Prisons: planning and policies

Accommodating the recent rise in the prison population has been achieved without increasing crowding to a great extent. But it is worrying that despite the Government’s efforts to supply sufficient prison places to meet demand, the proportion of prisons that are overcrowded is growing, and the proportion of prisoners held in crowded conditions remains at almost a quarter. It deeply concerns us that as a result of a shortage of prison places in London, NOMS is building prisons fully intending to hold more prisoners in them than they have capacity for, as the National Audit Office reported happened at HMP Thameside.

Overcrowding is a more significant issue than the way it was described to us by the Secretary of State, who characterised it simply as people sharing a cell designed to hold fewer people. When a prison holds many more people than it was designed for this impacts more broadly on regimes and the capacity of prisons to rehabilitate through the provision of purposeful activity. If greater overcrowding is accepted as de facto policy then it is important that NOMS is clear about the wider capability of the prison estate to absorb more prisoners when they are building new facilities, expanding existing ones, and determining an individual prison’s decent and safe level of capacity. Current measures of overcrowding do not facilitate this, so we recommend that NOMS should design a broader measure which better reflects the reality of prison conditions.

We stand by the view expressed in our report on Youth Justice that small custodial units are safer and more humane for children and young people. Notwithstanding the potential educational benefits of secure colleges, we question why the Ministry of Justice sees it necessary to dedicate scarce funding to develop such a large-scale establishment, when the number of children requiring secure accommodation is shrinking rapidly.

There is some evidence about the difficulty the prison system has had in providing appropriately for young adult prisoners, and there is no definitive answer about the best forms of establishment to meet their particular needs. It is clear to us that there is a need for NOMS to ensure that there is dedicated responsibility for this group both at an institutional and national level. This is an issue that could be further explored by the Justice Select Committee in the next Parliament.

The estate modernisation policy of closing of old inefficient prisons and replacing them with new more cost-effective ones is a good one in principle. We recognise in particular that some prisons have been operating, and some continue to operate, with decrepit buildings that hinder effective rehabilitation; and we note that redesign and re-configuration provide the opportunity for new technologies and their resulting efficiencies to be embedded in the infrastructure of the prison estate. It is unfortunate that to date the resources for capital investment in new technologies in public sector prisons have not been found while private sector prisons have given priority to investment in new technology. We recommend that the Ministry carry out 68 Prisons: planning and policies a cost-benefit analysis of implementation of in-cell technology across the public sector prison estate.

A policy of replacing older establishments with newer ones is resulting in the creation of large, multi-purpose prisons, while questions arising from available evidence on the relationship between the size and effectiveness of institutions do not appear to have been addressed by the Government. The success of the Government’s policy also depends crucially on the ability of NOMS to predict demand for places with sufficient accuracy, and to provide places accordingly. The time taken to build new prisons, and their associated costs, means that it can take several decades to yield savings. In addition, these savings are dependent on the consequent closure of older and more expensive places, which might not be possible if future demand tends towards the upper end of what are inevitably imperfect projections. We welcome the fact that the cost to the public purse of a prison place has fallen to some extent, but it remains high and it is unlikely to fall significantly while the population continues to rise.

A key question is whether making savings in the prison estate inevitably results in a one-size-fits-all approach to prisons policy. Our evidence suggests there is a definite risk of this following recent decisions on custodial provision for children, young adults and women in prison. We consider that the custodial estate needs to be designed so that it meets the different needs of different sectors of the prison population. Reconfiguring the estate could provide an important opportunity to reconsider the best forms of custodial provision for key cohorts of prisoners, for example, through smaller, more geographically dispersed, units for both females and children. Instead, decisions have been taken to retain the recent emphasis on a smaller number of large establishments.

It also appears to us that there are some consequences of modernisation that have not been planned for properly. When prisons are going through transition, whether that takes the form of opening, changing purpose, merging, or becoming managed by another sector, levels of performance are typically affected, at least in the short- term. There may well be unanticipated and unquantified costs of reconfiguring the prison estate in this manner. If the pressure to expand capacity continues, so too will the need for ongoing adaptations of the estate, with the risk that some establishments may be in a constant state of flux.

It may be prudent to build prisons to standard specifications to minimise the need for rebuilding them should they change purpose, this can lead to prisoners being held in accommodation or conditions that are disproportionate to the risk that they pose, which is not conducive to rehabilitation. The approach to security in prisons which we saw in Denmark assumes that the use of open prisons should be the default, with restrictions minimised as much as possible. This is essentially the opposite of the approach taken in England and Wales, and we believe there is merit in the Danish approach. The profile of the prison population is changing, including becoming older, and in some respects more challenging. In this context, we recommend that the Government review the way prisoners of different security categorisations are accommodated to ensure that it remains appropriate and proportionate to the risks presented by 21st century prisoners.

The Government’s working prisons policy is a worthy aim and prison industries are becoming more common. Nevertheless, it remains the case that most prisons do not have the facilities for workshops on a scale that would enable the majority of prisoners to do work which will equip them for employment on release. Where there are such facilities, the aims of involving employers on a commercial basis and normalising a working week for prisoners are not achievable without sufficient staff to enable prisoners to be unlocked for a full working day. This appears to be much easier to achieve in prisons dedicated to that purpose.

The current commissioning arrangements for prison work and learning and skills do not appear to support the integration of these two vital aspects of rehabilitation. We recommend that the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills take steps to ensure that the next round of commissioning for learning and skills in prisons prioritises arrangements for embedding learning in the various forms of purposeful activity in which prisoners are engaged. In the shorter term, we recommend that the Government should review the combined impact of the various policies—the differential in remuneration when prisoners are in employment, the Victim Surcharge and Advanced Learning Loans—so as to ensure that they do not disincentivise to prisoners from developing their of learning and skills, and hence future employability.

In previous Reports we have commended the Government’s creation of a nationwide network of resettlement prisons. It should not, however, confuse the priorities of multiple purpose establishments, and dilute the priority accorded to resettlement needs elsewhere in the estate. This initiative to improve provision in the last three months of a sentence should not come at the expense of rehabilitative support for the majority of prisoners who are serving medium to long-term sentences. If time in non-resettlement prisons has been used productively, prisoners will be in a better position to prepare for resettlement. We recommend that NOMS develops measures of performance to ensure that the quality of rehabilitative provision for prisoners who are not in the final three months of their sentence is maintained, and publishes them regularly.

There are also some immediate issues which must be rectified as a matter of priority if support for offenders in moving from custody into the community is to work to best effect. These include as a matter of urgency resolving staffing shortages and clearing the backlog of risk assessments. Both issues are likely to hamper considerably the efforts of the new providers of Community Rehabilitation Companies as they seek to implement their through-the-gate services. There is a risk that such services could be rendered inoperable as a result of failures in the system that are the responsibility of NOMS. We ask the Ministry to clarity in its response to this Report whether it has any financial obligations towards Community Rehabilitation Companies in the event that they are unable to operate effectively because of failures in the system that are beyond their control.

We agree with most witnesses to our inquiry that the benchmarking of prisons to develop more efficient regimes is in principle an effective way of reducing 70 Prisons: planning and policies expenditure more rapidly than would be possible through prison-by-prison competition. We also support the phased approach to the implementation of benchmarking which NOMS has adopted.

All available indicators, including those recorded by HM Inspectorate of Prisons and NOMS itself, are pointing towards a rapid deterioration in standards of safety and levels of performance over the last year or so. Most concerning to us is that since 2012 there has been a 38% rise in self-inflicted deaths, a 9% rise in self-harm, a 7% rise in assaults, and 100% rise in incidents of concerted indiscipline. Complaints to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman and other sources have risen. There are fewer opportunities for rehabilitation, including diminished access to education, training, libraries, religious leaders, and offending behaviour courses.

A quarter of the staff who have left the Prison Service in the year to September 2014 resigned. NOMS ought to have foreseen that major reductions in staffing, less favourable pay and conditions of employment, and significant changes to prison regimes, would lead to a rise in people opting to leave the Prison Service, regardless of the buoyancy of the external labour market. This underlines the importance of retention as well as recruitment. As NOMS is highly dependent on its staff to run well-functioning prisons, and it is important that the Service acts rapidly on the evidence of recent surveys to ensure that staff feel valued and are given appropriate support to work in circumstances which are challenging at the best of times, but currently particularly pressured. Given the importance of relationships between prisoners and prison staff we do not believe that making further detrimental changes to terms and conditions of staff is sustainable as a means of controlling costs if the prison population continues to rise.

It is possible that the Ministry might be taking the matter of the sudden rise in self- inflicted deaths seriously internally, but downplaying publicly its significance, and the potential role that changes in prisons policy might be playing in it, is ill-advised as it could be construed as complacency and a lack of urgency. The Ministry told us they had looked hard for evidence of factors which could be causing an increase in suicide rates, self-harm and levels of assault in prisons. Worryingly, they had not managed to arrive at any hypothesis as to why this has taken place. In our view it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that the confluence of estate modernisation and re-configuration, efficiency savings, staffing shortages, and changes in operational policy, including to the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme, have made a significant contribution to the deterioration in safety.

Private sector prisons have not been immune from the imposition of efficiency savings but once their contracts have been agreed they are insulated to some extent. They also benefit from their greater ability to make capital investments in the hope of recouping the benefit over the lifetime of the contract, while public sector processes restrain such investment. We conclude that public sector prisons need greater capacity to invest in cost-effective and operationally beneficial improvements in the way that the private sector does.

Both public and private sector prisons have been in a state of flux over the last two years, for a host of reasons. These include the implementation of new operational Prisons: planning and policies 71 policies, staffing reductions, populations changing and stabilising as prisons have opened, closed or re-roled, transfers from the private sector to the public sector and vice versa, and large-scale building projects on existing prison sites. It would be surprising if there had not been some adverse impact on performance. We believe that the key explanatory factor for the obvious deterioration in standards over the last year is that a significant number of prisons have been operating at staffing levels below what is necessary to maintain reasonable, safe and rehabilitative regimes. Having fewer prison officers can tip the power balance, leading to less safety and more intimidation and violence on wings. Interim measures such as restricted regimes and the national detached duty scheme have been adopted as a necessary means of minimising the risks of operating with insufficient staff, but these measures themselves have an adverse impact on the ability of the prison system to achieve rehabilitation and reduce reoffending.

The Government has been reluctant to acknowledge the serious nature of the operational and safety challenges facing prisons, and the role of its own policy decisions in creating them. Some difficulties could arise in any process of change, but it is clear to us that the Ministry had not planned adequately for the risk of staffing shortages, and failed to act sufficiently quickly to mitigate them. This unsatisfactory outcome and sluggish response has risked jeopardising the safety of prisoners and prison staff. We note that NOMS believes that these problems will begin to recede, and that the situation will have stabilised by April 2015, but we found convincing evidence that more pressurised working conditions for staff are compounding the staffing problem. Over the medium to long-term it is our view that turnover is likely to remain at undesirably high levels if some public sector prisons are operating with insufficient staff

The Ministry remains optimistic that the benchmarking policy will prove a safe and effective means of reducing costs, but the current difficulties in many prisons highlights the hazards of seeking to run an estate operating at 98% capacity with staffing levels which afford too little flexibility. We welcome a more robust response to assaults on staff as a response to incidents of violence, but the real answer lies in staffing levels and regimes which minimise such violence. We recommend, especially in the light of the Government’s acceptance that there is now a more challenging mix of prisoners, that staffing benchmarks should be altered upwards to ensure prisons are able to have the capacity to return to the levels of operational performance which prevailed early in this Parliament. In its response to this report we also request the Ministry of Justice to provide a full update on progress which has been made in restoring staffing levels, and to set out what other steps it is taking to address low staff morale and improve the retention of staff, across the whole prison estate and in areas of particular shortfalls.

The Ministry’s inability to provide us with fully worked out costings of its reforms is a recurring issue for us. We request the Ministry to provide in its response to this Report an analysis of the impact additional staffing and recruitment costs will have on the Ministry’s ability to meet its spending targets for the 2014–15 financial year, along with an assessment of whether the additional staff being recruited will be sufficient also to staff the new prison places opening in the spring

Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL) is an effective tool in supporting rehabilitation and can lead to better outcomes than releasing prisoners without preparation from a recent experience of the world outside prison. We recognise that the Government has to ensure that it is operated in a way which recognises legitimate safety concerns and can maintain public trust. While the number of failures are very few, the consequences can be high-profile and tragic. Nevertheless, if as a result of the restrictions imposed considerably fewer prisoners receive ROTL opportunities, the chances of effective resettlement for them will be reduced, undermining the Government’s efforts to institute a rehabilitation revolution. In addition, if there is any detrimental impact on Parole Board decisions there would be further upward pressure on the prison population. We recommend that the overall impact of these restrictions on the sustainability and effectiveness of ROTL—which should be based on the presumption that it will be available unless there are strong public safety grounds for refusal in a particular case—be reconsidered as a matter of urgency.

Prison governors in public sector prisons and some private sector prisons are no longer responsible for the sum total of everything that happens within their prison walls. As well as effectively becoming contract managers for provision of services for which they used to be directly responsible, they are constrained in their operational decisions when dirigiste decisions are taken from the centre on such matters as the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme, the ‘lights out’ policy and release on temporary licence. We conclude that relegating governors to an oversight and partnership management role with much reduced discretion undermines their control over the performance and safety of the establishment and their ability to govern their prisons using their professional judgment, as they are trained at public expense to do. We recommend that the National Offender Management Service review the cumulative effect of these changes on prison governors, and report the matter to our successor Committee.

There is a risk that the proliferation of partner organisations providing services to prisons could distract prison management teams from their core role. This potential effect is all the more important when resources are such that reduced staffing levels are impinging on the safety of prisoners and staff for which Governors have ultimate responsibility.

We recommend that NOMS examine the scope for extending self-catering by prisoners.

The main foundation of a safe prison is dynamic security, established through consistent personal contact between officers and prisoners, enabling staff to understand individual prisoners and therefore anticipate risky situations and prevent violence. Prison officers also have a pivotal role to play in prisoners’ rehabilitation. Their involvement in sentencing, planning and resettlement, and enabling prisoners to take responsibility, should be enhanced. It would be counterproductive to reduce their role to one of basic oversight of safety and security. We are not convinced that the Ministry has considered sufficiently, or valued highly enough, the complicated Prisons: planning and policies 73 and difficult nature of work undertaken by frontline prison staff under its benchmarking programme.

It is important that within new ways of working in prisons there is sufficient time to allow for productive interaction between staff and prisoners, which contributes significantly to improving safety and rehabilitative outcomes in prisons. Prisoners themselves have an important role to play in creating effective regimes. We recommend that NOMS encourage the establishment of prison councils and other initiatives which engage prisoners in meaningful dialogue with prison management about the impact of prison management and policies, and which provide a framework of support for prisoners who wish to help each other.

If difficulties experienced by prisoners are not addressed in a timely and effective manner this can compound the problem. Given that there are fewer opportunities for prisoners to raise matters directly with staff, it is important that the more formal prisoner complaints system functions effectively. This would be aided by the wider availability of in-cell technology.

The future role of Independent Monitoring Boards would benefit from further, more detailed, consideration by our successor Committee. We are also concerned at the backlog of complaints now faced by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, and the likely impact of the rise in self-inflicted deaths on his workload. The Ministry must discuss with him how resources can best be made available to manage this. We remain of the view that the independence of HM Chief Inspector of Prisons would be strengthened if he or she reported directly to Parliament.

Within existing building plans the Government would find it difficult to accommodate another unexpected increase in the prison population that deviates from their central range of prediction and moves towards the upper limit. Had the Government not been able to utilise redundant capacity from the youth estate it appears quite likely that the demand for prison places for adults might already have outstripped supply. Unless there are significant changes in both policy and rhetoric on sentencing, there is a continuing risk of unmanageable growth in the prison population.

Insufficient access to rehabilitative activities in prison and the backlog in offender risk assessments are likely to impact adversely on rehabilitative outcomes and hence the effective implementation of through-the-gate support by new providers of Community Rehabilitation Companies. NOMS’ belief that there is sufficient headroom in the system both for the implementation of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms and to allow for a further rise in the prison population is difficult to reconcile with the current staffing shortages.

Given the size of the prison population, and the likely need to continue to make financial savings in the medium term, there is a real danger that savings and rehabilitation could become two contradictory policy agendas. The question of the sustainability of the system cannot continue to be ignored.

The size of the prison budget, the fact that it completely dominates expenditure on crime, the importance of reducing crime, and other problems identified in this report all indicate that we need to re-evaluate how we use custody and alternatives to custody in a cost-effective way which best promotes the safety of the public and reduces future crime. General Elections have a tendency to produce the wrong kind of debate on criminal justice policy, with a competition as to who can sound toughest, rather than an examination of the evidence on what works. This need not be so, and it should certainly not preclude a rational and evidence-based discussion on criminal justice policy in the next Parliament. That task needs to be continued by future governments, by political parties, and by our successors on the Justice Select Committee.