§ 6.55 p.m.
§ Mr. Norman Fowler (Nottingham, South)In this short debate I wish to raise the question of the increased expenditure on prisons in England and Wales. As will be seen from the Supplementary Estimates, this amounts to some £916,000, the lion's share of which results from pay awards and increased overtime. It is the staff side of these increased costs on which I wish to concentrate and to which I wish to draw the attention of my hon. Friend the Minister of State.
Many ideas have been put forward on penal reform. It is said that we should build new prison buildings, and so we should. It is said that we should keep everyone except criminals out of prison, and so of course we should. In the end, however, progress within the penal system depends very largely upon the staff who are serving in the prisons, the prison governors and the prison officers. It is they who control and influence the whole climate inside prison. The finest buildings in the world would be of no avail without a good staff and—this is the essential point, I believe, to come out of the figures—unless the staff had the time to carry out the job which has been given to them in fulfilling the rôle of the prison officer.
The question of increased overtime mentioned in the Supplementary Estimates worries me most. Here I have some specific questions to ask my hon. and learned Friend about the amount and nature of increased overtime in the expenditure total.
734 First, would my hon. and learned Friend confirm my impression that prison officers are now working long hours of overtime, not irregularly but on a regular weekly basis? There seems to be no question but that our whole prison system now depends heavily upon the overtime that is worked by those prison staff.
Will my hon. and learned Friend also confirm that the present average weekly overtime of prison officers is 12 hours? Even this, I think it will be agreed, seriously understates the position in some prisons. According to my information, at some prisons regular overtime of over 20 hours a week is being worked. In other words, prison officers are working what amounts to an extra half a week in each week. Again, this is happening not just once or twice a year but on a regularly weekly basis. This gives cause for concern because it means that the prison service must be depending very heavily upon the overtime now being worked in many of our prisons, to my mind, in an excessive manner.
Can my hon. and learned Friend say which prisons are particularly affected by the increased overtime shown in this expenditure? In particular I wish to know the position in the dispersal prisons for maximum security prisoners, for the following reasons. In latter years we have seen a number of disturbances in such prisons as Gartree and Parkhurst. Needless to say, this has reopened the whole debate on the question of how dangerous prisoners should be held. This again has relevance to the question of staffing and overtime.
I know that my hon. and learned Friend will recall what the Mountbatten Committee said about prison security, namely, that maximum security prisoners should be housed in one separate prison. I know he will also recall what was said later by the Penal Advisory Committee on this question as he was at the time a member of that committee. It argued that these prisoners, whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public, the police or the State, should be dispersed to several prisons within the general system. Therefore, I ask my hon. and learned Friend how he sees the position today, because with his experience he is in a first-class position to answer that very question.
735 We were latterly thinking theoretically about maximum security prisons and we now have experience of them. One of the results of the policy that the Penal Advisory Committee put forward—it was accepted by the Home Secretary at the time—was to put extra pressure upon the staff which whom we are concerned in this debate. It has involved more overtime in those prisons. There can be little question of that.
Surely it has meant that by definition extra security has to be maintained for a greater total of prisoners. That is what it must mean because, if we disperse a small number of maximum security prisoners to a number of prisons within the system, the security of those dispersed prisons must be of an order to prevent the escape of maximum security prisoners. It will have an effect also on the other people already housed in those prisons.
I realise that it is difficult to distinguish between category A and category B prisoners and it is difficult to draw the division in this way, and that sometimes there is very little difference between the degree of risk they present to the public. The whole question has an important bearing on the subject of overtime worked by prison staff and on pay awards which account for the lion's share of the expenditure in the Supplementary Estimate. It could mean that the system which we have devised is putting particular pressure, indeed maximum pressure, on our prison staff.
In the prison population, it seems to me, there are two categories which cause concern. The first are those whose escape would be a matter of public concern, namely, the category A prisoners as defined by the Mountbatten Committee. Secondly, there are those who disrupt the prison population, the young, violent offenders. It may be that sometimes the two categories merge into one, although it may not necessarily follow that that is the case.
When we discussed this matter in 1966 and 1967 we were concerned solely with the escape side. We were not concerned then with the development that has now shown the young, violent criminal as being the real disruptive minority inside the prison system. It is these people who are now causing a new threat to our 736 prison system, men who have used violence in their crimes outside prison and who are prepared to take violence into the prison system. These are the ones who are threatening the whole penal system. It is they who are disrupting the prisons, who are placing an extra burden on, and causing extreme difficulties to prison staff.
Would it not be better, not only from the point of view of the penal system generally but from the point of view of the prison staff, if we examined again the proposal that there should be one prison where most of our worst and dangerous prisoners could be kept? This is a difficult question and in the past I have been ready to accept the argument that the risk of such a course is to create one unmanageable prison. However, in the light of the experience of the last few years, I wonder whether the alternative danger to that is not even greater, the danger being that by failing to isolate this group we spread the trouble, which might otherwise be confined to one prison, to five or six prisons around the country. Evidence of this can be found in the disturbances last summer at prisons like Gartree. What is happening is putting strain essentially on the maximum number of prison staff inside the system.
How we regard this position depends upon our judgment of the problem. I know that my hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State will remember what the Radzinowicz Committee report said about this matter when it referred to a small but disruptive minority of prisoners. The impression given was that it was a very small problem in the context of the penal system. I would not dispute that a minority of prisoners is causing damage and danger within our penal system, but I wonder what assessment has been made by the Home Office of the precise size of the problem today. It is my impression that the size of this disruptive minority has increased appreciably in the last few years. Although it is a minority group, it is big and strong enough to have a really disruptive influence within the prison system.
I put it to my hon. and learned Friend that we should consider whether it is not now in the interests of the prison system, and in the interests above all of the prison staff, to have a single high security prison. Clearly the population will not be the same. There is no question that when 737 a person is sent to such a prison he will remain there for ever and a day. That has not been proposed. The categories of security, and of risk of danger to prison staff, obviously change as sentences increase. Therefore, it would be a changing population within that small or medium-size security prison, and prisoners could be transferred into the mainstream of prison life if this were considered necessary. This proposal, I believe, would be in the interests of the prison system and the interests of the prison staff. These factors should be carefully considered, especially in the light of of our experiences over the last few years.
No one will dispute that a prison officer's job is a difficult one. It is regrettable that sometimes it is dangerous. It involves long and inconvenient hours. It must follow that that must be recognised in the pay which is given to prison officers. The pay scales indicate that an officer is first paid a basic weekly rate of £22.54, which rises to £30.62. A senior officer receives from £32.90 to £35.85. At the top of the scale is the chief officer who receives £2,782 per annum. The basic officer is paid about £30 a week at the top of his scale. I ask my hon. and learned Friend to accept that that is not generous treatment. It is not the most generous pay scale for a job which involves such difficulty. I am not seeking to urge my hon. and learned Friend to announce a sudden and dramatic increase for the prison service. However, I hope that the prison service will put its case, which I think is a good one, before the Pay Board.
There is a strong case for upgrading the status, the conditions and the pay of the prison service in the same way as the police service has been upgraded during the last 10 years. Following the Royal Commission in 1962 police service conditions were improved dramatically. We should now consider the prison service and ensure that similar treatment is adopted.
I hope that everything I have said indicates the importance that I place upon the role of the prison service. Some people say that prisons are outdated and should be phased out. That is nonsense. Crime is increasing, not only in London but in the main provincial centres. Serious crime is increasing dramatically—for example armed crime, crimes of violence. 738 robbery and crimes which the general public consider most serious. It follows that we face the problem of the serious criminal. It is sometimes forgotten that that is the logical result.
The service which will bear the brunt of the problems caused by the serious criminal is the prison service. The situation is in some ways new to this country. It has developed dramatically during the last five or seven years. As we are not experienced in dealing with the problem of serious crime and the serious criminal, it is reasonable that we should feel our way and should not find ourselves on a hook because some years ago a proposal or policy was adopted which necessarily must be continued in the 1970s.
It is essential that we learn from experience, and I hope that we will learn from the experience of dealing with the serious criminal. I am convinced that in any policy emphasis must be put upon the prison staff and upon the basic prison officer, who does a good if underrated job.
§ 7.15 p.m.
§ Mr. Thomas Cox (Wandsworth Central)I welcome the opportunity that the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler) has given the House to spend a few moments talking about the prison service. While we have many debates on many important subjects, this subject is rarely discussed in the House.
I have contact with the prison in my constituency, and I know that there is a shortage of staff. This, indeed, applies to most of the prisons in our large cities. Many officers have to work many hours of overtime each week. That is the situation at Wandsworth Prison. One of the main reasons is the lack of housing accommodation for prison officers. When officers come to Wandsworth and other prisons in the London area from the training school at Wakefield they are aware that initially they will not have accommodation made available to them. But they feel that within a reasonable time accommodation will be made available for themselves and their families. Unfortunately they soon learn that that is not the case.
All hon. Members will realise that no man wants to be separated from his wife and family. From the discussions which I have had with officials of the Prison 739 Officers' Association at Wandsworth, that is one of the reasons why men who enter the prison service with enthusiasm, thinking that it is a worthwhile job, soon become dissillusioned not with the job and its prospects but because they realise that they will be separated from their families. They realise that they will live in furnished accommodation in a city for a year or even more. Possibly they will know very few people. Unfortunately this means that men will leave the service. When we consider the cost that must be involved in training prison officers, that is something which we should regret very much and seek to stop.
The hon. and learned Gentleman will agree, following the consultations which he must have had with prison governors, that all governors say that they seek most of all a stable staff. The potential trouble makers who are found in the larger prisons require a stable staff of officers. These are men who will find out the potential troubles which possibly are being considered by prisoners. I know that that point is often made to me by the Governor of Wandsworth Prison. That is why he encourages wherever possible the stability of staff. If housing is not made available, that stability, which we should all like to see, cannot exist.
I hope that the, hon. and learned Gentleman will give an assurance that where there is a shortage of accommodation and where there are properties on the market that can be bought, no restrictions will be placed by his Department on moneys being made available to prison governors to ensure that they can offer accommodation to men coming to staff the appropriate prisons.
The hon. Member referred to the longer sentences which are being given. This has caused us a good deal of concern. The people who are being given these longer sentences are the potential trouble makers. These are the people who, when they are sent to prison, sometimes for the most appalling and vicious crimes, think that they have a right to rule the prison as they obviously tried to rule the area in which they lived.
It is the duty of the Government to see that these people are not allowed to do this. The only way we can ensure 740 that this does not happen is to be certain that every prison has its full quota of staff. The hon. Member made the point about dispersal. There are two schools of thought about this. The Prison Officers' Association believes that there should be one prison to which long-term prisoners, potential trouble makers, should be sent.
I take the point made by the hon. Member about the salary scales of prison officers. I am sure that the Minister is aware that prison officers are feeling very bitter just now about the Government's freeze. We know that all workers are feeling bitter. I am aware, too, that groups of workers say that they are special cases. I do believe that the police and prison officers are special cases by the very nature of their work.
The police officers were able to get their wage increased before the freeze. The prison officers were not so lucky. I hope that the hon. and learned Gentleman will tell us that prison officers will be given an assurance that the present salary scales will be readjusted and that there will be a substantial increase in their pay. It is wrong to expect prison officers to work long hours of overtime to get a decent weekly wage. I know that shortage of staff is one of the reasons but another is the inadequate pay scale. I know from recent correspondence that there is a feeling of great bitterness among prison officers. There should have been a salary increase in January this year, but it was stopped.
I welcome the opportunity which the hon. Gentleman has given the House to talk about the problems of prison officers. We rarely discuss such matters in this House. I am certain there would be a great deal of agreement on all sides when I say that we ought to tell prison officers, wherever they are, that we recognise their problems, we realise the potential dangers and as far as is humanly possible we shall do everything we can to see that they obtain the best possible conditions, by way of salary, prisons and living accommodation. If we can say that to them, we shall ensure a continuing increase in the number of men entering the service, remaining there, and playing a useful and constructive part. This is something we all want to see happening.
§ 7.24 p.m.
§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Mark Carlisle)The House is grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler) for introducing this debate—at a slightly earlier hour of the evening than on other occasions when he and I have discussed such matters on the Consolidated Fund. I particularly enjoyed his thoughtful speech. I agreed with him and the hon. Member for Wandsworth, Central (Mr. Thomas Cox) when they said that it is the staff which influences the climate within a prison.
None of us would dispute for a moment that a successful prison service, however success is measured, is utterly dependent on the staff, in terms of numbers and calibre. I am glad that, thanks to the initiative of my hon. Friend in raising this subject, I have the opportunity to pay a well-deserved tribute to the many thousands of officers of all grades within the prison service who day after day carry out onerous duties in difficult conditions on behalf of the rest of society.
We all know that working with people, even at the best of times, imposes certain severe demands on one's reserves of patience and tolerance. When a person is dealing with people in custody, many of whom may be disturbed, many of whom will have an inbuilt antipathy towards the system and those whose job it is to operate it, this must be about the most demanding job which it is possible to impose.
It is greatly to the credit of our prison staff that they manage so successfully to live with and surmount the various problems. I sympathise with those among the Prison Officers' Association and others who say that the only time they hit the headlines is when something goes wrong and suddenly public opinion is focussed on their work.
Three of the main points which have come out of this debate are pay, overtime and the effect on the prisoner and the prison officer of the dispersal policy as against the concentration policy for long-term criminals.
Before dealing with pay, let me make one or two comments about numbers. We have to give a high priority to building up the size of the prison service, both to meet unavoidable additional demands 742 and also to improve the regime within prisons and borstals and so on. Over recent years we have met with considerable success. From the beginning of 1968 until the beginning of this year the number of prison officers increased from just over 8,000 to just over 13,000. That is an average net increase of 700 a year. With such a net growth it means that the recruitment rate was over 1,000 a year.
In 1972 we had an all-time record of over 1,500 new recruits to the prison service. It can be said that that is still not enough. My hon. Friend was right to say that we still want more prison officers. There is a limit to the rate at which new officers can be recruited, trained and absorbed into the system. The fine recruitment rate of last year means that at the moment one in six of basic grade officers are still in their probationary period and about 30 per cent, of those basic grade officers have no more than two years' service. Although the quality of recruits is high—and I am glad to acknowledge this—the relatively high level of inexperience that follows from rapid expansion in itself creates problems. Therefore we have to be careful not to think in purely numerical terms, and in any case we should delude ourselves if we were to think that the pool of potential prison officers in the population is unlimited.
Leaving numbers, I come immediately to the question of pay and conditions. This was a major part of what my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South said and also a major part of the speech by the hon. Member for Wandsworth, Central. In reference to pay, at this moment, when looking to the future, I can only say that this must be subject to the Government's overall counter-inflation policy. I accept that prison officers, being civil servants, will be subject in phase 2 of that policy to whatever arrangements are devised for dealing within the overall limit with civil servants' pay, and that any anomalies or special difficulties to which the hon. Gentleman referred will have to be matters for examination in phase 3.
I accept what the hon. Gentleman said —and it is right that I should do so— that the prison officers would be negotiating now for a pay award backdated to January 1973. But I must in all fairness make it clear at once that that award will 743 have to operate within that overall Governmental policy, as will awards for other groups.
I think one ought to put this in perspective and look back over recent years and see what has happened to prison officers' pay during that period. My hon. Friend mentioned the analogy with police pay as it existed at the time of the Royal Commission in 1962. I would suggest to him that this is not a very valid analogy because, if I recollect correctly, the Royal Commission found that since the war police pay had lagged behind pay movements generally and had got seriously out of line with the general level of wages and incomes then applying. To restore that position, very substantial increases in pay were recommended.
The arrangements we have used for reviewing prison officers' pay in recent years have been designed specifically to prevent that situation arising. Those arrangements, which have the agreement of the Prison Officers' Association, followed the recommendations of the independent Wynn Parry Committee, which reported in 1958. That committee found, perhaps not unnaturally, that, unlike other grades in the Civil Service, prison officers had no analogue in the outside world with whom their pay could be compared. They therefore proposed that the pay of prison officers should be lined up with certain other Civil Service grades with which their pay was then comparable. The pay of those other Civil Service grades followed outside analogues, and prison officers' pay then followed any changes in the pay of those other grades based on that analogy. But the committee also recognised that future changes in the nature of the prison officer's job might affect the link with the other grades, and provision was therefore included for "special factors" to be adduced which might call for modification of the straightforward test of comparability.
That is how the pay of prison officers has been dealt with over a number of years and to my knowledge the Prison Officers' Association has certainly not shown any inclination to depart from that arrangement. Nor, let me say, has the system led to any lagging behind of prison officers' pay as compared with outside 744 rates. Indeed, if 1 may quote the prison officers themselves, in an article about the pay review system in their magazine two years ago they said
Since the Wynn Parry formula was introduced the national average wage "—that is, since 1958—has improved by 71 per cent. … Wage rates for prison officers have improved by94 per cent, at the minimum of the basic grade scale and 105 per cent, at its maximum. That was between 1958 and 1970, and those figures do not take account of the fact that there was a 14.6 per cent, increase effective as from 1st January 1971 and a further 7 per cent, increase which took effect a year later.Therefore, corning to the pay rates at the moment—and I confirm what my hon. Friend said—the present rate for a newly joined officer under training, in round figures, is £22.50 a week. On completion of his initial period of training he gets an increase of £1.50 a week, his pay rising to £30.60 after eight years. That is for the basic grade of officer, but before reaching that maximum he comes into the field for promotion to senior officer, and subsequent promotions within the prison officer grade can take him up to a salary of £2,782 a year. These rates represent increases dating back from January 1972 of between 63 per cent, and 72 per cent, over a period of seven years.
The other point that must be made is that it is somewhat misleading to think in terms of basic pay rates only, because in addition to the basic pay, in addition to the allowances he may receive for particular skills and particular kinds of duty, every officer has a free house, maintained at public expense, or a rent allowance.
I want to break off here to tell the hon. Member for Wandsworth, Central that at this stage I am afraid that I have not the answers to his points about housing. He has raised these with me before and we have discussed them in the past. I am only too willing to look at what he said and to write to him about any matter that may be of help, or to get my noble Friend who is now directly responsible for prison matters in the Home Office to write to him.
As the House knows, the prison officer also has the non-contributory pension 745 scheme—a recently negotiated, highly attractive scheme. He has the opportunity to retire at 55 with every year of his service after the twentieth year counting double for pension purposes. I suggest therefore, that over these years since the Wynn Parry Report the salary of prison officers has become more than level with those in other forms of employment.
Overtime, too, is relevant to pay and very relevant to conditions in the prison service. Overtime is widespread, and one must accept that it is likely to remain so for some time to come, given the demands on the prison service and the limited speed with which it can be expanded.
Demands for additional staff press upon us all the time. An increased emphasis on security followed the Mountbatten Report, much of which rested on physical improvements and increased the demands on individual officers. There is also the constant endeavour to improve the regime within the prison, which again imposes additional burdens on the staff. There are the new establishments which we are opening and the extension of existing establishments. There is the ever-increasing amount of court work to which we have to respond in terms of escort duty and the manning of the courts.
All this means that our substantial recruitment has only just about managed to keep level with the demands that have been imposed. More recently, we have had to find a considerable number of officers to assist in the prison service in Northern Ireland. It is not surprising that overtime remains substantial.
I confirm my hon. Friend's figures. The average overtime worked weekly, week in, week out, is about 12½ hours but, like all average figures, it includes wide variations and fluctuations. Doing the best I can to answer the question put to me by the hon. Member for Wands-worth, Central, I would say that in the local prison the average amount of overtime worked is between 15 and 16 hours a week. In the remand centre, which is where the real pressure exists because of escort duties, the average weekly overtime worked is about 20 hours. The training establishments, the more modern prisons and the young offenders' establishments follow the average. I cannot give the exact figure for the category A prisons. 746 but it is above the average of 12½ hours worked throughout the prison service and falls somewhere between that figure and the 16 hours worked in the local prison.
In the category A dispersal prisons within my own knowledge up to a year ago—and I have no reason to think that this does not still apply—a greater number of overtime hours were worked in some prisons than in others. We must remember that the disturbances last summer imposed considerable extra work and overtime on the prison service. I am sure that my hon. Friend and the hon. Gentleman, who take such an interest in this matter, will remember that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary gave a specific acknowledgement of the extra work that those disturbances had imposed on the staff.
Both hon. Members have asked about the dispersal policy. If I am right in saying that work in the prison service calls heavily on the prison officers' patience and tolerance, obviously they are subjected to additional strain when working in prisons which contain a high proportion of dangerous men. There is no simple answer to this. The problem will not be solved merely by changing the method of containment. Prison officers will still be working with dangerous and violent men who have to be carefully contained by whatever method. I will not go into the detail of the distinction between concentration and dispersal. My hon. Friend summarised it in his speech.
We are conscious of the effect that the dispersal policy has had on staff. At the time of the prison disturbances last year my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary acknowledged that and set up a review of the operation of the dispersal policy. It is hoped that this review, which is being carried out in the Home Office, will shortly be completed. My right hon. Friend will then have an opportunity to consider the results of the study in relation to the views expressed at the time by the Prison Officers' Association and the effect of the dispersal scheme on prison staff before coming to a decision.
I reiterate what my hon. Friend said about the danger of over-simplifying that distinction between category A on the one hand and the disturbers on the other. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said in a Press statement at the time 747 that it was a gross over-simplification of a highly complex problem to confuse these two separate issues. He said that there were prisoners who were dangerous and must not be allowed to escape and there were prisoners who were trouble makers who tended to disrupt the prisons that had to contain them, but not all the dangerous men were the trouble makers and not all the trouble makers were the dangerous men.
In the review of the operation of dispersal, the Home Office has very much in mind that "category A" and "troublemaker" are not necessarily two different names for the same person. We have set up this review to see whether the operation of the dispersal policy can be improved. The Home Secretary hopes to have the advantage of looking at the results of the review in the near future.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this subject and to the hon. Member for Wandsworth, Central. They have both always taken an interest in penal matters. I am grateful also for the interest which they have always taken in the Prison Officers' Association and the members of it. We in the Home Office are conscious of the work that they do and are grateful to them for the way in which they carry it out, often in difficult circumstances with a high degree of patience, tolerance and skill.