Q21 Mr Jenkins: I see from page 17, Figure 16, if I am reading this correctly, the percentage of staff leaving during the year at Rye Hill in 2001 was over 40%, whereas the public sector averages 6%. Is that right?
Mr Wheatley: Yes, those are correct figures.
Q22 Mr Jenkins: What would you consider to be an optimum figure? If 6% is too low, would the 40% be too high?
Mr Wheatley: I do not think there is an answer for any one place. It depends what sort of prison you are dealing with and the pressure staff are under. For instance, in a high security prison, I would look for a slightly higher turnover of staff worn out with dealing with the most difficult prisoners, but a relatively low enough level to give me quite a lot of experience. In an open prison, where the pressure was much less, I might be quite happy to live with a 6% or less turnover. I would be concerned about the very high levels of turnover and I think 50% is a high turnover. For a public sector prison, if I were facing that, it would give me concern that the staff would not be learning how to handle prisoners and I would worry about it.
Q23 Mr Jenkins: I certainly would worry about it and I think the figures for staff turnover in some of these prisons in the Report is worrying. It says in Figure 5 that in most PFI prisons, after a few years of operation, the financial deductions drop quite sharply. Is this because of the improved performance of the prison or because the controllers are getting too close to the contractor?
Mr Wheatley: This may be one for Mr Narey who is responsible for private sector prisons. I run the public sector.
Mr Narey: It is because prisons settle down. Prisons are very difficult things to open and as someone who led the public sector services and still manages Phil, I want to be honest about that. We in the public sector opened some prisons with immense difficulty, Whitemoor being the best example of that, where after two and a half years of grave difficulties a catastrophic escape took place. Prisons settle down over time and some of the private sector prisons have started well and done well from the outset, but others started with some difficulties. Parc is a very good example; Ashfield is a very dramatic example more recently. History shows that most of them settle down and staff turnover starts to reduce. If you look at the table which you discussed with Mr Wheatley, you will see that the older private sector prisons have a much lower staff turnover this year than the newer ones.
Q24 Mr Jenkins: Prison priorities change over a period of time and you are tied into a contract with the PFI administration. How flexible are these contracts to meet that change in priorities or do you have a difficulty there?
Mr Narey: There is a difficulty. Some of the contracts for prisons were made at a time when the emphasis was very much on industrial activity, taking prisoners to workshops and so forth. Now, as the Committee knows, there is a much greater emphasis on educating prisoners and offending behaviour programmes. I shall be better able to answer that question in a few months, because we are in some negotiations with the private sector contractors who are running the prisons which have been established for longer, to try to refresh the contracts, to align them more clearly with what we are trying to do, essentially reduce re-offending. I am optimistic about those negotiations. I know that Mr Banks and Mr Beeston and their colleagues who head Securicor are committed to having prisons which are as effective as any other in the public sector and want to catch up with the re-offending work on which they do lag behind at the moment.
Q25 Mr Jenkins: That leaves me addressing Mr Beeston. It says in Figure 5 on page 6 that Dovegate incurred a financial deduction of £423,000 in the first three quarters of its opening year. Why was the performance so poor?
Mr Beeston: First of all, I think that figure is actually over the first two years rather than the first nine months; the figure should say one year and nine months. Also, whilst being too large for my liking, the figure reflects the fact that Dovegate is a very large facility, almost twice the size of Ashfield. It has incurred that level of penalty due predominantly to the same issues we have had at Ashfield, which has had very great difficulty in retaining staff in the early years of the contract and that itself has caused financial penalties to be levied.
Q26 Mr Jenkins: That is what worries me. If I have a business plan and I go to a bank and say I want them to lend me many millions of pounds for the business plan and I accept this location in a place where I should know that it is going to be very, very difficult to get staff and retain staff . . . Was this not taken into the equation or did it take you by surprise?
Mr Beeston: Some level of penalty is taken into the equation. We will take the experience we have had in terms of starting up prisons and build those to some extent into the equations. I have to say clearly not to the extent of the issues we had at Ashfield. Dovegate for the last three quarters has been really relatively low in performance penalty terms and has settled down, so that figure has not been ensuingly large.
Q27 Mr Jenkins: How did you make the improvements so quickly?
Mr Beeston: It is really a question of the prison settling down, as you have staff who have been in place for longer. It is a very daunting experience. When you interview somebody to come and work in a prison and then when they actually get there and discover the reality, that is quite a culture shock to some people. Inevitably the staff turnover is high in the early years and whilst we make some allowance for that, it will result in financial penalties in the contract if that means that some of the performance indicators are not achieved.
Q28 Mr Jenkins: Why is your selection procedure for staff so poor?
Mr Beeston: I do not think it is poor. One of the great advantages of starting up a new facility is that you can go through and select new staff, staff who do not come with baggage. One of the prices you pay for that inevitably is that you get a high staff turnover. Once those prisons have settled down, for instance Doncaster and Lowdham Grange, both of which have now been running for several years, staff turnover drops dramatically. We have seen the same indication of high staff turnover in the early years of all the contracts which have started up.
Q29 Chairman: Did I hear you rightly saying that the figure for Dovegate was for one year and three quarters?
Mr Beeston: That is my understanding.
Q30 Chairman: If you look at page 6, Figure 5, it says there in the notes, "The figure for Dovegate is for the first 3 quarters in the performance year".
Mr Beeston: Yes. I do not believe that to be the case. I can look into that, but I do not believe that to be the case.