Q81 Jon Trickett: My question was: why is the management of private sector provision under the Director of Strategy, Finance and Competition? Your response was that he does not manage, but I have demonstrated that here there is a continuous line which shows the direct line of management into the private sector. Would it not be better to create tension between the Director of Strategy on the one hand and the management on the other, to show clean lines of accountability rather than obscure lines of accountability, as you have here really?
Mr Narey: There is a tension, it is a contract. The private sector providers contract with my Director of Strategy and Finance in the running of the prisons. In the future what I should like to do with the public sector prison service, which Phil Wheatley now leads, is move those prisons onto a series of service level agreements, so that there is a similar contractual relationship between the public sector and me, with me in the middle, neutral between the two different providers.
Jon Trickett: That is exactly what I would do. I would separate out the strategic direction of the service from the management of the service. This organisation here does not bring that about. My questioning is over now.
Q82 Mr Rendel: Would you expect a modern prison to perform better than an old prison, or not?
Mr Narey: In general yes, but one cannot be absolute about that. There are some prisons in Victorian surroundings which, despite the challenges faced, run very well. Generally there is an advantage to having modern architecture, decent buildings, lots of light, lots of vision, buildings which, for example, provide greater staff observation of prisoners. However, some of our worst prisons, the very worst, are actually not the Victorian ones, they are those which were designed in the 1960s with very poor sight lines and, in terms of safety, they are some of the prisons which cause my successor and caused me most concern.
Q83 Mr Rendel: It certainly seems to be the case from the sample we have here, Figure 6 on page 8, that only one in six of the worst prisons was opened in the last ten years but six out of the ten best prisons were opened in the last ten years and a couple of others are only 11 and 12 years' old; so it look as though that is the case. Is it also true that it is easier in modern prisons to provide more facilities for some sort of sensible work programme, some sort of sensible occupation for the prisoners?
Mr Narey: Certainly that is the case. The NAO used Pentonville prison built in 1842 as a comparator and there are no workshops there, very little room for education; the same applies at Brixton. The prisons we build now are all based on getting prisoners out of the cells for a large part of the day and involved in some sort of activity, not quite as much as I would like in terms of involvement in education as opposed to menial work in workshops.
Q84 Mr Rendel: I am not entirely surprised to hear you say that, but it does raise in my mind a question about something you said initially to the Chairman, when you said that one reason for there being no very great increase in the amount of purposeful activity over the years has been an increase in prison population. I would have expected a lot of that increase in prison population would have been taken up in the increasing number of new prisons being built, where, as you just said, it must be easier to provide purposeful occupation. You would think that the hours per prisoner of purposeful occupation should be going up rather than down.
Mr Narey: They would have done had it not been for the severity of the rise in the population. I believe I was a very fortunate Director General. I had a lot of investment, I was able to increase massively activities such as education, offending behaviour programmes, drug treatment programmes. There is a lot more in prisons for prisoners to do, but unfortunately the rise in the numbers of the population has more than overtaken the increase in activity. So the purposeful activity measure, which in itself is a crude measure, has not moved very much from 24 hours for about four or five years now.
Q85 Mr Rendel: Are you saying therefore that there is a certain amount of total purposeful activity which is there and therefore the increase in the size of the population means that total is split among a larger number of people?
Mr Narey: That is exactly right; yes.
Q86 Mr Rendel: Surely, as you increase the number of prisons which are being built, there must be an increase in the total amount of purposeful activity and it must in fact be that those new ones ought to bring the average up, because there is more purposeful activity per prisoner in the new ones than there was in the ones you had before.
Mr Narey: That is the case. In some of the new prisons which are uncrowded, levels of purposeful activity are very good, but in some of the new prisons, and a lot of the private sector new prisons are local prisons, we had immediately to overcrowd them to similar levels to that which we were using to overcrowd Victorian locals. So although there is a great deal of activity in those prisons-and if they only had a population which reached the CNA, levels of purposeful activity would be very high indeed-we have had to spread the work and education out amongst a very much larger number of prisoners than we anticipated.
Q87 Mr Rendel: Given that there is more purposeful activity per prisoner in those new ones, you would have to have more overcrowding in the new ones in order to get the same level per prisoner of purposeful activity. You are not saying there is more overcrowding in the new ones, are you?
Mr Narey: No. For the new PFI prisons we set very high levels of purposeful activity. They have not been met in full, but the performance on purposeful activity across the private sector is very good.
Q88 Mr Rendel: Therefore mathematically the average ought to be going up.
Mr Narey: But the average is influenced much more by the wider population not in private sector prisons, which has continued to fill out and overcrowd public sector prisons. I repeat the statistic I shared with Mr Gibb that 13,000 prisoners are currently sharing a cell meant for one and clearly the pressure on work places, for example, is now very great.
Q89 Mr Rendel: May I turn to Mr Wheatley now and ask you to look at Figures 11, 12, 13 on pages 24 and 25? I was interested in these because we can see that on the whole more respect is shown to staff in the PFI prisons than in the public prisons and that is fairly clear from Figure 13. It is also true that in the PFI prisons, you tend to get a younger prison officer and rather more female officers than you do in the public prisons. What I want to ask is whether you are aware that these are in fact correlated. Is it because there are more women and more younger prison officers that you tend to get more respect shown in the PFI prisons?
Mr Wheatley: We do not have the research to back that up as a fact. You are likely right that with a younger group with more women in there, one probably starting out with a new prison, which is the thing which really makes the difference, so you recruit people for your prison, you select them carefully, you reject ones which do not fit in very quickly, if you are working in the private sector, you can start with a very clear view of how you want this place to work and you do not have to fight against an existing learnt culture. Those are all factors which help establish a culture. They probably do not help establish a culture which is quite as good at controlling security, because for that you are looking to the older head, who is probably a bit more wary of what else might be going on.
Q90 Mr Rendel: If you do not yet know whether there is actually a correlation, but you feel there may well be, may I suggest it would be a very useful piece of research to do, if only because it might guide you in the sort of people you would want to choose for your new prisons, if it is found that in fact there is a better ethos in the prison if you have perhaps rather more women prison officers and younger prison officers?
Mr Wheatley: You realise of course that we cannot specifically say we want to recruit women and not men, unless there is a genuine occupational qualification. What we are trying to do is use an approach to selecting prison officers which requires them to show they can practice the skills. So we use a simulation, not an interview, where we look at them and like the cut of their jib, we actually trying them in doing difficult things and that is tending to recruit those who, at least on that assessment, show better skills of empathy with the people they are dealing with and are more sympathetic to prisoners in difficulty and show those sort of skills. By doing that, as we select new prison officers, we are selecting for the world we want them to work in, while still trying to make sure they can handle the security issues as well.