Extract from House of Commons Hansard   Debates for 16^th March 2005

National Offender Management Service

Mr. Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow):

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor), who introduced the debate, for securing it and bringing this subject to our attention. I shall try not to repeat too much of what he said, because I agreed with virtually all of it. I had hoped that we might be having a similar debate at about this time on the Management of Offenders and Sentencing Bill, which was introduced in the other place, but so far it does not even have a date for Second Reading. It therefore looks highly likely that it will not be proceeded with this side of the general election, which puts the debate off even further.

One of my major concerns, which I share with my hon. Friend, about the process that we are going through in establishing NOMS is the lack of debate in Parliament. I make no criticism of my hon. Friend the Minister for that. He has been generous with his time in meeting me and other hon. Members present. Through the justice unions parliamentary group, he has made every effort to meet and talk to us and we have been very grateful, but there has not been a wider debate in Parliament. The number of hon. Members who have signed the early-day motions on this subject shows that there is considerable concern, but there has not been an opportunity for a full debate.

I am also concerned that, although we have not had a full debate, the reorganisation and restructuring and the setting up of NOMS are moving on. A chief executive was appointed some time ago. More recently, regional offender managers have been appointed, even though they have no regions to manage as yet. Some, I understand, are continuing to do other jobs and will do for the foreseeable future—perhaps for another year or two—as well as taking on the regional offender management role.

Even though I have probably spent more time on this subject than most other subjects in the House in the last year or so, I am still confused about exactly what is happening to the structures, who is responsible for what, what the relationship really is between the regional offender managers and the probation boards, and the future of the boards themselves. In July last year, the Minister announced that, in the light of the consultation exercise that had taken place since January and the publication of the Carter report, he had decided not to do away the 42 existing probation boards, but that he was still going to bring in regional offender managers. In making the decision not to do away with those boards, he used the phrase "at this stage". That seems to leave open the possibility, at the very least, that at some point in the future those probation boards will cease to exist.

Mr. David Drew (Stroud): The Minister will know this because he kindly organised a meeting with the south-west appointment to NOMS where I raised the very point that my hon. Friend is talking about. Members of my board have written to me questioning what their role is now and what their future role will be. So, there is a real problem. I am sure that he would say that things are similar in his area.

Mr. Gerrard : That is the case. I have certainly spoken to members of probation boards who find themselves in a situation of considerable confusion. They are not really sure yet quite what the relationship with the regional offender managers is supposed to be. If the ROMs are involved in making decisions about budgets, what does that imply? Who is actually the employer? Legally, as I understand it, the probation boards are the employers of the probation service, but if someone else starts to make decisions about budgets, performance and innovation, it is far from clear to me quite what that will mean for the boards in exercising their responsibility as employers. From talking to people who work in the probation service and the Prison Service, it is absolutely clear that there is a huge amount of uncertainty and worry among staff about what their future will be and where their services are going.

My hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire pointed to the issue of contestability. I know that the Minister will tell us that contestability is not privatisation. We have had that conversation several times. However, I have to say to him that, from the point of view of the people out there who are working in the service, it feels very much like privatisation. There is no question but that that is what it feels like to staff. If the probation service is to be split into purchaser and provider, and work is to be put out to tender, that feels very much as if some of it will be privatised. There is no question but that the talk about market testing of prisons certainly implies the possibility—if not the probability—of private providers taking over.

I recall being involved—I think in 1993—in the first debates in the House about the introduction of private prisons in the UK. I certainly recall the comments of the then shadow Home Secretary—I think that his constituency was Sedgefield—and the opposition that we put forward from the Labour Benches to privatisation. My hon. Friend pointed out what has been happening in the Prison Service.

David Taylor : I am interested to hear the provenance of the remarks that my hon. Friend just mentioned. Another remark from the same source would be something along the lines of "What matters is what works." One therefore draws the inference that if something does not work, it does not matter and we should revert to the normal model. Is that not a reasonable line of logic?

Mr. Gerrard : That is logical. There is also a logic that says that if things are working and going well, why restructure them? If it is not broken, why try to fix it? Given that not a single prison in the public service is classified as a failing prison, why market test? In 2003, the National Audit Office reported on the operational performance of private prisons. It said that the experience of that performance had been mixed: some private prisons had delivered; some of the best private prisons compared with the best prisons in the public sector and that the worst prisons at the bottom were performing at least as badly as public sector prisons.

The NAO acknowledged that private prisons had brought some innovation into the way in which they recruited and used their employees, but said that there was little difference in daily routine. It concluded that the use of private prisons was not a guarantee of success. I have seen no real evidence to back up the statement that the existence of private prisons has had an dramatic effect on how non-private prisons operate. It was said that private prisons have been one of the factors in driving up performance in the public sector. I cannot recall seeing reports of detailed research into such matters.

My hon. Friend referred to prison numbers. That is clearly a huge problem and it is not unique to the United Kingdom. What is happening to prison numbers in many countries is interesting. I recently saw statistics that stated that, from November 1998 to June 2004, in countries where prison numbers could be counted with some reliability, numbers had increased from 8 million to 9 million. Between 1992 and 2004, there had been an increase in the prison population of more than 50 per cent. in 50 countries. The United Kingdom was one of those countries, but the other countries ranged from Argentina, Australia, Cambodia and Spain to Singapore.

David Taylor : A subset of the large prison population that will be of importance and relevance to my hon. Friend's constituency is that there is a larger number of young black men in prison than there is at university. Should we not be trying much harder than we are as a society and a Government to work with non-custodial sentences and divert people from criminal and antisocial activity?

Mr. Gerrard : That is absolutely right. There are disproportionalities in the prison population in respect of young black men. A worrying trend is the increasing number of young Asian men who are ending up in prison, often through drugs offences. We must be aware of the number of people who are in prison on remand. Recently, there has been a drop in the remand number, but it is still large and adds to the pressure inside prisons. As my hon. Friend said when referring to such pressures, it seems that money is being diverted into setting up the new centralised structures for NOMS, so we are ending up with prisons having unused accommodation. We have prisons with wings that are being refurbished, but the money is not there to bring them back into use with the result that other parts of the same prison are overcrowded. The number of overcrowded prisons is still large. How far does spending money on setting up new bureaucratic structures deal with such problems?

We must consider what contestability or privatisation does to staff morale. There is no doubt that, when there has been privatisation, staff terms and conditions are affected. The research that was done on private prisons showed that prison officer pay was on average between 24 and 32 per cent. lower in the private sector than in the Prison Service, and that a Prison Service pension was between 10 and 13 per cent. more valuable than a pension available to someone employed in the private sector. We have already seen those effects in the prisons, so it is no wonder that prison officers are concerned about more market testing. It is also not surprising that people in the probation service, having seen what has happened in the Prison Service, have started to vent concern about what will happen to them if a purchaser-provider split and privatisation come into parts of that service.

The Minister has said to us before that people should not be too worried because there will be a growing market with more work and that the Government want to do more through the probation service and services associated with it. No one whom I have spoken to in the probation service or Prison Service has any problem with the idea of co-operating more closely or working with drugs agencies that are not necessarily in the public sector. What they are worried about is that their jobs will be put out to tender, and there is no question but that that has an effect on staff morale. We have seen real improvements over recent years, and there are serious questions about what we are doing to staff morale at the moment.

My hon. Friend mentioned the business case for NOMS, which we still have not seen, and we do not know when or if we will see it. That again raises some major questions about what is happening now, before the business case has been seen.

We said at the beginning that the Minister has been extremely helpful to those of us who are interested in the issue. He has met us frequently, discussed what is happening and tried his best to keep us informed, and we are genuinely grateful for that. I suspect that he did not dream up some of the ideas that he is lumbered with and having to implement, and that we might be doing some different things if he was taking all the decisions. However, I hope that he will take on board the fact that there are still concerns and consider whether now is the time to be pressing ahead with the reorganisation. We do not know really where we are going or how we intend to get there, and we have not had either the legislation or the full debate in both Houses of Parliament that we should have had.
 
David Taylor : My hon. Friend talked about the reduced pay and conditions of the staff in the private sector. Will he comment on the lack of training or poorer quality training that exists for those staff? The regimes for which they will be responsible will be lower quality purely because of that. Is that not a factor?

Mr. Gerrard : That has certainly been an issue in some of the private prisons. The prisons that have been privatised tend to have been new buildings and at the easy end of the market. A lot of work has been done to improve the prison estate, but none of the old buildings that are more difficult to manage has been taken over by the private sector.

To conclude, I think that we should step back and be careful about rushing ahead with something that has not had the full debate in this place that it should have had.

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