Safety of Prison Staff

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab) (Urgent Question)]

To ask the Secretary of State if he will make a statement on the safety of staff in prisons.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Michael Gove)]

A central duty of the Ministry of Justice is security on our prison estate. It is imperative that the dedicated professionals who work in our prisons are kept safe. It is also critical that we safeguard the welfare of those who are in custody. It is therefore of profound concern to me that serious assaults against staff in prisons have been on the rise recently. In the 12 months to December 2015, there were 625 incidents, an increase of 31%.

Those who work in our prisons are idealistic public servants, who run the risk of assault and abuse every day but continue in their jobs because they are driven by a noble cause: they want to reform and rehabilitate offenders. That is why we must stand behind them. I know that members of the Prison Officers Association, and other trade unions, want rapid action to be taken to make their work safer; I understand their frustrations, and I am determined to help.

Violence in prisons has increased over recent years for a number of reasons. The nature of the offenders currently in custody is one factor: younger offenders who have been involved in gang-related activities pose a particular concern. Another factor is the widespread availability of new psychoactive substances or NPS—synthetically manufactured drugs which are more difficult to detect than traditional cannabis and opiates. The former chief inspector of prisons has said that NPS are

“now the most serious threat to the safety and security of jails.”

NPS consumption, and indeed violence in prison, are also often a consequence of prisoners’ boredom and frustration, and a lack of faith in the future.

There is no single solution to the problem we face, but we are taking steps to reform our prisons. To take account of our changing prison population, more than 2,800 new prison officers have been recruited since January 2015, a net increase of 530. To keep them safer, we are deploying body-worn cameras as additional protection for staff. In May, we outlawed new psychoactive substances and thus dramatically reduced the opportunities for easy profits to be made from their trade. In June, I allocated an extra £10 million in new funding for prison safety, and the money has gone direct to governors.

All these steps will, I believe, help improve safety, but there are two more critical points to make. First, I want to stress that my Department’s door will be open to staff and their representatives to ensure we work collaboratively to improve conditions for all in our prisons. Secondly, it is because I have seen for myself how important it is to change our prisons for the better that this Government have initiated a major reform programme. We will be replacing ageing and ineffective prisons with new establishments designed to foster rehabilitation. We will give governors greater scope to design regimes that encourage purposeful activity. We will ensure that prisoners are more effectively incentivised to turn their lives around. As we press ahead with this reform programme, I am confident we can ensure that our prisons can become what they should always be: safe and secure places of redemption and rehabilitation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Slaughter]

The situation on our prison estate continues to deteriorate, as the Secretary of State concedes, and I am sorry we have heard nothing from him today that we have not heard before.

Over the weekend, prison staff held crisis meetings across the country amid concerns about their security and safety in the workplace. Incidents of violence and disorder are reported on a daily basis. On Friday around 100 staff at HMP Liverpool met outside their prison at the start of their shift, a pattern that was repeated at many other prisons. A Ministry of Justice spokesman unhelpfully called the action “unlawful” despite admitting that it posed no security risk. I wonder whether the Secretary of State thinks that is an appropriate response to members of staff concerned about their welfare and that of the inmates. According to local staff at Liverpool prison, over the past 12 months there have been more assaults than in the previous 12 years. This includes one member of staff who was stabbed, while others have been spat at, punched and kicked and had urine and faeces thrown over them. On the same day, a squad of specialist prison service riot officers was sent into HMP Birmingham, and in a separate incident in the same prison on the same day a prisoner was found dead in his cell in unexplained circumstances. A Prison Officers Association spokesman said that between 5,000 and 6,000 prison officers had taken part in the pre-shift meetings, with the numbers showing the “strength of feeling” of its members.

The Secretary of State will also be aware that a freedom of information request last week revealed there had been five walkouts in the past five months, including from Wormwood Scrubs in my constituency. Following that walkout in May, and the serious assault on two officers and an urgent question here, the Secretary of State announced £10 million, but, frankly, he has been absent in the last few weeks and we have had an inadequate and reactive response to each crisis.

We need a full response to a growing and increasing crisis and, as the Secretary of State correctly says, a growing number of serious assaults. I hope if we do not hear it today, we will hear that full strategy, and hear it soon, for the safety of our prison officers and prisoners. If we do not have that, he is going to lose control fully of the prison estate.

[Michael Gove]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for the detail and tone of his remarks. He continues now on the Back Benches the great work he did on the Front Bench, making sure that the condition of our prisons is kept at the forefront of our minds.

May I first say that in the limited time I had available in response to his original urgent question, I was not able to outline all the steps being taken? Thanks, of course, to his diligent work and that of the Justice Committee, a number of areas of concern have been brought to our attention or highlighted or underlined.

We have appointed a highly experienced prison governor, Claudia Sturt, formerly governor of Belmarsh, to lead work specifically to ensure that our prisons are more secure. She has set up a taskforce to visit the prisons that face the greatest challenge. Those visits have so far resulted in prison governors feeling reassured and strengthened that they have the best professional advice to help them deal with these problems. In addition, we have been rolling out something called the five-minute intervention, which is a specific intervention to help prison officers to de-escalate violent incidents. It is being pioneered by a first-rate professional, Russ Trent, who is due to be the governor of HMP Berwyn, the new prison in Wales.

The hon. Gentleman made the point that £10 million was only a start, and it is indeed only a start. I stress that the Treasury has given us £1.3 billion as part of a broad prison reform programme, but I shall not run away from the fact that we have a difficult situation in our prisons. That is one of the reasons that I invited the BBC in to visit our prisons in recent weeks. It is also one of the reasons that I have sought to work across the aisle to ensure that we tackle this problem fairly. I know that the hon. Gentleman is sincere and dedicated in his desire to ensure that our prisons work better, and I look forward to working with him to that end.