Other
1 The Minister will wish to note the Board’s dismay at the refusal to extend a member’s tenure, condemning the Board to two members in 2026, against a complement of 16 in a prison with some 1,240 prisoners. This will make it impossible to deliver all our statutory requirements; by necessity, there will be periods when we are unable to provide duty cover, and it will take longer to answer prisoners’ applications. Also, if one of the two remaining members needs to resign, due to personal circumstances, for example, the other member will not attempt to continue solo, without peer review. Thus, the Board could close at short notice.
Other
Repeated
2 The Board is, again, disappointed that, despite repeated requests for change, the IMB recruitment process continues to be inadequate and inappropriate to support the timely recruitment of candidates with the necessary qualities and skills.
Complaints/Property
Repeated
5 While the number of property complaints on transfer have fallen since last year, they are still far higher than they should be, and continue to cause much anguish for prisoners. Will the Prison Service implement a system of recording the number of complaints about missing property on transfer as a specific metric for every prison?
Estate/Conditions
Repeated
6 What is the timeline to bring the heating and hot water systems for Woodlands up to the required standard, so that the prisoners are not continually being disrupted in their ability to wash, shower and clean their crockery?
Education/Purposeful Activity
Staggering 35% reduction in the training budget at a training prison, leading to loss of activity places and poor provision for work and training.
Healthcare
Repeated
Inadequate arrangements for the provision of social care for prisoners after-hours.
Complaints/Property
Repeated
The total number of internal complaints and appeals (Comp 1s and Comp 1As) has increased from 2,945 in the last reporting period to 3,751 in the year in review. The Board is disappointed to note, again, that this high number of internal complaints includes a disproportionately high number of complaints from a relatively small number of ‘serial complainers’ and that many of the issues could have been handled by staff or key workers. The Board is aware that the complaints procedure is being reviewed so that more of them can be dealt with more efficiently and we look forward to seeing the impact.
Healthcare
The in-patient buildings have lifts to take prisoners who have mobility issues to the first-floor level. For many years, they have been unreliable and frequently broken. This has had a huge impact on the healthcare team delivering controlled drugs to prisoners waiting on the ground floor. In practice, two staff members have to chaperone the secure medical box to each prisoner for dispensing individually, thereby requiring multiple trips up and down the stairs to attend each of the prisoners. This makes for an expedient but inefficient resource-heavy situation. For the prisoners, this also means waiting for extended periods, often outside in inclement weather and with a limit of times allowed by their regimes. Capital funding for replacement lifts has been submitted, but has not been approved in the reporting year. While the capital expenditure is awaited, there is a reluctance to undertake extensive and expensive repairs to lifts that will be replaced, added to which, some parts are unavailable.
Estate/Conditions
However, we are disappointed to note that the roof of the workshops’ building was leaking for the whole of the reporting period, without any clear plan to repair or replace it.
Resettlement/Release
Since the last report, the offender behaviour programmes have been changed nationally, from Kaizen and Horizon to Building Choices. Unfortunately, there was a gap between the old programmes being withdrawn and the staff being trained on the new programmes, leaving some prisoners unable to complete the necessary courses. The broad range of programmes is overseen at a national level by intervention services and they briefed parole boards on what was happening. However, parole boards still must manage the risk and there was a reluctance to recommend a prisoner release if he hadn't completed a programme that had previously been identified as necessary on his OASys, resulting in parole delays for some prisoners. The problem was made worse by a rule that limits programmes to only two or three prisoners who maintain their innocence in any group a challenge at Littlehey, where a high proportion of prisoners do so.
Resettlement/Release
Also, there is a mismatch between programmes and OMU/parole boards in prioritising prisoners for courses. Programmes will try to schedule prisoners onto courses two years before their release date. However, they have to prioritise recalls, which often disrupts planning schedules. National policy prevents programmes from scheduling preparation for a category D move until much closer to release, even though this move can occur up to five years before release.