Prisons: Rehabilitation

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, as ever we are much indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for speaking so powerfully about a critical issue in our society. The number of people in prison is disgraceful. It is an incredibly serious problem. The report over the summer on the situation at Birmingham was quite deplorable. The Chief Inspector of Prisons described a situation of widespread violence and bullying, pervasive drugs problems, squalid conditions, inadequate levels of staff control and prisoners so terrified for their personal safety that they resorted to self-isolation. I am pleased that he did not go down a sterile argument about prisons being in either private or public ownership. It is clear that HMP Oakwood is a magnificent example under G4S. I do not think that this is a question of public or private ownership—but it is an issue of culture in prisons and regaining control.

I will speak particularly about HM Inspectorate of Prisons, because it has a position of authority, power and integrity that is listened to by all. I pay tribute not only to Peter Clarke in his present role but to a particularly fine Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick. He did the job excellently. He showed a lifetime of commitment to the most disadvantaged in society, but also a cool head and a warm heart. He established the independence of HM Inspectorate of Prisons, which has been established for some time now.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, prisons operate in a wider context—the multiplicity of causation, the whole situation of health, mental health, homelessness and education. I read a paper only last week about rough sleepers. Those are all contributory elements, as we well understand, to how people end up in prison. But it cannot be an ideal place for them.

Two years ago was a dramatic period in which the Inspectorate of Prisons documented some of the most disturbing prison conditions we had ever seen—conditions that have no place in an advanced nation in the 21st century. I am hugely encouraged that the commitment of the Minister for Prisons, Rory Stewart, to implementing substantial improvement is there for all to see. As a new MP, I had been a candidate on the Isle of Wight where there were three major prisons and I knew a lot about the situation there. I had an adjournment debate in the middle of the night. The then Minister of Prisons tried to coerce me into not raising the debate because really nobody was very interested and it would not do my career very much good at all. There is now a very different situation and I welcome that, led often by Members of this House.

We understand that organised crime in prisons is connecting two interlinked components—staff corruption and the use of drugs in prison. I call on the police to work very closely with prison officers to try to tackle the violence, disorder and crime. It cannot be done from prison alone: it has to be done beyond the walls.

Of course, there are many prisons doing excellent work and there are many valiant prison officers who are really committed, in spite of the odds. But there is an extraordinarily serious issue concerning staff retention. We have had the announcement of 2,500 more prison officers, but in 2010 only 1.5% of operational staff had had less than one years’ experience. By 2018 this was 22%. The real, underlying issue is the extraordinary rotation. People join the Prison Service and then leave. In other professions, there are programmes: for example, to look at how nurses can stay and hold on to their vocation.

Rory Stewart’s announcement of £10 million of government investment in the prison system and 2,500 prison officers is important, but we know that we also need investment in scanners, security, estate management, governor training and support for prison officers. Fortunately, the number of those in youth offender institutions is, quite rightly, significantly down from 3,500 to 883—almost all boys. We need to focus on education, but here again, with the new secure schools, I urge that HM Inspectorate of Prisons should continue to have a crucial place in inspecting the schools, because it was the inspectorate, after all, that discovered some of the abuses in the secure training centres. If there is an ideal example of these institutions, it is hard to find.

Let me echo the call by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, to find time for more enlightened approaches. We speak about restorative justice time and again. Let me commend Gerry Johnstone and Iain Brennan at the criminology department of the University of Hull, who are doing a fascinating piece of work comparing restorative justice in seven European countries. They will produce work that we should see and value.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I am convinced that the Minister takes this seriously. We must all wish him well in trying to ensure that our prisons set an example and do some good for the people incarcerated in them, instead of carrying on in their present deplorable state.

The Future of the Civil Service

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, I join those who warmly congratulate the noble Lord on initiating this debate. I am not one who believes in a major commission, except in so far as it would give the noble Lord many opportunities to present evidence which we would all greatly enjoy.

At a time of coalition Government, I do not think that uncharted territory is the time for a fundamental reform. Many of the comments around whether the central role of the Cabinet Secretary as the head of the Civil Service should be split have a lot to do with coalition Government and the fact that we live under severe financial constraint.

I declare my interests as set out in the register, but suffice it to say that, from the experience of running the health service, where we brought in commercial people to help lend their skills to what we were trying to achieve, I have become a very strong believer that there are talented people in the commercial world who have a huge amount to offer government. It is possible to find people who will undertake the work on much reduced income and be committed and add great value to what we are trying to achieve.

My concern is that, even now, the only Permanent Secretary we have who comes from an outside environment is Stephen Lovegrove at DECC, who came from Deutsche Bank to the Shareholder Executive and is now a Permanent Secretary. I do not think that this makes sense. The work that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, has been doing with non-executive advisers on departments—I refuse to call them “directors” because they are not—has shown the calibre of people who are prepared to come to assist in government. I see the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, who I remember said, “We want a permanent Civil Service; we do not want permanent civil servants”. We should question more closely whether there is a resistance in the Civil Service Commission to giving ultimate leadership appointments to individuals who have spent a lot of their life in a different field.

Only today I have published a paper about the leadership of universities. We have Bill Rammell, a former Minister; Martin Bean from Microsoft; Sir David Bell, a former Permanent Secretary; Debbie Swallow from the V&A—they are all now vice-chancellors. It is not that they should necessarily come straight into the top job. When commercial people come in, of course they need to learn and understand the subtlety and values of the Civil Service. It is my sense, however, that we should look carefully at what the resistances are.

The Civil Service was commended by my noble friend Lord McNally for diversity—maybe of gender, orientation, race and ethnicity, but not of occupational background. Every other field of endeavour in this modern, fast-changing world needs different skills, which do not necessarily grow themselves.

There are of course great differences—although I understand the ministerial frustration—but, increasingly, politicians have very little business background. They know about press notices; they do not know about delivery of projects. The implementation of anything means you have to go through winter and spring before you get to the summer of delivery. There are key fundamental principles, and my sense is that both Ministers and civil servants need to look again at this.

Finally, have we looked closely enough at the model of the Greater London Authority and some of the local government models, where service delivery and policy formation is much more closely integrated? Certainly, the much underexamined GLA has in many ways a more interesting balance of people coming through into the executive.

Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone]

My Lords, I strongly commend the noble Lord for his initiative in bringing forward this practical, concise and important Bill. It was 50 years ago that Enoch Powell talked about putting a torch to the funeral pyre of the great Victorian lunatic asylums. It was also 50 years ago that Erving Goffman, the great American sociologist, talked about stigma theory: the process whereby an individual is isolated, denigrated and humiliated to make others feel more normal and safe.

In the field of mental health, discrimination and stigma have been extraordinarily persistent. It is quite wrong for reality to reinforce prejudice. As the noble Lord said, there can be no justification for singling out mental ill health, whether of a school governor, Member of Parliament, company secretary or juror, when many other forms of difficulty would make them far more objectionable in any of those roles.

My original reference to become a Member of Parliament was written by a professor of child psychiatry at the Maudsley, Lionel Hersov, with whom I worked for a long time. Like others, I made it my role in Parliament for all these years always to do what I could to promote understanding and recognition of, and better services to tackle, the problems of mental ill health. I know that the noble Lord is doing a huge amount to develop a major global initiative to promote research into the understanding of mental illness and its cures.

I recognise the Government’s work in their excellent recent paper, No Health Without Mental Health. A key feature is the intention to combat stigma and discrimination. In that context, I strongly add my voice of support to an enlightened, simple and practical Bill that can make a significant difference.