2.5 Data collected by private prisons are usually monitored internally by a compliance monitor employed by the contractor, and also by the on-site Prison Service staff led by the Controller. Contractors also benefit from more up-to-date IT systems which assist in the collection and analysis of data. We found the data collected from private prisons to be of a generally high quality. There were effective systems put in place to check the validity of the information collected by both the contractors' teams and the Controllers.
2.6 We also examined the data collected by public prisons on their performance against KPTs. There were 48 KPTs in 2002/03, though on average, only 40 of these will apply to an individual prison. In public prisons, the internal monitoring of data varied considerably as did the validity of the data. Some prisons carried out spot checks on data such as the amount of purposeful activity being recorded; others relied on the data being provided by wing staff and accepted that this may not always be reliable.
2.7 One option to improve the quality of KPT data from public prisons would be to put the equivalent of a Controller's team in each public prison to audit the information provided. This approach is already used in those public prisons which are implementing an in-house bid following market testing and operate under a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the Prison Service17. The Prison Service considers that it would cost approximately £5 million a year to apply this approach to the other public prisons and did not feel that this would be cost-effective. It is therefore developing self-audit systems in each prison. It also hopes to improve the ease with which data is transferred, both between prisons and from individual prisons to its head office, with a new information system which is part of the planned Quantum IT project.
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17 The SLA operates in a similar way to a contract between a private contractor and the Prison Service.