Q151 Mr Williams: So you changed the regime to some extent.
Mr Narey: We anticipated that Ashfield would be an establishment looking after young Offenders, that is those aged 16 to 24. We signed a contract in 1998 on that basis. Shortly after it was opened we had a body called the Youth Justice Board (YJB), which purchased from the prison service custodial places for those aged 17 and under with a radically different regime. So we did change the challenge facing Ashfield.
Q152 Mr Williams: How did that make such an enormous difference to the incidence of assaults?
Mr Narey: Because it imported a population, which is very difficult. We exacerbated that further by having to transfer some young Offenders in from Gloucester. At the time I was extremely worried about the number of young Offenders, that is 18 plus, at Gloucester who were taking their own lives and we had to move young Offenders out of Gloucester prison completely into Ashfield. That caused a graver challenge for Ashfield. Overall the performance was very poor indeed and that was why we fined them and eventually withdrew places and finally took it into public service management to try to sort it out.
Q153 Mr Williams: Why did the Youth Justice Board have to contact the service and tell you that a key element of YJB policy and funding was not in the contract? How did that come about?
Mr Narey: Because we signed a contract in July 1998, I believe, before we knew about the creation of the Youth Justice Board. So we had already agreed a contract with Premier for running an establishment. The Youth Justice Board took on responsibility for young Offenders and buying places two years later, in April 2000. So although we have done a great deal to merge the two under a contract now which more reflects the needs of juveniles than previously, there are still some inconsistencies between the two which we need to improve.
Q154 Mr Williams: It was oversight, on the part either of the department or the service or both, that the contract was inadequate?
Mr Narey: It was a lack of psychic qualities. I did not know the Youth Justice Board was going to be created. We were believing we were going into a contract with the private sector to run a traditional young offender institute for an age group ranging from 16 to 21.
Q155 Mr Williams: When it changed, why did you not make the appropriate changes to the contract?
Mr Narey: We started to and we started to enter discussions with premier for changes, including perhaps putting more staff into Ashfield to make it safer. The problem was that we could not really talk seriously about improving Ashfield and putting more resources in until we got to the point where Ashfield were able to meet the staffing levels which they should have been delivering under the contract. They consistently failed to do so, which is one reason why eventually we withdrew young people from there.
Q156 Mr Williams: Really it was a combined mess-up: the service, yourselves and the private operator. Each of you contributed to this unbelievably bad performance.
Mr Narey: I have to accept that. What I would say in our defence is that the financial sanctions, which were very extreme, have helped to contribute eventually to a much different attitude from Premier and Ashford is now going to be a decent place.
Q157 Mr Williams: You said you considered terminating the contract. What stopped you terminating the contract? Was it because, in view of the culpability on the part of the government side that you exposed, there was a difficulty that you might lose in a legal confrontation with the company?
Mr Narey: No, I did not believe that was ever a prospect. The culpability was mainly at Premier's door, who failed at that time to run Ashfield well. Since then they have made changes to make that very different. I was confident that, if we had gone to court, the case against Ashfield, against Premier, was very significant. The answer is that I did not think I had to go that far. When we put a public sector governor in, Kevin Lockyer from Portland, the institution began to stabilise. Had it not done so, had I not developed any faith in Premier to turn this around-and I have been frank about my anxieties about Wackenhut as part owners of Premier-then I might have had to consider going to the lenders and asking them to find another operator. If they had not done that, then I might have had to pay off the lenders' liabilities.
Q158 Mr Williams: May I go parochial on you and switch to page 23, where you have your traffic light ranking of prisons and the more red marks you have the worse your performance is? I note that one of the three best, which is a public prison, is the prison in my own constituency, Swansea. I am delighted. What are we doing right that the rest of the prison service is not?
Mr Narey: Swansea is a very good prison and much improved. Coincidentally it is one reason why I worked hard personally to persuade Vicky O'Dea, previously governor of Swansea prison, to join Premier for a few years to try to bring a bit of the leadership which I had seen so patently at Swansea into Ashfield. It is partly because of Vicky's presence that I have so much faith that Ashfield, though it may not catch Swansea up, is well on the way to being a very good prison indeed.
Q159 Mr Williams: Going back to our hearing on Fazackarly prison years ago, when they had just finished their first year I think, and when there had been trouble at Parc and a riot, we discovered that you had to call on prison officers from Cardiff and Swansea to go in and help out. I asked whether they received any compensation from the private operator of Parc for the provision of their staff. I was told no. Has this situation changed now? The staffing is so low in the private prisons that they do not have anyone they can send to help out with the public prisons.
Mr Narey: We have arrangements of mutual support. For example, when we had a very serious incident last autumn at Lincoln prison, some of the staff who came to help reassert control came from private sector prisons. The two sectors support one another. A private sector prison running into difficulties like that would suffer significant numbers of penalty points which would result in fines, if they breached the tolerance levels. There is not a straight link. The private sector do not pay for the mutual aid in the same way that we do not pay the private sector when they offer mutual aid to public sector prisons.
Q160 Mr Williams: So it works even-handedly between the two sectors.
Mr Narey: The co-operation between the two sectors in any sort of crisis is exemplary.