Q101 Geraint Davies: Can you provide any statistics which point towards the idea that significant localised overcrowding reduced educational performance, which in turn has a knock-on on re-offending and therefore is a false economy? On this point, will you comment on whether there is any correlation between drug abuse and overcrowding and short stays?
Mr Narey: Certainly.5
Q102 Geraint Davies: I am just wondering whether there is a case to be made here?
Mr Narey: It is more complex than simply overcrowding. If we had a static population, then we could do more to cope with the overcrowding in a particular prison. The reality is that for much of last year, and certainly currently right across the sector, prisoners are having to be moved up and down the country to anywhere there is a bed, the number of vacant cells at the moment is so low. So education programmes, drug treatment programmes are sometimes being disrupted. We are doing everything we can to protect those; they are the prisoners we move last. However, sometimes those programmes are disrupted and it is incredibly frustrating for the prisoner and for the staff concerned.
Q103 Geraint Davies: Just so I am clear. The key problem in terms of education delivery is discontinuity because of shuffling people around filling beds, it is not the overcrowding itself.
Mr Narey: Except that moving prisoners is a consequence of the overcrowding. We have to fill every prison bed that we can and sometimes, before I moved on, when I was Director General, I have been embarrassed at having to instruct governors to move young prisoners from Feltham in South West London up to Castington in Northumberland, because it is the only place we have had a bed for them.
Q104 Geraint Davies: It is a well known fact that the lack of family support increases re-offending. What number of the 73,000 inmates do you have over 50 miles from their family home at the moment. It was about 35,000 before.
Mr Narey: The statistic does not immediately spring to mind. May I check on that and write in? 6
Geraint Davies: I should be very interested to know that.
Q105 Chairman: Can you provide that?
Mr Narey: Yes; of course.
Q106 Geraint Davies: We went on a visit recently to Altcourse, where people are basically in bed between nine and seven and the rest of the day they are doing various activity, yet in Walton we are told they are locked up for 24 hours. That is presumably within legal limits. How exceptional is Walton, which would seem to be horrendous?
Mr Narey: Prisoners at Walton are not routinely locked up for 23 hours; that will sometimes happen but levels of activity are rather higher than that. It is true that it is a very considerable way behind Altcourse and certainly behind other public sector prisons. That is why Liverpool, along with Dartmoor, was selected for performance testing and will face the sanction of being contracted out, if they do not provide me with a convincing case that they are going to maintain significant improvements in future years.
Q107 Geraint Davies: I am sorry to harp back but it is useful to have this sort of historical comparison. Last year you said something along the line of 75% of inmates had been permanently excluded from school.
Mr Narey: In some of the institutions which deal with the youngest Offenders, Feltham and Stoke Heath, the figure is 75% plus.
Q108 Geraint Davies: It still is. Since last September the government has decided to give everybody who was excluded a full-time education through a pupil referral unit. Has that made any difference so far?
Mr Narey: I would have to go back to check the figures. I should be surprised if there had been any significant change yet in the proportion of young people coming into custody for the first time who had little or no education beyond the age of 13.
Q109 Geraint Davies: What I am talking about is those children who were formerly walking around the streets with no education at all and stealing mobile phones and all this. Now, if they are taught for those four days, already at the margin, in terms of the new incoming people, is there a difference in their profile between what proportion of them are currently permanently excluded as they come in?
Mr Narey: That has not come to my notice. I can check on that and let you know.7 I would expect that any noticeable benefit at the moment will still be quite slight.
Q110 Geraint Davies: On page 28 it gives prisoner to prison officer ratios and it varies widely between 2.5 to 5 prisoners per prison officer. We know from paragraph 3.15 that staff costs account for about 80%. Do you have any comment to make about the massive variation there and whether there is a danger that those people who are trying quite naturally to maximise their profit are experimenting with staff levels perhaps close to taking a risk?
Mr Narey: We could spend a long time discussing this chart. There are several explanations which lie behind this, not least architecture itself at particular establishments, and some of the more modern establishments have much healthier prisoner to staff ratios. Also, in the two forthcoming private sector contracts which we will let for Peterborough and Ashford, the staff ratios will be at the lower end of the scale, that is nearer to one in three than one in five, precisely because what we have required from those who bid and from the successful contractor are regimes fully committed to spending a lot of time on reducing re-offending. So the staff numbers there are actually going to be greater. It is not the case that the private sector in all circumstances is having very few staff and the public sector more. It depends partly on what we are trying to do in the prison, what sort of regime and very frequently on the architecture of the prison in terms of maintaining safety for prisoners who live there.
Geraint Davies: For the record, I was very impressed as well by my visit to Altcourse. I come with no particular baggage to this.
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5 Ev 27-31
6 Note by witness: A prisoners home area is taken as their home address if it is available (it is available in around 30% of cases). If this information is not available a prisoners' court of first committal is used as a proxy. Evidence suggests that in 90% of cases home town address and court town of committal are the same. The position on 30 June was: Total prisoner population 73,634. Number of prisoners held over 50 miles from home area, 27,872. The latest statistics collected on 30 September show: Total prisoner population 73,741. Number of prisoners held over 50 miles from home area 27,864.
7 Note by witness: Exclusion from school:-Information of the percentage of juvenile prisoners that have been permanently excluded from education is not routinely collected. The last data was collected in a Youth Justice Board Audit in 2001 showed that 80% of juvenile prisoners at that time were not in education immediately prior to their imprisonment, and that 59% had no plans to return to education when they were discharged from custody. However, this does not mean that all of these juveniles had been "excluded" from school; it will include those who regularly "truanted" with or without the approval of their carers and for those over 16 years old juveniles who had legally left the education system.