Q11 Chairman: Thank you for that. I am sure we may want to come back to you later in the afternoon and get a better idea of what is going on in Ashfield and why the problems took place there. Could you turn please to Figure 13 on page 25? I find this a rather alarming little graph. It is the prisoners' views on the respect shown to them by staff. How are you going to get prison officers in public prisons to show the same respect towards prisoners as prisoners receive in PFI prisons?
Mr Wheatley: Getting the balance right in the way in which staff treat prisoners is crucial. They have to be able to work closely with prisoners while at the same time not being too trusting of prisoners otherwise there are security problems. Getting that right is difficult. We are working on a number of fronts to improve the way we deal with prisoners in the public sector by recruiting more carefully, by training rather better and for the current climate; obviously people who were recruited 20 years ago received their initial training on the basis of what was happening at that time.
Q12 Chairman: We were told that prison officers bring a lot of baggage with them. Is that correct?
Mr Wheatley: If somebody has been working in the prison service, as they will have been in many cases, for 20 or 30 years, they will have the baggage of 20 or 30 years. We have a very stable staff with a very low attrition rate as opposed to a greenfield site, where you have recruited staff for that place at one time with a chance to train them for that. We need to re-train, re-emphasise and we are measuring the quality of prison life in a rather sophisticated survey developed with outside research assistance which enables us to get quite a good handle on what is really happening in establishments and therefore begin to measure changes and see what works in creating the changes we are looking for.
Q13 Chairman: Have you spoken to the Prison Officers' Association (POA) recently and reminded them that decency is now at the top of the agenda?
Mr Wheatley: Yes and I am working with the POA who at public level fully recognise that and with a chairman who has endorsed that agenda and I am not working against the national union or national leadership. They are on board for the changes we are trying to make.
Q14 Chairman: I want to explore staffing a bit further with you. If you look at page 33 and paragraph 3.15, you will see that one of the key innovations in PFI prisons has been greater flexibility in staffing. Have public prisons taken this on board?
Mr Wheatley: I believe public prisons have taken on board increased flexibility. The arrangements are shift scheme arrangements which allow us to produce tailor-made shift schemes for each establishment and vary them at will. We are not on big national shift schemes. We have reviewed all our establishments over a period of three years, looked at staffing levels, brought in changes to staffing levels, not always immediately greeted favourably with enthusiasm, but implemented without opposition. So we have much more flexible staffing and are using the labour we have well.
Q15 Chairman: To what extent does fear of the Prison Officers' Association stop you bringing in the kind of flexible staffing arrangements you would like to see in public prisons?
Mr Wheatley: It does not prevent me doing it. The POA at the moment have no legal right to take industrial action and indeed have entered a voluntary agreement in which they have given up, even if they had it, their right to take industrial action. We are able to push through change through a process of arbitration, which means that we can impose change, provided we win the arbitration. We are winning arbitrations where we do meet opposition and we can make changes without worrying about the union's unreasonable opposition.
Q16 Chairman: You do market test some of these public prisons, do you not? The Prison Officers' Association does co-operate. Presumably this market testing is a weapon in your hands which has allowed you to bring in innovations?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, we are using the process at Liverpool in which we have given the establishment six months to sort itself out. POA are co-operating locally and nationally in that and if they do not sort out what they are doing and do not produce a bid in effect for which we will award a service-level agreement that we think is acceptable, then Martin has the right to go immediately to the market without any further public sector bid.
Q17 Chairman: Other colleagues can come in on that if they wish. If colleagues look at Figure 10 on page 23, we see that Altcourse is ranked among the best prisons, but is it the refinancing of the original deal which has helped you afford to do these improvements? In other words, you made a good profit, no harm in that, you have now refinanced and that is one of the reasons why you are making progress.
Mr Banks: I would say that improvements to the regime were not dependent on the refinancing and we try continually to improve the regime at all the prisons we manage. That said, the refinancing produces financial benefits and we have used some of those to fund projects to improve aspects of the regime at Altcourse over and above the contractual requirement. An example of this is that the prison runs a football academy, which offers prisoners opportunities to enhance skills, learn refereeing skills and qualify as a basic coach. Whilst these are useful aims in themselves, numeracy and literacy and social education form 50% of the statutory curriculum and it becomes a very positive vehicle for engaging prisoners with education.
Chairman: I shall stop you there because we know there is a good story to tell at Altcourse and you can get it out in the course of the afternoon.
Q18 Mr Jenkins: You said prison staff brought baggage with them because they had been there 20 or 30 years and were used to the old regime and they did not show prisoners the same level of respect as the new PFI staff did. These staff have been under your control for 20 or 30 years, so why were they not trained in that time to respond?
Mr Wheatley: The way in which we deliver prisons, what the public and parliament expect from prisons, has changed sharply over the last 20 or 30 years. What was acceptable in 1970 is actually quite different nowadays. For instance, when I joined the service in 1969 every cell in my local prison held three prisoners and they all slopped out. When running Leeds prison with 1,000 prisoners in as a young officer there was no chance to give them association or indeed to do more than sew mail bags. People who joined at that time saw that as the way that the public and parliament wanted them to operate then. That became part of their baggage. The world has changed sharply, thank goodness. Those who have joined and never been through that experience have a quite different view about what the prison service is about. If you joined a prison where you were expected to produce 29 hours purposeful activity and the place was equipped to do that, you would form a different view about what your job was. We need to keep on retraining. You are quite right that there is a retraining issue and I need to use the opportunity to retrain staff and we are doing that. So the decency agenda, changing the way in which prison staff deal with prisoners so that it matches our view of the correct way of doing it, is a major piece of business for us and there is no doubt we are seeing improvements. On the other hand, I do not want my staff to get so near prisoners that they fail to have that degree of scepticism which is needed to work out whether somebody is just being nice to you, or whether they are trying to con you because they are in the process of pursuing an escape or something else like that. This is a difficult balance to get right.
Q19 Mr Jenkins: You have answered the next question I was going to ask. On page 25, in paragraph 2.19, it says ". . . prisoners also expressed concerns about safety issues related to the relative inexperience of staff in private prisons. They included fears about the conditioning of staff by prisoners and the ability of staff in private prisons to challenge prisoners' behaviour". Why would this be so? Why do you think staff and prisoners feel that because of the inexperience of staff who treat prisoners with respect, prisoners are manipulating staff?
Mr Wheatley: Unfortunately prisoners do manipulate staff from time to time. Most escapes occur because staff have been-the phrase used is- conditioned. Effectively they have been persuaded not to look at something, not to see what is actually happening, because they have been convinced that what is happening is okay and underneath this a plan of escape is being created. To spot that happening, you have to be constantly alert; a major part of the job of any person working in prisons. It is easier to have that degree of alertness and scepticism about what is happening, while still treating people properly, if you have experience. It is more difficult for junior staff whether they are in the public or private sector. It is not an issue about which sector, it is a question of the experience of the staff.
Q20 Mr Jenkins: If you have a prison which has a large turnover of staff, quite a substantial turnover in a year, would that cause you any concern when thinking about the training they have to undergo and the screening of people who are coming into the service?
Mr Wheatley: It is easier to operate a prison if you are building up knowledge of how prisoners behave and how you can deal with prisoners in a variety of challenging circumstances. If you get too stable a staff, where staff do not turn round and everybody is experienced, it is difficult to move forward and change things. There is a balance between the two and too much of either is a concern to me.