Prison Services: Insourcing

Lord Keen of Elie Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

I can only play the ball that is in front of me. What I am trying to do is to make sure that our prisons run excellently. It is very much a hybrid model of the voluntary, private and public sectors. I will give the noble and learned Lord one good example. We imprison lots of people who have skills we could use in a prison, and it is important that we use more of them. We have two schemes—one called Q-Branch, the another called CRED—operating in 70 prisons, where about 750 prisoners are employed each month. In HMP Lewes, the team repainted and sorted out all the floors, saving huge amounts of money. So I want to see more prisoners doing more work in prisons.

[Lord Keen of Elie (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that publicly managed prisons are not delivering better rehabilitation outcomes than privately managed prisons?

[Lord Timpson (Lab)]

The noble and learned Lord raises a really important question on how the performance differs between public and private sector prisons. It is something I have been interested in for a long time. I can show you some excellent private sector prisons and some excellent public sector prisons, and I think we need to learn from each other where we have areas of excellence and of poor performance. One thing I look out for is the quality of leadership in a prison. It does not matter whether it is a public sector prison or a private sector prison. I believe that too much of the performance of a prison is dependent on one leader, and that is the situation in both types of prison.