Prisons

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

My right hon. Friend’s assessment is absolutely right and we are, indeed, bringing back former prison officers on a temporary basis.

I will move on to what we are doing on recruitment and retention, because that is the most important issue we face as a Prison Service. We will not achieve our aims of reform if we do not have enough officers and if we do not train them properly and have proper career development to make the most of our workforce. In October, we started by announcing our plans to recruit an extra 400 staff in 10 of our most challenging prisons. I am pleased to say that we have so far made 389 job offers. We were due to do that by the end of March, so we are ahead of target. We recently launched a graduate scheme called Unlocked, which is like Teach First for prisons, to attract the top talented graduates. We had more than 1,000 expressions of interest in the scheme and within 24 hours, we had 350 graduates from Russell Group universities applying for it.

The idea that people do not want to do the job is not right. There are a lot of people out there who want to reform offenders and to get involved in helping us turn around our Prison Service. We need to talk up the job of being a prison officer, because it is incredibly important. One prison officer described themselves to me as a parent, a social worker and a teacher. What could be more important than turning somebody who lives a life of crime into somebody who contributes to society? We find that when we go out and recruit, a lot of people are interested in the role.

Of course we have to retain our fantastic existing prison officers, but I want to correct the hon. Member for Leeds East. In fact, 80% of our staff have been with us for longer than five years, so the idea that we do not have a strong depth of prison officers is wrong. However, we do need to ensure that they have career and promotion opportunities. That is why we are looking to expand the senior grades in the service and to promote our existing staff. We want to give them a career ladder so that they have opportunities to train on the job and get the additional skills they need.

We are giving prison governors the opportunity to recruit locally for the first time. We have launched that in 30 of our most hard-to-recruit prisons. That means that the governor can build much more of a relationship with the local community, get people involved, show people what life is really like inside prison and encourage people to work there. The local recruitment and job fairs have been really successful.

Of course this is challenging. Recruiting 4,000 people in one year is challenging, but I think we can do it. We have the opportunity to do it, we are enthusiastic about it and we have the budget to do it for the first time in a number of years.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The opportunity for the governor to do more proactive recruitment has been welcomed in Bedford. In the amendment, she talks about decentralising authority to prison governors to enable them to make their own decisions. Does she find it interesting that that idea has been missed completely by the Labour party?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I agree with my hon. Friend that we need to give prison governors power over what happens in their own prison. They should decide what regimes to operate and what staffing structures to have. They should motivate and recruit their own team. They should also have more say over how lives are turned around. For example, we are giving them the power over their own education providers. We will hold prison governors to account for how people are improving in English and maths; how successful they are at getting offenders off drugs, which we know can lead to rehabilitation; and how successful they are at getting people into work when they leave prison, which will encourage them to work with local employers and set up apprenticeships. However, we need to give governors the levers and the responsibility that will enable them to do those things. We are also working on leadership training so that governors have the skills and capabilities to take on those extra responsibilities.

That is the only way we will turn lives around. Whatever I and my civil servants do in the Ministry of Justice, we are not the people on the ground in the wings who are talking to prisoners day in, day out. It is those people who will turn lives around. That is why we need motivated staff and governors who are empowered to do that job. That is what our reforms will achieve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen). With the House’s permission, I will be very parochial and focus on Bedford prison, given that it is mentioned in the motion. I commend the Minister, because on the afternoon and evening of 6 November, following the disturbances in the prison, he managed, notwithstanding his responsibilities to recover the situation, to keep me fully informed throughout. As my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) said, that is a hallmark of this particular Minister, and I am very grateful to him. Since the disturbances, the prison has been recovered and rebuilt. As I have been nice to the Minister, I would ask him to meet me to discuss the possibility of a very small investment that has been pending for Bedford prison, which could make a substantial difference.

I want to talk about accountability. One of the issues leading up to the problems at Bedford prison was that 72 recommendations for change and improvement had been made by the inspectorate, but only 12 had been enacted two years later. I have every confidence that the governor, who has recently returned to her position, will find remedies to those problems. However, as governors are given more accountability, how does the Minister think that they themselves will be held to account? Bedford prison has an excellent independent monitoring board. What will be the role of IMBs across the country with regard to accountability?

Prison officers have been mentioned frequently with regard both to numbers and to pay. Having spoken to a number of members of staff at Bedford prison anonymously after the disturbances, it is clear to me that two other issues ought to be addressed. First, this is not just about pay; it is also about the prestige of the profession. Many Members have paid strong compliments to the profession today. Too often prison officers are seen as the “nearly force”—they are not quite held in the same regard as the police. There are a number of things that the Minister could do on prestige as well as pay that could make a difference.

Prison officers also talked to me about the importance of experience. There has been a downgrading of the age range at which people can be brought into the prison officer corps, but that does have a knock-on effect for confidence and teamwork when people are put in very difficult situations.

Finally, given that last year was the 150th anniversary of the Howard League—it is named after a former high sheriff, John Howard—may I reinforce the comments that have been made about the attention that needs to be paid to suicides in prison? I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that. At its 150th anniversary, I said that the Howard League was the essential irritant to Governments on prison reform.

Having listened to the Opposition today, I have to say that, unfortunately, the Labour party has absolutely no positive suggestions. I expect the Minister to do much better in his contribution.