Q91 Mr Rendel: May I bring you back to my question? Do you accept that it might be a useful piece of research to do?
Mr Wheatley: Yes.
Q92 Mr Rendel: In fact it may even be possible to use some of the figures which the NAO have already been working on, because they might have some indication as to why it was that they were showing the private sector prisoners as having more respect.
Mr Wheatley: We are doing research at the moment. The surveys we are doing as part of our audit process, so each prison will be surveyed on a fairly complex assessment tool, developed without sound research assistance, which gives a series of measures about how prisoners regard staff, what they regard and how those interrelate with each other, give us some really quite powerful information to stack up against the sort of prison officers we have and the sort of experiences that prisoners had to go through. The experiences a prison goes through change the view of the staff who work in it. Out of that we shall be able to make these links, but this is very early work. We are just getting the first results-we are about three months into results coming out of this survey. I am certainly committed to making really good use of that, very good data and working with people outside the service to make sure we make the best of it.
Q93 Mr Rendel: Paragraph 1.27 on page 18 indicates that the level of the financial deductions which have been levied on some of the PFI prisons has depended to some extent on who happened to be the controller, the attitude taken by the controller as to how firm they should be with enforcing the contract. Is that not rather unfair? Should we not be trying to make sure that the controllers treat these contracts in exactly the same way?
Mr Narey: I agree absolutely with that. Part of one of the advantages of the changes we have made is that I now have, working for Mr Steele, one manager who manages all the controllers in all the prisons and we are doing a lot of work with and working together to make sure they have an exactly equivalent approach to their prison no matter who runs it. I accept that there have been inconsistencies, particularly in the early days of the contracts.
Q94 Mr Rendel: Presumably, amongst other things, that has meant that some public money was at risk, because there may have been some controllers who were not taking as severe a view of contract terms being broken as others?
Mr Narey: I have no evidence of that, but that may have been the case. I am very anxious to ensure that is not the case in the future and make sure that in the management of the contract-and I have plans to give controllers, if I can, a much simpler job, which is entirely concentrating on managing the contract and I am hoping I can give adjudications to directors which take up a lot of the controllers' time-we have an equivalent approach and also that we make sure we get every penny of public money that we should do, if a private sector prison fails in any respect.
Mr Rendel: Good, thank you, that sounds like a good idea.
Q95 Geraint Davies: The Chairman noted that on page 22 in paragraph 2.8, in terms of the amount of meaningful activity, PFI was something like 29.5 hours and the target for the public sector was 20.6 hours. Is it possible to provide any breakdown of different amounts of purposeful activity in different prisons and what they spend on? In particular I am interested in the proportion of that in the first instance which is spent on education as opposed to anything else.
Mr Narey: I can certainly provide the Committee with details of purposeful activity for each and every prison. It is more difficult to say how many hours of that are spent in education, but I can certainly give advice, for example, on the achievements of education, how many educational qualifications are gained and so forth in each and every prison.2
Q96 Geraint Davies: In our previous report and the previous hearing at which you were a witness, we found that the variation in education and investment per head was something between £600 and £1,600 per prisoner on average out of a global total of something like £34,000 which it costs to keep someone in prison. Would you agree with me that if it costs between £3,500 and £4,000 a year to put someone in a state secondary school and in a private top public school about £15,000 a year, what is happening there is some attempt to make people into tax payers? Do you think with the £34,000 you are given you could do a better job of delivering more tax payers in the future rather than repeat Offenders?
Mr Narey: Yes, I do and that is very much what we are trying to do. For example, last year across the prison service, public and private sector, prisoners gained something like 42,000 educational qualifications, almost double the number I reported to the Committee when I last discussed reducing re-offending. The targets I give Mr Wheatley next year will be higher again. I think we are beginning to do that. About 10% of all adults who improved their literacy and numeracy last year did so from a prison cell and we are making significant progress in making prisoners employable; indeed over the same period the proportion of prisoners whom we have got into jobs on discharge has risen from about 11% to about 24%.
Geraint Davies: Would it be possible for Mr Narey to send in an additional note on this? I feel this is a particularly interesting area for the Committee?
Chairman: What exactly do you want from Mr Narey?
Q97 Geraint Davies: What I am interested in is what measurements we have in terms of value for money in respect, ultimately, of how much tax we are likely to get out of people leaving prison. I know he will not be able to quote that particular figure, but at one of our last hearings Mr Narey said that in terms of the national numeracy and literacy target the prison population represented something like 10%, and now he seems to be saying that 10% of our national targets have been achieved in prisons. He seems to be saying that the numeracy and literacy strategy is working in prisons. Is that right?
Mr Narey: There has been a significant catch-up, but we have some way to go because the population we have in prison has much higher levels of illiteracy and innumeracy, so we have much more to do. On the other hand it is a population which is very difficult to teach. These are frequently people who failed in school, so it takes a long time. I can send you a note showing you spend and showing you the progress in that important area.3
Q98 Geraint Davies: What I am interested in is the amount of time in each prison spent on different sorts of purposeful activity.
Mr Narey: I shall endeavour to break that down.4
Q99 Geraint Davies: Education workshops. Presumably a lot of work is done on self-esteem, presentation, etcetera?
Mr Narey: Yes.
Q100 Geraint Davies: How much is overcrowding and the focus of accommodation management impeding our main objective of reducing re-offending? In particular, you mentioned that on the back of the 73,000 current population, which has grown from about 44,000 in ten years, 13,000 were sharing rooms. To what extent does that, plus this turnover and discontinuity of education, mean that in particular prisons there are great variations in educational output which can be put down to overcrowding within this global crisis?
Mr Narey: It has undoubtedly had an effect. I am very pleased with the performance of the prison service in the year just ended and the annual report, which will be published shortly, will show very significant progress across education and offending behaviour programmes. I am quite sure that performance would have been much better, possibly significantly better, had it not been for overcrowding.
__________________________________________________________________________________
2 Ev 24-26
3 Ev 24-26
4 Ev 24-26