15 years, it is not in the public interest to prosecute when they assault prison officers. I think anyone who saw the video of CCTV footage at the weekend will start to realise what prison officers are facing in the line of duty in protecting the public.
Mr Llwyd
What steps can you take in the meantime to limit this violence, given the situation that you are in?
Steve Gillan
I think there has to be a realisation that the cuts to the Prison Service now have gone far enough, and if there are any further cuts to the budgets, then we will be in serious trouble. I also think that by getting rid of experienced staff has not helped the situation; we warned about that. But the reality is I think there needs to be a consolidation now in order to reduce the violence in our prisons by diverting people in the first instance away from prisons, because I will put it in this context: there are 86,000 prisoners in 2014 with 24,000 unified staff, and in 1993 we had 43,000 prisoners with the same amount of staff. I think that puts it in context.
Mr Llwyd
It certainly does. Could you tell the Committee, in the experience of the Prison Officers’ Association, has the integration of younger prisoners into the main prison estate caused any significant impacts within the prison system?
Steve Gillan
Certainly, but when I have gone about and listened to my executive colleagues, for example, at Pentonville, where they have tried to break the gangs up at Feltham and move young offenders into some of the core locals, it has caused problems. It has not settled things down, and the mix of adults and young offenders has not helped the situation.
Mr Llwyd
Could I ask your two colleagues, what concerns do you have about the safety, decency and security of your prison in the last 12 months, and how does this differ, if at all, from the previous 12 months?
Thomas Bailey
From Isis’s perspective, I do not want to sound like a broken record, but because of the staffing issues we have, we do not have the numbers. Because we do not have the correct number of staff available on duty, this ultimately has everything to do with the rehabilitation agenda and everything else that is nice and that people believe in and is correct. None of that can be done unless you have a core consistent group of staff, and because we have never been in that position we have never been able to achieve anything in that respect. For the 12 months previous to this, it has been the same for us, because the staffing issues we have had have been consistent over such a long period of time and have not been addressed for such a long period of time.
Sukhvinder Buparai
The biggest impact we are seeing of recent is the number of prison officers responding to incidents when there are incidents in Belmarsh. What historically used to happen pre-benchmark was that there were prison officers carrying out an administrative role, or an instructional role, or an office role, or whatever the context was. Under the benchmark, all of those prison officer jobs went, and those were inherently the prison officers who would, when there was an incident, leave their departments and go on to the wings and make sure that safety, security and decency were maintained. They would help us maintain order and control. Under the benchmark model, our prison officers have all been taken out of these departments, and we are literally just the turnkeys on the wings. When there are serious incidents of disorder, we do not have all the staff that we historically used to have coming out of these departments to provide us with that assistance. It is becoming increasingly difficult for us to maintain stability and order within our prisons, because prisoners get wind of this very quickly and as soon as they know there is not a big response coming from the establishment, they are more keen on testing safety and security systems to gain their own personal advantages.
Nick de Bois
What is your view of the adequacy of provision of purposeful activity—I think this is for Mr Bailey and Mr Buparai—at each of your establishments?
Sukhvinder Buparai
We have a number of places for prisoners to attend. Ultimately they have all been identified. We are working towards maximising the number of prisoners who attend all the activities, all the training and all the skills workshops that are in place—all the educational systems. However, the crux of the issue is that we are here to reduce reoffending, and what we are not doing is tackling the moral issue behind what causes reoffending. Let us say we house 800 prisoners. We can put them all into activities on a daily basis, but does that necessarily tackle the moral issues that caused them to lead a life of crime in the first instance?
Nick de Bois
So you are going through the motions—I do not mean to be pejorative about this, but you are almost ticking the boxes to say that somebody is doing something, and that looks good, but you do not think you are digging deeper. Would you need to dig deep enough with everyone? Is it maybe the case that not everyone requires as much moral examination, to use your words?
Sukhvinder Buparai
Everyone requires moral examination to an extent, because that is why they are in prison, and ultimately it is down to prison officers. We could do that if we were trained and skilled enough, like in Scandinavian countries, where they put a big emphasis on the skills that prison officers have. I am guessing here, but they are trained in rehabilitation to give prisoners moral guidance as well as guidance on issues, which is one thing that we completely lack. All the time we are not giving prisoners any moral guidance, then we are just putting the bum on the seat, showing the Government that prisoners are attending activities as per the required schedule of activity. However, these prisoners then leave prison and it is a case of revolving doors and they are straight back in, because we have not tackled the moral issues.
Nick de Bois
That is very good evidence, thank you. Mr Bailey, do you want to add to that?
Thomas Bailey
I would echo what Mr Buparai said. Specifically for Isis, as a training prison, the expectation is that 100% of the offenders in the prison will be engaged in some sort of work activity during the day. Again, the problem we have is that the restricted regime we have been running for 14 months—and there does not appear to be an end in sight to this restricted regime—means that on any given day, only 40% of the offenders in the establishment have access to these activities, so in terms of delivering what everyone would like to deliver—
Nick de Bois
So you are slightly different, because Belmarsh was saying that if it came to it they would put everyone on an activity.
Thomas Bailey
Yes. Until we have a full staffing complement, we cannot. As I said, for 14 months we have only been roughly at 40% on activities on a daily basis.
Nick de Bois
What are the implications, then, for your prison staff and prisoners of the plans for Belmarsh, Thameside and Isis to become resettlement prisons? What does it mean?
Thomas Bailey
Personally, I do not think that there will be too much change at the minute. Again, because of the staffing complement we have, we are unable to deliver these things because we do not have the people to deliver them, and until that changes, this is all very nice, but—
Nick de Bois
Even with the under-12-month prisoners and the sort of through-the-gate approach?
Thomas Bailey
Yes. I completely understand, but we do not have basic prison grade officers on duty to deliver any of this work. That is the problem. As I said, we are only sending half of the offenders to work on a daily basis, so this will involve more prison officer work in terms of getting people to work and working with them.
Nick de Bois
This is being contracted out, bringing people in to do this work.
Thomas Bailey
Yes, but you still need staff on duty to have prisoners unlocked.
Nick de Bois
To supervise them?
Thomas Bailey
Yes.
Sukhvinder Buparai
The concept is a very good concept. You need small, unique wings where prisoners are focused or in the company of other prisoners with the same needs. One of the difficulties with a core local like us is that we have such a mixture of prisoners that you could have somebody who is nine months from release mixing with somebody, or sharing a cell with somebody, who has nine years or 30 years, on some occasions, because of the circumstances we find ourselves in. In terms of the resettlement prisons, as I say, there is a lot of work to be done through the CRCs in making the whole concept work, but whether we achieve it or not I think is too difficult to say. We would argue that the role of the prison officer is vital in the resettlement function, and we only hope that the Prison Service recognises the role that the prison officer has to play in this function for it to succeed.
Nick de Bois
Just talking in terms of end-to-end offender management, which as you know received a bit of a going-over by the Inspector of Prisons and Probation, I would be interested to know to what you attribute the failures. Also, is there a model of joint working between prisons and probation that would best support the Transforming Rehabilitation programmes? I do not mind who answers that, it is quite a broad question.
Sukhvinder Buparai
I do not have the ability to answer that. Steve?
Steve Gillan
It is a difficult question, and everybody knows end-to-end management is a decent concept. We have always had proper joined-up relationships with the Probation Service and outside agencies, so it is nothing new.
Nick de Bois
Can you point to the failure?
Steve Gillan
The failure? Probably resources, to be honest with you, and not getting to grips, I would suggest—I have said it before in many forums—with three essential ingredients: mental health issues, alcohol abuse and drug abuse. Until those three key issues are dealt with in society, then I am afraid prisons become a warehouse for those individuals. We have consistently said that a root and branch review and treatment needs to be done in relation to those three key issues. Everybody keeps bringing it up—not just the POA, but you have the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, you have the Prison Reform Trust, you have the Howard League, and I am not sure whether the Prison Governors Association mentioned it as well. I am not sure we can all be wrong on the concept of that. I am not sure that is—
Nick de Bois
You are talking specifically about treating drugs, for example, as a health problem, not a justice problem?
Steve Gillan
Absolutely, and I am not sure that fully answers your question, but I think it goes some way to answering your question.
Chair
Can the local representatives say whether the personal officer scheme has been affected by staffing changes and staffing practices?
Thomas Bailey
Absolutely. With the spurs that I work on, because the staffing pool we have is so small, you find yourself working in various different places throughout the day, so forming any sort of positive relationship with the prisoners in your care is extremely difficult to do when you are barged from pillar to post throughout the whole day.
Chair
What about the actual allocation of personal officers to prisoners?
Sukhvinder Buparai
In terms of allocation, it depends on whether you are following the NOMS model. The NOMS model has changed now, I think, and it is no longer a mandatory requirement to have a system in place where you allocate prisoners to prison officers. The new policy talks of prison officers being positive role models towards prisoners, and that is a sort of new way forward for the role of the personal officer. It is difficult for prison officers to be positive role models for prisoners, partly due to the consistency issue caused by the short-staffing in prisons that we have historically faced. Prison officers do not know from day to day where they are going to be posted, so it is very difficult for anything to happen, as such.
Chair
Thanks very much, Mr Bailey, Mr Buparai and Mr Gillan. We are very grateful for your help this morning. We are running a little late, but we are moving on now to hear from the Independent Monitoring Boards. Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses
David Pinchin, Independent Monitoring Board Chair, HMYOI Isis, and Carole Homan, Independent Monitoring Board Chair, HMP Belmarsh, gave evidence
Chair
Welcome, Mr Pinchin and Ms Homan. I think we have to congratulate you, Ms Homan, because you have been honoured with an MBE very recently. Congratulations.
Carole Homan
Thank you.
Chair
Mr Penzer from the Thameside IMB would have liked to be with us but was not free to be here today, but he has given us some comprehensive written evidence on some of the questions.
Andy McDonald
Could you tell me what has been the overall impact on your respective prisons of the benchmarking process, and particularly whether staffing levels and staff training are sufficient to run a decent and safe regime for prisoners?
Carole Homan
In Belmarsh, as you have heard, the new regime was introduced during the summer because of the staff shortages, and the staff shortages these things were basically due to high sickness levels and the summer holidays and a failure to be able to run the regime as it was before. It was a good precursor to September, when benchmarking was introduced, and a split regime is being operated. Two house blocks are on domestics and two house blocks are on purposeful activity. I think it has been introduced smoothly and is running quite well.
David Pinchin
Thank you very much, sir, for asking us to give you some thoughts today. I am very grateful to you for the invitation. What a question, about benchmarking. It is a big question. Our concerns go back a couple of years at least—we have mentioned this in our annual report—and certainly our main concerns all started around the beginning of last year, in 2013, when Isis was not permitted to do any external recruitment. We made that point to the Secretary of State in our annual report, and it had a big impact from the word go in the early part of 2013, so much so that come the summer of 2013 the Governor had no choice—we completely understood where he was coming from—but to go to a restricted regime. That is in a way an advance of benchmarking itself. Given all the other things that have been going on, with fair and sustainable prior to that, problems with beds being given, the prison closure programme and somebody somewhere getting some of those figures wrong, which prevented external recruitment during 2013, it came as no surprise to us that the regime had to be altered. It was, from September last year, supposedly for a temporary period of a few weeks. That is still ongoing today and it is a very serious situation there.
Chair
This is Isis, as described previously by Mr Bailey?
David Pinchin
Correct, this is at Isis. The result of that restricted regime is that almost immediately it halved the time of purposeful activity available to the offenders. 40% are now locked up in their house blocks each and every working day, and this is still going on. That is what we are most concerned about—that even though that recruitment was not allowed in 2013 and it has now been reinstated, there is external recruitment going on now, but the process is so slow that the prison has still been unable to go back to a whole regime because the prison is still so short. They are currently 24 prison officers short as of today, so it is no surprise that the prison cannot go back to what it set out to do. It is a very good prison, it is well built, it has great facilities, and it is not able to do what it should be doing as a trainer.
Andy McDonald
Which recent prison policies have had the most beneficial and most detrimental impacts on the operation of your prisons in your view—the good and the bad?
David Pinchin
I think I have done a bit of the bad. Just before I move on, one of the things that my board has been so frustrated about is the reaction to our annual report and bringing these issues to ministerial attention. The responses we have had have been, to say the least, mealy-mouthed about where we stand and the seriousness or the lack of seriousness of it. On that whole business I mentioned to you about not being able to recruit last year, twice our ministerial responses have said, “Yes, indeed, Isis was not permitted to appoint, but can I reassure you that there was no recruitment ban?” By any stretch of the imagination, that has to be a political comment—
Chair
It is a Yes Minister comment.
David Pinchin
—that just leaves us speechless.
Chair
That is normal for us.
David Pinchin
Yes. I have heard it before many times, believe me. Coming back to what you asked about the bad, there is no doubt that the bad is in relation to what that regime has meant for the offenders. They have not been able to experience the education and the work opportunities that they should have had. Even two weeks ago, because of this same situation, we had the prison locked down for two days. There was no education and no employment. I do not blame Grahame Hawkings for this at all. He was seriously short of staff, but it happened. Those sorts of bad things are continuing to happen. On the safety side, which maybe you are alluding to, because the regime is now slightly more consistent, at least people know what they are going to have to tolerate.
Andy McDonald
What about the incentives and earned privileges scheme and the changes to that? Did that happen?
David Pinchin
I would agree with previous figures about that. In the main, we get offenders who have already been through other prisons, so they are used to the introductory grading. So it has not had as much effect as some people thought it would.
Carole Homan
With regard to the IEP scheme, when initially it was revised in November, the prisoners in Belmarsh had a perception that it was a double jeopardy, in that they were perhaps losing an enhanced status to go down to standard or from standard down to basic, and they were also being adjudicated. A lot of work went into trying to explain to the prisoners that in fact it is not double jeopardy, and that that is allowable and that they can be adjudicated and lose part of their status. We as a board are not getting any prisoner complaints about that now, although we did in the initial stages last November.
David Pinchin
The same for us, really. There were lots of issues about property, but I have to say that the Governor, Grahame Hawkings, took a very pragmatic view about a lot of it and dealt with individual cases on a very sensible basis and we support that.
Andy McDonald
You have already touched on this to some degree already, but are your views and recommendations taken into account by prison management and by NOMS or do you feel that they do not?
David Pinchin
I have a regular meeting with the Governor, and I would regard that relationship as a challenging one, but it is one that I think he appreciates. We are there on a daily basis, my members—not every day, but we are there weekly, doing our rota visits. We hear applications from the offenders and we bring to his attention things that we think are wrong. I have to say, over the years we have been able to be influential over getting things to change. We do not have any power, but we are quite influential.
Carole Homan
For us at Belmarsh, we have a good working relationship with the senior management team, and latterly, on the arrival of the new Governor, Simon Cartwright, the board has now received monthly bulletins affording a more transparent view of statistics in the prison that we had great difficulty in obtaining before. That has been a huge improvement there. I would agree with David Pinchin that the impact of the annual report, which is a huge amount of work for volunteers, is minimal. The prison always answer and react in detail to any issues that we raise, but I fear that the impact on NOMS and the MOJ is almost non-existent.
David Pinchin
Yes, I think that is part of our frustration too: we get a lot of good reaction locally from the Governor and his senior management team, but we do tend to fear that reaction on the wider issues—such as the ones I have mentioned already on recruitment and the processes, and also on the other big issue that we mentioned before about OMU and the backlog of OASys sentence planning reports—has not helped us at all, and both issues are as yet unresolved.
Andy McDonald
Let us extend that a little. What is your view on the relationship between the National Council for IMBs, the IMBs for each prison and NOMS? Does the same sort of tone apply there as well? What is your view?
David Pinchin
I find that a difficult question to answer. My own personal relationship with the president of the National Council is perfectly good. I have been around this business of IMBs for a long time, so I do know the National Council members. The problem is that I do not think the National Council fully understands what its role is. We certainly do not want, as volunteers working in individual prisons, to have such a dictatorial approach from the National Council that we have no flexibility to operate within our prisons at all. That would be quite wrong, because all the prisons are different, they all have their different requirements and needs and different populations, but on the other hand, we do need good advice about good practice and bad practice, and quite regularly we do get good guidance from the National Council. It fulfils a very important role, but I am not absolutely sure that the governance arrangements of IMBs have been properly sorted.
Chair
Do you want to say something about that?
Carole Homan
Yes, if I may. We have had no London representative for the London prisons on the National Council for over a year. The workload is heavy, and experienced members do not seem to be attracted to the post. At Belmarsh we have had the head of the National Council come to one of our board meetings, but other than that, we have very little dealing with the National Council. I think the National Council should have clear guidelines as to purpose, and should be working for IMBs and directed by the needs of IMBs working with prisons. I also think it might be considered appropriate to co-opt members with areas of particular expertise for a short time for a particular piece of work, and even perhaps consider co-opting outside professions that do not have a link with prisons so that their expertise can be used. We seem to be very parochial in the National Council.
Mr Llwyd
What is your current assessment of the levels of prisoner safety within your prisons, and if there are any recent trends, what are they and what causes them?
Carole Homan
On safety, the statistics that I have for violent incidents show that they have apparently gone down since last year. Assaults on staff in 2013 were 55; up to 30 September, they are now 48 this year. Assaults on prisoners in 2014 to 30 September were 44; in 2013 they were 50. I think it is comparable, really.
Mr Llwyd
They do not seem to be going down, do they, with respect? There are several months left of this year.
Carole Homan
Yes. There are several months left, yes, but hopefully that will be the case. The other aspect of safety, which is the self-harm that prisoners do, has definitely reduced, although we have had two deaths in custody this year. I think the safety of prisoners is paramount for prison officers and for the senior management team. ACCTs are taken when prisoners are exhibiting signs of self-harm, so I think it is coped with relatively well in the prison.
David Pinchin
Isis has a difficult population. It is a young population, it is a very volatile population and the incidents of fights and minor incidents occur all the time, but the statistics suggest that on self-harm, for example, there has been very little change recently. It spiked a bit in the summer, and that has happened before, funnily enough, but overall the figures are stable. On ACCTs, we have just had a month in October where there have been more ACCTs opened this year than in the same month last year, but I do not think there is anything particularly significant about that. We did have one attempted suicide last week. Assaults on staff are still a concern and have continued to occur. The number of instances of assaults on staff has gone up, and it spiked in July, also in the summer of this year. There have been 39 assaults on staff so far this year, and there were 35 in the whole of last year. Offender on offender assaults have gone down, and quite significantly—136 so far, against 254 last year. That may well have something to do with the more consistent approach to the regime.
Andy McDonald
The more restricted regime.
David Pinchin
The restricted regime, yes, because they are locked in their cells more often, so it is not surprising in a way. Of course, we mentioned the personal officer scheme earlier on, and there is not much of a personal officer scheme in place in the prison because of the shortage of staff. Officers fear that they do not have enough time and are often in different places. They do not know from one day to the next where they are going to be working, so the opportunities to have access to the personal officer scheme are very limited. That in turn might introduce feelings of a lack of safety on the part of the offenders, and of course it has an impact on staff morale, which I have to say varies quite considerably. At times it is quite low.
Mr Llwyd
Your 2013 report mentioned the worrying level of violence at Isis.
David Pinchin
Yes.
Mr Llwyd
What changes were made after that report, and could they have fed into the latest statistics?
David Pinchin
Yes, I think they could do, but I think through the very strong efforts of the Governor and his team at Isis in terms of the partnerships that he referred to earlier, a lot has been done to resolve—or not resolve, but certainly reduce—the incidents of violence. The very presence of Trident in the prison has made a big difference. The relationship with MOPAC, the Mayor’s office, with the local borough commander, with the CPS and with people undertaking impact statements after issues of violence, and the fact that the police have now taken to charging more people who offend in prison, has all had a big effect on making a more positive approach to violence generally.
Mr Llwyd
I have a short final question for you both. It is short, but I think it is an important one. We have heard today that the prisoner complaints regime is good. In your opinion, is it effective, and are there any areas that the board or you yourselves as representatives would seek to see improved?
Carole Homan
Yes. I do think that the complaints system could be. At times some of the answers given by prison officers to complaints, when we look at them as board members, are not what we consider adequate, but then there is provision for us to pass that on to a member of the senior management team to highlight the fact that we do not think that the answer is fit for purpose. Then that is dealt with and the senior management come back to us to let us know what the outcome of that is. I think in Belmarsh we have unfortunately had incidents of prisoners who feel that their complaints are not being listened to, who go on a dirty protest. That is not decent for the prisoner who is perpetrating the protest, it is not decent for the officers who have to handle it, and it is not decent for outside people like ourselves in education and all the rest of the services to cope with. It is also very expensive to manage. So that is the final resort that a prisoner might feel they have to make a protest.
David Pinchin
Yes, I would endorse that. I do think the quality of the responses that the offenders get at times has not been very good, and also that they try to manipulate the system so that they will go up the line quicker. Mr Hawkings was saying that they would sometimes write to him, as opposed to going through the process. We applaud the fact that now there is going to be a greater focus on using the application system first before entering the complaints process. Certainly all the stats suggest that the complaints are answered within a good time. Having said that, the offender will often come to us as a means of circumventing the system too. You might be interested to know that we get a lot of complaints—or we call them applications—every week. They vary between 20 and 35 a week, which is a lot, and we are not investigators, but we certainly have to make sure that we can sort something out quickly or make sure that the prison is doing so properly.
John Howell
I listened to your earlier comments about purposeful activity. How effective do you think it is for prisoners?
David Pinchin
There are some extremely good examples of good outcomes, both educationally and work-wise; there are some very good outcomes. Through the job fairs, people have gone out into jobs—we know about those and we have seen the good examples of that. That is a great credit to the jails doing that. Having said that, not enough people are going to purposeful activity, for the reasons we have talked about earlier, so the very fact that they are not doing as much as they should be means that the job of the training prison is not as effective as it should be. But what is reassuring is the number of good outcomes. Equally, the education provider, which is A4E, have struggled to provide staffing themselves. You probably know about this and there is a question mark about their future.
John Howell
I was going to ask you a supplementary question about A4E and what effect its withdrawal would have.
David Pinchin
I do not think it has had much of an effect yet. It certainly will do, obviously, but I do not know what the arrangements are going to be. I understand they are sub judice at the moment, but the very fact that A4E have not been able to recruit staff themselves, and have often not been able to provide back-up when staff are sick or on leave, obviously means that those opportunities are missed and offenders do not get across to education. Sometimes, because of the shortage of staff on the wings, the offenders cannot get across to education and workshops anyway, so there is a dual problem there. Sometimes it is both, sometimes it is one, sometimes it is the other.
Carole Homan
On purposeful activity, we have, for instance, a breakfast pack workshop. It is not what I would classify purposeful activity, it is just mindless packaging. It does, however, encourage the work ethic for a prisoner to physically go to work. With regard to staffing by A4E and tutors for the workshops, you have heard previously from other representatives that tutors are now being sought outside of prison officers. For us in Belmarsh, there is an added dimension to recruitment to both the education and workshop providers, in that they have to have a counter-terrorism clearance and the board has to have the same clearance. We find it extremely frustrating, the length of time it takes to get this clearance and whether in fact everybody needs to have the clearance, because not all facets of the staff have contact with the prisoners who need that level of clearance. If there were less going through the process, maybe it would be sped up. But most of all, our contention as the monitoring board is that it has taken me since the recruitment process in September 2013 until September 2014 to have one appointee take up post. It is so difficult to complete the form online, it is not fit for purpose. You cannot complete it on an Apple Mac. There are various parts of the form that are very difficult, because there is a drop-down menu and if you do not fit into the category, it is extremely difficult to bypass that. I do think that that should be looked at, because it affects IMB, chaplaincy, and obviously officers applying for jobs. I do not think it is fit for purpose.
Chair
Mr Pinchin, we are running out of time, but I understand you have concerns about the reclassification for resettlement.
David Pinchin
Only in the sense that we have seen recently offenders being transferred back to Isis from other jails, and that has reignited some of the gangland relationships and has caused some additional violent episodes. The through-the-gate policy, which obviously one supports in terms of trying to reduce reoffending and so on, does have that as a potential problem, so I would just sound a note of warning about it.
Chair
Somebody should be aware that that can take place.
David Pinchin
It is also about the response to our concerns by NOMS and Ministers. It frustrates us more than anything else.
Chair
Thank you very much, Mr Pinchin and Ms Homan. We are very grateful for your evidence today. Oral evidence: Prisons: planning and policies, HC 309 4