Q1 Chairman: Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts. Today we are looking at the operational performance of PFI prisons. We welcome as our witnesses Mr Martin Narey, Commissioner for Correctional Services at the Home Office, you are very welcome once again to our Committee; John Steele, the Correctional Services Director of Strategy, Finance and Competition; Phil Wheatley, who is the Director General of the Prison Service; Kevin Beeston, the Executive Chairman of Serco; David Banks, the Chief Operating Officer of Group 4 Falck Global Solutions Ltd; Veronica O'Dea. Thank you very much for coming to see us this afternoon, we are very grateful. Could you please turn to Figure 1 on pages 2 and 3? If you look at that interesting figure about the reporting lines and information flows between the prison service and PFI prisons, you will see in the box at the bottom of the page that there are 48 key performance targets (KPTs), 61 prison service standards. Why do you need so many?
Mr Narey: Phil Wheatley, my successor as Director General needs that many to have a firm grasp about the whole activity of the prison service. It is a very complex organisation and he needs to have comprehensive information on how prisons are performing. We do not need that many in the future management of private sector prisons and work under way now with the private sector prisons is looking at ways of refining the current system of performance measurement. For example, we started very cautiously when this venture with Altcourse and Parc was a completely new initiative; we were very cautious about how we would measure performance. We feel a little more confident now and the contracts for the next two prisons will be much briefer in performance requirements, for example, they will give credit for good performance as well as take away points for poor performance.
Q2 Chairman: Some of these are required monthly, are they not? That places a considerable burden on the governors of the prisons, does it not?
Mr Narey: Indeed and in fully contracted Ashford and Peterborough two thirds of the measures will be measured annually rather than quarterly to reduce that burden.
Q3 Chairman: Thank you very much for that. Could you please turn to page 22 and look at paragraph 2.8? This surprised me when I read it. Could you tell us why some targets are set higher for PFI prisons than for public prisons? I see particularly, "For example, the average purposeful activity target for local prisons operating in the public sector is 20.6 hours per prisoner per week. The equivalent figure for PFI
and privately-managed local prisons is 29.5 hours". Obviously a key aim of this Committee is to try to get more purposeful activity in prisons, so why is a lower target set for public prisons?
Mr Narey: There are two reasons for that. The first is that when we were setting these contracts, we wanted to get the very best value for money, so we set high targets. This was also a target which we hoped the public sector prison service, as it now is, was moving towards.
Q4 Chairman: Are they moving towards it?
Mr Narey: In the last 10 years on a yearly basis the amount of purposeful activity provided in the prison service has increased by an incredible 32 million hours.
Q5 Chairman: Stop there. I am not so interested in large figures like 32 million hours. What I am interested in and what the Committee are interested in is how many hours of purposeful activity every prisoner is doing every week. You must be able to tell me that.
Mr Narey: Yes, I can tell you that. I was trying to explain why it has not gone up. Despite huge increases the size of the population has eaten up that measure. We measure purposeful activity on the basis of number of hours per prisoner per week. If the population had not grown from 44,000 10 years ago to 73,000, nearly 74,000 today, then the amount of purposeful activity per prisoner would be much higher than it is at the moment: it is about 24 hours at the moment and it would have been 30 plus hours.
Q6 Chairman: It is important that members realise that some of this purposeful activity is not very purposeful, is it? Some of it is cleaning the wing.
Mr Narey: That is right. My view, which I think we discussed when I last appeared, is that we should be concentrating much more on those aspects of purposeful activity which we know or believe reduce re-offending, such as education and offending behaviour programmes.
Q7 Chairman: We had a very interesting visit on Wednesday to Altcourse and we were very impressed with the PFI prison we went round. I talked to lots of prisoners there and they were obviously delighted to be there rather than at Walton, down the road in Liverpool, where you are banged up for 23 hours out of 24 hours a day. Is that a satisfactory state of affairs?
Mr Narey: It is not satisfactory. It is not always the case, but it certainly is the case that the regime at Altcourse is a much better one for prisoners in a number of ways than at Liverpool.
Q8 Chairman: What progress are you making to match the standards which are being achieved at Altcourse and which are clearly not being achieved at Walton?
Mr Narey: We have put Walton prison on notice that if in a six-month period they do not significantly improve their performance on a range of measures, including regime activities, then I may take the decision to contract Liverpool out of the private sector. In that case I will not allow a public sector bid.
Q9 Chairman: Thank you very much for that. Could you turn to Appendix 2, which is on pages 38 to 41, you will be familiar with it, it concerns the poor performance of Ashfield? I described Altcourse, which is a very good performing PFI prison, but Ashfield of course has a chequered history. Why did you not terminate this PFI contract?
Mr Narey: I came very near to doing that, but I did not need to. I took the unprecedented step of putting in public service management of the prison. The next step after that would have been to go to Premier's lenders to get them to find a new provider before possibly terminating the contract. Eventually I did not need to and despite very grave difficulties with Ashfield-very few prisons have caused me more concern as Director General-we managed to pull it round. I was at Ashfield on Friday, probably my eighth or ninth visit in the last few years, and I saw very, very significant signs of real improvement and it is on the way at last to being a decent prison for young people.
Q10 Chairman: Veronica O'Dea is the Director of the Young Offenders Institution. Do you want to say anything briefly at this moment about how you are improving matters there?
Ms O'Dea: Yes. We have changed the senior management and have put in a new team committed to that and managed to slow down the staff attrition; the staff are staying longer, are more confident. We have put in place different structures and systems and the place is getting better.