Troubling Signs at Parc

In the midst of a prison crisis and now a period of 'purdah' due to a general election being called, there are worrying signs of trouble reported on Twitter overnight. This from Reform & Rebuild, prison support advocates:-

"HMP Parc: 10 deaths in 3 months; youngest age 19. Riots sparked, prisoners stabbed, air ambulances, tornado squads, phone lines disconnected so families can't get through. This is the tip of the iceberg for the British prison system if it doesn't get its act together."

Someone else tweets:-

"There is a riot taking place in HMP Parc - one wing currently barricaded - inmates and staff injured with 2 airlifted to hospital and police at the site. This is what happens when you keep people locked up for 23 and half hours a day in a prison that's imploded!"

and an extensive thread by Ian Acheson and what he intended to tell Radio 4 listeners this morning:-

Extraordinary. *Unconfirmed* rumours that there is a major incident at the prison this evening. National Tornado resources mobilised.

I've been prevented from appearing on BBC R4 Today tomorrow to talk about HMP Parc because Purdah. That's perfectly fine of course, most of us who opine are used to being gazumped by dog bites man etc. No foul. But here is what I would have said: 

The frequency of fatal incidents in HMP Parc - 10 dead prisoners in the same establishment in 3 months is unprecedented. Behind the human tragedy are failings that can't be explained away as coincidence. 

Parc was until relatively recently performing reasonably well. 2022 inspection of the adult part of prison where the deaths have happened does mention easy availability of drugs tho. 

So what has happened since then to create a place that seems so profoundly unsafe? Several of the deaths are believed to be of suicide, several related to poisoning by synthetic canabinoids. Hard to detect, still easy to smuggle in.

One source of information ought to be the state 'Controllers' team. Every private prison has a state official based there to monitor contract delivery, ask awkward questions, look everywhere and coordinate enforcement of penalties. In theory anyway. 

The idea that private prisons are insulated from state accountability is a polite fiction. The state is directly accountable for the welfare of all prisoners in its custody whether it outsources the risk or not. Again, that's the theory. 

So here is an institution already going downhill fast in the two years since last inspection. Recruitment and retention is horrendously difficult, staff corruption is apparent, violence is becoming endemic. People are worn out and systems are breaking down. A familiar tale. 

All the precursors for failure assemble. G4S has form for this. It was stripped of HMP Birmingham contract in 2018 after a riot caused in part by rampant drug abuse and insufficient staff caused millions of pounds worth of damage. The death rate there was far lower.

Birmingham had a Controllers team that was either unable or unwilling to sound the alarm about a descent into chaos over a period of time. The same was true of Lowdham Grange, another privately operated prison that was in anarchy in Xmas this year until the state took it back. 

Again, an eleborate and bureaucratic system of contract monitoring seems to have completely failed to spot or arrest a frightening and tragic series of fatal incidents. A drugs economy operated with impunity by organised crime is likely at the bottom of most of the horror.

So what should be done? Well handing the prison back to the state seems to be a non-starter - less odd if you consider you'd be handing the place back to the people who run Wandsworth, Bedford, Woodhill and other hell holes. 

We need a beefed up assertive state contract management presence in Parc and G4S forced to get suitable and sufficient front line/specialist staff back into the prison to secure it and properly manage prisoners at risk. On pain of losing contract altogether w/o compensation. 

We should also have HMIP do an immediate emergency inspection to examine how and why the prison is failing to protect prisoners. And staff. If that power doesn't exist, give it to them. 

One of the best ways of easing the pressure - removing prisoners from a huge jail - one of our biggest and close to maximum capacity - giving staff some breathing space. But we literally can't spare any accommodation being taken out. 

For the first time, a state prison, HMP Woodhill, has recently been found culpable by the Coroner for unlawful killing through neglect after an inquest into a suicide there. But we can't wait for that level of accountability to arrest the decline. We need action now. 

I've seen my share of dead people in prison. It never leaves you. I feel huge sympathy for the parents & loved ones bereaved, looking for answers and the beleagured and fearful staff at HMP Parc who have been let down by their employer and the state. I probably would only have been able to say a tenth of that tomorrow morning but there you have it. 

Ian Acheson

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Ian Acheson profile Staffordshire University:-

Prison officer, journalist, Government adviser, director of an international charity – Ian Acheson’s career has been nothing if not varied.

He is an expert in the UK’s criminal justice system and specifically the prevention of Islamist and right-wing radicalisation in its prison system and the post-release threat of terrorist offenders.

In 2016 Ian was asked by the Government to lead a landmark independent review of Islamist extremism in prisons and the probation service which led to transformational change in the way the UK manages ideologically inspired offenders.

Born in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland in 1968, Ian moved to England to study politics at Durham University from 1986 to 1989 followed by a short stint as a trainee manager at Coutts Bank. “I had no aptitude or interest in finance,” he says. “I come from a uniformed family – the Army, police etc so going into the uniformed services was always in the back of my head.”

A journalism career followed banking, working for BBC Radio Ulster and then as a reporter for Ballymena Guardian, but a recruitment brochure for HM Prison Service that promised ‘this is a career where you will find out who you are’ turned his head.

Ian worked for HM Prison Service for around a decade including as a prison officer, principal officer, manager of a wing and finally a prison governor.

He then became the Director of Prisoners Abroad, an international charity supporting British citizens detained overseas.

Senior civil service roles followed including time as Director of Community Safety at the Home Office.

Ian left the civil service to launch what was to become a successful executive coaching company, Reboot, combining his loves for walking and talking. He was enjoying self-employed life until Michael Gove rang in 2016.

“He said I’d like you to investigate Islamic extremism in the youth justice sector and probation service. Of course I said yes.” For someone who talks of having “a profound and personal interest in counter terrorism” there was never any question of whether he would be prepared to step back into public life.

Ian’s work led to transformational change in the way the UK manages ideologically inspired offenders. In the years since he has worked to assist governments across the world to combat violent extremism in their prison systems and other criminal justice reforms in post-authoritarian states.

He has been a senior advisor for the Counter Extremism Project since 2018 where his research includes risk/dangerousness management, deradicalisation, reintegration of terrorist offenders and disguised compliance.

Ian is now a Visiting Professor at Staffordshire University and has been made an Honorary Doctor of the University.

He said: “I was very pleased to become a Visiting Professor, it’s important for me. I was a very working class kid, the first from my family to go to university. I love the idea of working with students like me and playing a small part in driving their enthusiasm.”

Being made an Honorary Doctor is a cherry on the icing on the cake and for Ian it is “recognition of the work that I’m doing.”

He is determined to ensure he always has something valuable to contribute and added: “I try to say what I think. I try to be honest and ethical about the problems we have.”

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BBC News two days ago:-

A tenth inmate has died at a prison in just over three months amid claims of drug misuse by prisoners.

Warren Manners, 38, is the latest to have died at HMP Parc in Bridgend, which is run by Security company G4S. Nine other inmates have died since 27 February, including four believed to be drug-related, while one prison staff member has been arrested in connection with drug dealing there.

South Wales Police said the death was not believed to be suspicious and the coroner had been informed. A spokesperson for the prison said Mr Manners' death would be investigated by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman and that the coroner would establish the cause of his death. Mr Manners died earlier on Wednesday, the spokesperson said, adding: "Our thoughts are with [Manners'] family and friends."

South Wales Police were called just after 12:20 BST following a report of a "sudden death of a 38-year-old man at HMP Parc". "Investigations are continuing into the circumstances surrounding the death, however at this time it is not believed to be suspicious," said police.

"HM Coroner has been informed. It will be for HM Coroner to give a determination on the cause of death." Families of inmates who have died protested outside the jail on Monday, while two MPs called on the UK government to take charge of the prison.

HMP Parc is one of the UK's largest category B prisons, holding convicted male adult and young offenders, as well as convicted sex offenders or those awaiting trial for sex offences.

South Wales Police previously said a synthetic opioid called Nitazene had been identified in connection with four of the deaths. The force said spice, another synthetic drug, had been identified in two of the four deaths.

In March, prisons and probation ombudsman, Adrian Usher, urged all prisoners in possession of spice to dispose of it.

Fool Me Once, Shame On You:

Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me

Those with long memories will recall the electronic tagging scandals of the past when the dead and a false leg were tagged as part of a massive and systematic fraud committed over many years by both G4S and Serco. Well, the hapless HMPPS have decided both companies are now rehabilitated and each has been rewarded with brand new contracts, as reported here on the Civil Service World website:- 

HMPPS says ‘lessons have been learned’ as Serco and G4S bag electronic monitoring contracts

Deals worth up to £450m come almost a decade after firms admitted overcharging government to the tune of £170m. The boss of HM Prison and Probation Service has told MPs that lessons from past experience with electronic tagging contracts have been learned as Serco and G4S have been awarded new deals worth up to £450m.

The firms wrongly billed the Ministry of Justice for tens of millions of pounds under electronic-monitoring contracts first awarded in 2005. Sometimes multiple charges were made in relation to the same offender, in other cases charges were made for offenders who were dead.

G4S repaid the department more than £100m after details of the overcharging scandal emerged in 2013; Serco repaid £70.5m. Both firms removed themselves from the procurement process for the “next generation” of electronic monitoring devices. G4S subsequently returned to supplying electronic tags to government.

Investigations by the Serious Fraud Office resulted in Serco being fined £19.2m plus £3.7m costs and G4S being fined £38.5m plus £5.9m costs over the scandal.

Earlier this month Serco landed a £200m MoJ contract to deliver electronic-monitoring services in England and Wales for six years to May 2030. The deal will be worth an additional £75m if two one-year extension options are exercised. G4S was granted a £175m contract to deliver monitoring technology, which includes devices for location monitoring and alcohol monitoring.

In a letter to members of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, HMPPS chief executive Amy Rees said the service’s approach to the new contract arrangements had “been informed by previous experience and lessons learned, as well as government best practice”. She said specific supplier “accountabilities, roles and responsibilities” had been set out in the respective contracts agreed with Serco and G4S.

“During implementation of the new service, both suppliers will be required to report on progress and risks through an implementation board,” she said. “This board will oversee delivery of the integrated implementation plan and ensure risks are appropriately managed through the various phases of transition. The implementation board will report into a service delivery board, chaired by the head of EM operations, where ultimate responsibility for holding suppliers to account and dealing with any issues will take place. This will ensure there is senior-level oversight of progress and risks.”

Rees’ letter was prompted by a recommendation in PAC’s Transforming electronic monitoring services report last year, which called for HMPPS to set out how it would handle risks in the programme once suppliers had been appointed. The letter was dated 27 October but was only published yesterday. The Serco and G4S contracts were announced on 8 November.

Rees said that as field and monitoring services supplier, Serco would act as service integrator and be responsible for the running and management of the end-to-end service. She said that in addition to their individual contractual obligations, Serco and G4S had also signed a separate collaboration agreement setting out clear expectations on behaviours and ways of working.

“Both suppliers will appoint a suitably senior lead officer who will be specifically accountable for ensuring their respective teams adhere to the requirements set out in the collaboration agreement,” she said. “These leads will attend the service delivery board.”

Published in October last year, PAC’s Transforming electronic monitoring services report detailed a litany of concerns about HMPPS and MoJ’s handling of tagging.

Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier said the current system was “outdated” and at “constant risk of failure”, while the report flagged £98.2m wasted on the scrapped Gemini case-management system, which MPs described as “high-risk and over-ambitious”. MPs also criticised the MoJ and HMPPS for failing to rigorously evaluate whether tagging reduces reoffending before pushing ahead with a £1.2bn programme to expand it to another 10,000 people. As of March last year around 15,300 offenders were tagged, according to the report.

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Of course tagging is seen by politicians as a 'silver bullet' and cheaper way of punishment for much criminal behaviour, alongside community service as part of so-called 'tough' community sentences as alternatives to imprisonment. However, it does nothing to address rehabilitation, but that's just indicative of politicians never understanding what's involved in that. 

Anyway, there's a chronic shortage of prison capacity and I notice the Sentencing Council have launched a consultation on the whole subject and this must surely be the opportunity for some serious submissions on the central role a reformed probation service could play from PSR through to proper, meaningful supervision. Reported here on the BBC news website:-

Courts to issue fewer short jail terms under plans

Courts could soon be handing out more rehabilitative community sentences, rather than sending people to jail for short terms, under radical new plans. The Sentencing Council for England and Wales says judges and magistrates should think more about sentences that are proven to reform offenders. The plans tell courts to think twice about jailing women because of the impact on children. The plans, years in development, come amid a prison overcrowding crisis.

The council is the official body that advises all criminal judges and magistrates on how they should sentence criminals fairly and consistently, following rules set out by Parliament. The new consultation covers the principle of choosing community sentences, such as unpaid work or drug treatment programmes, or prison.

For almost 30 years the trend in sentencing has meant that more criminals have been sent to jail and for longer periods. However, academic studies show that community sentences do more good in rehabilitating low-level offenders than prison. In the major consultation, the council argues that if judges and magistrates conclude that an offender potentially deserves to be jailed, they must first pause and consider if a community order would actually be more effective at achieving rehabilitation, one of the key purposes of sentencing.

"Increasing academic research has covered the importance of rehabilitation in reducing reoffending," says the council. The Council believes it is important to reflect the findings."

The document suggests that judges needs to take extra care in assessing the lives of offenders from specific backgrounds including young adults, women, people with dependants, people who are transgender, ethnic minorities or people with addictions, learning disabilities or mental disorders. Crucially, before judges jail a woman, the council says they must consider the harm that could be caused to a pregnant woman's unborn child.

"A custodial sentence may become disproportionate to achieving the purposes of sentencing where there would be an impact on dependants, including on unborn children where the offender is pregnant," says the council. "Courts should avoid the possibility of an offender giving birth in prison unless the imposition of a custodial sentence is unavoidable."

That highly significant guidance comes after the death in 2019 of a baby whose mother went into labour unaided in a cell. The proposals also tell judges for the first time to consider whether older women who commit crimes may be experiencing changes in their mental health caused by the menopause.

Sentencing Council chairman, Lord Justice Davis, said the existing guidelines were among the most important in use. "The revised guideline updates and extends the current guidance," he said. "It reflects new information and research in relation to young adult and female offenders and findings from research on the effectiveness of sentencing."

Tom Franklin, head of the Magistrates Association, said it welcomed the "robust emphasis on alternatives to custody. Magistrates want effective community sentences and more information about their impact on the people who are given them," he said. The consultation runs until 21 February next year on the Sentencing Council's website.

Failure Rewarded Again!

I've been a bit distracted of late and this from the Independent is slightly old news, but it's certainly worth highlighting and especially as 'outsourcing' is proving so spectacularly bad at running Covid test and trace:- 

G4S wins £300m government contract to run ‘mega-prison’

G4S has won a £300m government contract to run a new “mega-prison” which will house 1,680 inmates. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) selected the security company to manage HMP Five Wells, a category C jail in Wellingborough, despite a series of scandals and after the firm was stripped of its contact to run crisis-hit Birmingham prison last year. The government had named G4S as its preferred choice to run the new £253m prison in July but faced a legal challenge from a rival bidder. 

Prisons minister Lucy Frazer confirmed on Tuesday the company had been awarded the 10-year contract. Five Wells is set to open in early 2022, on the site of a former jail which closed in 2012, creating 700 jobs.

Birmingham prison was taken back into state control in April last year after G4S was stripped of the contact seven years early. The jail, one of the largest in the country, had plunged into crisis under private management, according to damning findings by the chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke. His report likened scenes to a war zone and said inmates walked around "like zombies" while on drugs and flouted rules with impunity.

G4S also pulled out of running Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick Airport last year and stopping running Medway secure training centre in Kent in 2016 after BBC's Panorama programme broadcast undercover footage of inmates and detainees being allegedly assaulted and verbally abused at two sites.

The company runs four other prisons - Altcourse, Parc, Rye Hill and Oakwood - which have won praise from inspectors. But just days after it emerged G4S was the front-runner for the Wellingborough contract, the firm was fined £38m by the Serious Fraud Office for “dishonestly” overcharging the government for the electronic tagging of offenders.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: 

“At a time when we should be investing in public health, ministers are once again pouring millions into the coffers of G4S. Even after a major tagging scandal and the disastrous management of Birmingham prison, the profiteers of punishment continue to be rewarded for failure. Unfortunately, the people of Northamptonshire will be the ones picking up the tab, as a huge new prison in their county will bring more crime and heap more pressure on police, hospitals and other public services.”

David Lammy, Labour’s shadow justice secretary, said: “G4S’s past performance illustrates the failings of privatisation in the justice system. Its well-publicised failure to manage HMP Birmingham led to reports of violence, unsanitary conditions, drink, drugs, and the bullying of staff. Serious questions must be asked about why the government has handed the contract for the new prison in Wellingborough to G4S.”

The MoJ said the UK’s privately run prisons were "among the best-performing across the estate and have been consistently praised by independent inspectors". It added 95 per cent of inspection scores awarded to jails run by G4S graded their performance as good or reasonably good. 

An MoJ spokesman said: "G4S-managed prisons have also brought innovative new approaches to offender rehabilitation, including a cutting-edge families intervention programme and peer-led initiatives, praised by prison inspectors for building 'excellent personal and social skills' so prisoners contribute in jail and are prepared for resettlement."

Graham Levinsohn, UK chief executive of G4S, said: “In partnership with the Ministry of Justice, our mutual aim is to ensure that Five Wells becomes the blueprint for innovation, rehabilitation and modernisation in the prison service."

What a Lovely Surprise!

This from BBC website on Thursday:-

G4S selected to run Wellingborough 'mega prison'

Private firm G4S has been selected as the preferred bidder to run a new "mega prison", the BBC understands. It is believed the contract to operate the jail in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, will be for 10 years at a cost of more than £300m.

The company has been told it has been chosen, but the contract has not been ratified and could be challenged. An official announcement on the prison, which will hold 1,600 male inmates, is expected over the next few weeks. A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: "The operator competition has not yet concluded. We will set out confirmed details in due course."

The decision comes as a surprise after G4S was stripped of its contract to run Birmingham Prison following a damning inspection report which said it was in a "state of crisis". The company also gave up running Medway secure training centre in Kent and Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick Airport after undercover filming by the BBC's Panorama programme showed inmates and detainees allegedly being mistreated.

However, G4S has been praised for its running of four prisons in England and Wales - Altcourse, Oakwood, Parc and Rye Hill. It is thought three other companies - Sodexo, Serco and MTC Novo - bid to run Wellingborough, which is costing £253m to build and is expected to open next year. A source with knowledge of the process said the G4S bid was not the "cheapest" but was regarded as of "higher quality" than the others.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: "It is disappointing that public money is being squandered on expanding the prison estate; extremely disappointing that public money is being poured into the coffers of G4S. At a time when we need to invest in jobs and the nation's health, it is shameful to waste money on the profiteers of punishment."

Shadow justice secretary David Lammy said: "When G4S ran HMP Birmingham there had to be an emergency takeover by the government after reports of drug dealing, violence, squalid conditions and poor leadership. It highlighted many of the problems with privatisation in the justice system. Serious questions must now be asked about why the government plans to hand the company control of the new prison in Wellingborough."

Wellingborough MP Peter Bone said: "My concern would be to make sure that whoever runs it, runs it properly."

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This from BBC website on Friday:-

G4S fined £44m by Serious Fraud Office over electronic tagging

Security firm G4S has been fined £44m by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) as part of an agreement that will see it avoid prosecution for overcharging the Ministry of Justice for the electronic tagging of offenders, some of whom had died. The SFO said G4S had accepted responsibility for three counts of fraud that were carried out in an effort to “dishonestly mislead” the government, in order to boost its profits.

Former justice minister Chris Grayling asked the SFO to investigate G4S and rival Serco in 2013, after a departmental review found they had overcharged for tracking the movements of people who had moved abroad, returned to prison, or died. G4S agreed to compensate the Ministry of Justice in 2014, reaching a settlement worth £121m. But it remained under investigation by the SFO until Friday, when it announced a deferred prosecution agreement, pending approval by a judge at a hearing scheduled for next Friday.

Under the terms of the agreement, G4S will pay a £38.5m penalty and £5.9m to cover the SFO’s costs. The company was given a 40% discount on its fine after co-operating with the SFO. It has also agreed to enforce new controls, including a programme of “corporate renewal” to prevent a repeat of the scandal, which took place within its G4S Care & Justice division.

“G4S Care & Justice repeatedly lied to the Ministry of Justice, profiting to the tune of millions of pounds and failing to provide the openness, transparency, and overall good corporate citizenship that UK taxpayers expect and deserve from companies entering into government contracts,” SFO director Lisa Osofsky said. “The terms of this deferred prosecution agreement will provide substantial oversight and assurance regarding G4S Care & Justice’s commitment to responsible corporate behaviour.”

G4S chief executive Ashley Almanza said: 

“The behaviour which resulted in the offences committed in 2011 and 2012 is completely counter to the group’s values and standards and is not tolerated within G4S. We have apologised to the UK government and implemented significant changes to people, policies, practices and controls, designed to ensure that our culture is underpinned by high ethical standards and that our business is always conducted in a manner which is consistent with our values. We have made significant progress in embedding these standards throughout the group and we are pleased that this has been acknowledged by the SFO and the UK government.”

The £44.4m in fines and costs takes the total paid out by outsourcing firms involved in the prisoner tagging scandal to more than £250m. Serco reached its own £22.9m agreement with the SFO last year, six years after repaying £68m to the Ministry of Justice. The SFO said its agreement with G4S was made possible by factors including the company’s disclosure of evidence and its “overall – albeit delayed – substantial cooperation” with the investigation.

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In other dodgy-dealing - some would say corruption - news by HM Government, this from the Guardian:-  

Firm with links to Gove and Cummings given Covid-19 contract without open tender

The Cabinet Office has awarded an £840,000 contract to research public opinion about government policies to a company owned by two long-term associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, without putting the work out for tender.

Public First, a small policy and research company in London, is run by James Frayne, whose work alongside Cummings – the prime minister’s senior adviser – dates back to a Eurosceptic campaign 20 years ago, and Rachel Wolf, a former adviser to Gove who co-wrote the Conservative party’s 2019 election manifesto.

The government justified the absence of a competitive tendering process, which would have enabled other companies to bid, under emergency regulations that allow services to be urgently commissioned in response to the Covid-19 crisis. However, the Cabinet Office’s public record states that portions of the work, which involved focus group research, related to Brexit rather than Covid-19, a joint investigation by the Guardian and openDemocracy has established.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said this was because of bookkeeping methods, and insisted that, contrary to government records, all the focus group research done by Public First was related to the pandemic. The Cabinet Office, where Gove is the minister responsible, initially commissioned Public First to carry out focus groups from 3 March, although no contract was put in place until 5 June.

Government work is legally required to be put out for competitive tender to ensure the best qualified company is appointed, unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as an unforeseen emergency. When a contract was finally produced on 5 June, it was made retrospective to cover the work done since 3 March. The Cabinet Office paid Public First £253,000 for the two projects listed as being Brexit-related and two more pieces of work done before the contract was put in place.

Public First was required to conduct focus groups “covering the general public and key sub-groups”, according to a Cabinet Office letter. The firm was required to provide the government with “topline reporting” of their findings on the same day, with fuller findings reported the following day. The deal also included “on-site resource to support No 10 communications” in the form of a Public First partner, Gabriel Milland, being seconded to Downing Street until 26 June. Milland was the head of communications at the Department for Education when Gove was the minister and Cummings was his political adviser.

The Cabinet Office said in the letter that it had commissioned the work from Public First for a total of £840,000 without any tender “due to unforeseeable consequences of the current Covid-19 pandemic”. According to further details published by the government under its transparency requirements, Public First was paid £58,000 on 18 March for its first focus group work, classed by the Cabinet Office as being for “Gov Comms EU Exit Prog”, then a further £75,000 on 20 March for work classed as “Insight and Evaluation”.

On 2 April, 10 days into lockdown and with increasing numbers of people dying from Covid-19, the Cabinet Office paid Public First £42,000 for work listed again as “EU Exit Comms”. The first payment for work listed as being coronavirus-related was on 27 May: £78,187.07. A total of £253,187.07 was paid to Public First before the contract was entered into on 5 June.

A Warning About TR2

We all know TR was a complete disaster, not withstanding the civil servants involved received awards, and at least one former Tory minister has recently repented and admitted they tried to stop Chris Grayling. But as the government still seems wedded to privatising bits of probation under TR2, for completeness we'd better cover this latest report from the Institute for Government that spells out why it almost certainly won't work:-  

Government outsourcing: what has worked and what needs reform?

Introduction
Labour’s policy of bringing public services back into government hands by default would be a mistake. But senior politicians have consistently overstated how much money is saved by outsourcing services. Outsourced services are those delivered by the private or voluntary sector. This report ranks which have been outsourced successfully and which need reform.

It finds that outsourcing waste collection, cleaning, catering and maintenance services has delivered significant savings and benefits to citizens. Particularly in these areas, bringing services entirely back into government hands could lead to worse and more expensive services for the public.

The report also shows that consecutive governments have overstated the benefits of outsourcing. Senior politicians regularly claim outsourcing can still deliver 20–30% savings but there is no evidence to support this.

It highlights a series of high-profile contract failures – including security at the Olympics, welfare assessments, offender tagging and probation. These contracts have wasted millions of pounds, delivered poor services and undermined public trust. The outsourcing of probation failed on every measure, harming ex-offenders trying to rebuild their lives.

Consecutive governments have outsourced services with no market of good suppliers or in pursuit of unrealistic cost savings – and without a reasonable expectation that companies could deliver efficiencies or improve the quality of services.

The report recommends that the current government must strengthen its commercial skills and capabilities, makes ministers and officials more accountable to the public and improve the evidence base that informs outsourcing decisions.

About this report 
The role of external suppliers in delivering services to the public and to government has been expanded significantly over the past 40 years. This report assesses where outsourcing has worked and where it has not, and why, and makes recommendations on how to improve the way government contracts out services. 

Summary

Government outsourcing is at a crossroads. Government spends tens of billions of pounds a year on services delivered by external suppliers. Yet a string of high-profile failures has put Britain’s outsourcing model under intense scrutiny. The Labour Party has called for a wide range of services to be brought back into government hands. 

But in some areas, outsourcing has delivered substantial benefits, saving money and improving services. Instead of preferring public or private on ideological principle, government should base contracting decisions on what has worked and what has not, and why. 

Outsourcing, which we define as the private or voluntary sector delivering services to the government or the public after a process of competitive tendering,* has been expanded over the past four decades. Beginning in local government with services such as waste collection, successive governments have extended outsourcing to areas including front-line services and major information technology (IT) projects. 

They have done so with a largely consistent rationale: that applying market mechanisms and private sector expertise to the work of government can reduce costs, raise quality and achieve wider benefits such as innovations and improved public sector efficiency. 

In this report, based on more than 50 interviews with current and former government officials, suppliers, academics and industry experts, we assess whether outsourcing has met those aims. We review the evidence in 11 service areas: waste collection, cleaning, catering, maintenance, back-office human resources (HR) and IT, prisons, health care, employment services, adult social care, private financing of construction and probation. Our judgment of each is presented in Table 1 (we include a full summary of each service area in Chapter 2).

Outsourcing has worked best in ‘support services’ that are relatively simple to contract for and deliver: waste collection, cleaning, catering and maintenance. When these services were first outsourced in the 1980s and 1990s, it delivered large savings, often around 20% of annual operating costs, mostly while maintaining levels of quality. Companies therefore achieved significant efficiencies, although some savings were driven by paying staff less. 

Over time, the public sector has become more efficient in these areas, meaning the comparative advantage of the private sector has got smaller or disappeared. This has led some contracting authorities to bring services back in-house. But that does not mean outsourcing has not worked – early savings have effectively been ‘banked’, and improving public sector efficiency was a key motivation for the exercise. It is doubtful that if provision were returned entirely to government hands it would deliver the levels of efficiency currently achieved while competitive pressures remain from private services. 

For front-line services, the picture is more mixed. Private prisons are cheaper to run and have introduced innovations, including in how staff treat prisoners. They perform better on some quality metrics and worse on others, but the introduction of competition has improved performance in public prisons. Outsourcing has provided extra capacity in the NHS and, in some cases, improved the performance of public hospitals, but there is a lack of comparable data on cost and quality and some case studies show damaging failures. 

Probation is an exception: outsourcing has failed on every measure, harming ex-offenders trying to rebuild their lives. The heavy costs show why government should be cautious about extending outsourcing of front-line services and only do so when it is confident it will work. 

Outsourced IT services, on balance, appear to have often been more efficient and modern – despite multiple well-reported failures. Private financing of construction projects, on the other hand, has been more expensive while achieving unclear benefits. 

Politicians and senior officials often cite 20%–30% savings when making the case for outsourcing services today.1 But while this was possible for some services outsourced in the 1980s and 1990s, we found little evidence that such savings are available today, whether for services outsourced for the first time or on second- or third-generation contracts. Where there is more recent evidence of savings, they are typically of around 5%–10%. 

Across these areas, we found that government lacks the evidence it needs to inform current decisions on how to deliver services. This includes a paucity of evidence on the cost and performance of services that the public sector delivers in-house, not just those that are outsourced.

Probation
In 2015, under a programme called Transforming Rehabilitation, the MoJ outsourced the management of medium and low-risk offenders in England and Wales to 21 regional community rehabilitation companies. The rationale for introducing competition and outsourcing was that, despite increased spending on prisons and probation, re-offending had remained stubbornly high.

Community rehabilitation companies supervise 150,000 medium and low-risk offenders, and some of the 40,000 extra short-term prisoners who previously had not been managed in the probation system. They also provide some services to high-risk offenders managed by the National Probation Service. The contracts were for seven years but the MoJ decided in 2018 to terminate the contracts in 2020, two years early. In 2019, it announced that the management of offenders will be brought back in-house, although private companies will continue to provide “innovative” drug and rehabilitation services.

The case study of Transforming Rehabilitation shows that the outsourcing of probation has not worked in the UK. Quality has been unacceptably poor. As chief inspector of probation, Dame Glenys Stacey concluded that the outsourcing of probation was “irredeemably flawed” after she found 80% of community rehabilitation companies to be inadequate in at least one key quality area, and many in several, including delays and poor-quality assessments. Support provided by the public sector’s National Probation Service for high-risk offenders performed better on every metric.

Outcomes are also generally poor. The proportion of offenders who re-offended decreased slightly but the number of re-offences per offender, and the number of prisoners recalled to prison for breaching their licence, both increased for medium and low-risk offenders, while the rates for high-risk offenders (for whom probation remained in-house) saw no such increase. But interviewees questioned how much providers could be held responsible for these outcomes – even though they are partly paid on the basis of them – given they depend significantly on other localised factors such as the police, magistrates and judges.

Nor does the outsourcing appear to have delivered the intended cost savings. The MoJ has had to invest at least £467m more than was required under the contracts because the contracts were not delivering a good-quality service. This is still less than was initially anticipated at the outset of the reforms, but as the NAO has said the department has made little progress in transforming rehabilitation. One industry expert speculated that the programme had probably cost roughly the same as the previous programme, while dealing with more offenders, but it is not possible to confirm this. An audit of the contract in 2019 concluded that it had provided “poor value for money”.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to rigorously compare the cost and quality of probation services before and after they were outsourced. We found no rigorous comparative evidence, in part because outsourcing in this area is only a recent phenomenon, but also because of changes in the service and problems accessing data held by suppliers. We found no comparable evidence from other countries, because probation has not been outsourced in most countries. Announcing in 2018 that the services would be brought back in-house, the MoJ itself recognised that outsourcing had not worked as it had hoped. Sector experts agreed. We set out the reasons why the outsourcing of probation hit so many problems in the next chapter.

3. Why has outsourcing succeeded or failed?

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But in several areas, including electronic monitoring and probation, government has outsourced services without a well-functioning market and has paid too little attention to generating competition. As we highlighted in earlier work, this not only jeopardises the potential gains of competition described above, it also increases the likelihood of opportunism from suppliers and risks problems with service performance.

The outsourcing of the electronic monitoring of offenders, where the market has been dominated by two suppliers (G4S and Serco), demonstrates how an uncompetitive market risks supplier opportunism. In 2013, when the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) contracts with the two companies came up to be re-tendered, it discovered “significant anomalies” in billing practices: both had charged the department for tags that had never been fitted. In the summer of 2013, Serco and G4S withdrew from the tender process for the electronic monitoring contract. In December 2013, interim arrangements were put in place for Capita, the remaining supplier in the bidding process by the end of the financial year when the contracts were due to expire, to take on the contracts. G4S subsequently won a further contract for the provision of tags.

Such uncompetitive markets are liable to suppliers abusing their power – and the exit of one or two suppliers can leave government in a poor position with limited bargaining power. The NAO found that the contracts failed to deliver promised quality outcomes, while it is unclear whether projected cost savings were achieved.

Several subsequent attempts at procurement hit problems partly because the market was not sufficiently competitive. Interviewees suggested that there was an early assumption in government that reputational risk would ensure that private providers performed well, but that has not proved to be the case – and in many cases where markets are weak, suppliers win further contracts soon after serious failures.

The outsourcing of probation services shows how outsourcing without a well-functioning market contributes to poor service performance. While some probation service providers had provided specific interventions, the full management of offenders had not been outsourced before in the UK, or anywhere else using the model the UK adopted.19 At the time, the Institute for Government and others warned that the absence of capable suppliers, combined with the difficulty of contracting probation services, made outsourcing a poor choice.

Interviewees told us that major outsourcing companies issued similar warnings – and late in the procurement process the department struggled to ensure that it had enough bidders for contracts in some regions and had to approach suppliers directly to encourage them to step forward. By requiring that organisations bidding to be one of the 21 ‘prime contractors’ had a ‘parent company guarantee’ – effectively taking on financial risk – the department excluded voluntary sector organisations and social enterprises with experience in this area from bidding to become prime contractors. Many of the companies that won contracts had minimal prior experience, which in some cases contributed to the widespread failures to provide a quality service. 

Picture Worth a Thousand Words

It looks as if our new Prime Minister is determined to use all the tricks in the book to ensure he wins the next Election, so we can expect prison numbers to rise and sentence length to increase. A long read even for a Sunday, but this recent forensic report from the Institute for Government has a number of charts that graphically demonstrate the effect of trying to save money on the Prison Service budget. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words:-  

Prisons

Prisons have experienced large spending cuts and cuts to staff numbers since 2009/10. Despite promising signs in the early years of this period that this was manageable, in 2013/14 prison safety started to deteriorate sharply. Violence rates have risen, and prisoners appear to have less access to learning and development activities.
Spending has risen recently following an injection of extra cash at the 2016 Autumn Statement to tackle the decline in prison safety. The rate of deaths in prison has subsequently fallen, but the data does not yet show any discernible improvements in overall violence levels.

There are 122 prisons in England and Wales, of which the vast majority (108) are ‘public’ prisons, run directly by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS). The other 14 (‘private’ prisons) are run by private companies. These tend to be of above-average size, and house 19% of the prison population – up from 15% in 2012/13.*

This chapter looks at all of these prisons, including eight young offender institutions. These young offender institutions accommodate males aged 15–21, although some adult prisons also have youth wings.

Spending on prisons is 16% lower in real terms than in 2009/10

Between 2009/10 and 2015/16 day-to-day spending on prisons fell sharply – by 21% in real terms – reflecting similarly deep cuts to the wider Ministry of Justice budget. However, extra money was pumped into the prisons budget at the 2016 Autumn Statement – £291 million (m) over three years – to try to tackle the deterioration of safety levels in prisons, most notably by increasing prison officer numbers by 2,500 by the end of 2018. Spending then rose in that year and in 2017/18, around £3 billion was spent on prisons, 16% less than in 2009/10.

Demand: prisoner numbers have remained broadly flat

The prison population has remained broadly flat since 2010, in contrast with rapid growth in the 1990s and 2000s. There were 82,773 prisoners in England and Wales on 30 June 2018 compared with 83,391 on 30 June 2009. This shift is in part due to reforms to sentencing in 2008 and a fall in the number of cases being received in the courts.The prison population has remained consistently around 95% male.

The total number of prisoners in June 2018 includes 642 under-18s (all male), most of whom are held in young offender institutions.There has been a dramatic fall over recent years in the number of young people held in custody: between June 2010 and June 2018, the number of under-18s in young offender institutions more than halved (from 1,661 to 642).This reflects an apparent overall fall in youth crime – fewer young people are being cautioned or sentenced. However, there is evidence that the remaining population of young people in custody is becoming more challenging, with a growing proportion being held for violent offences.

Overall, the prison population is ageing: the proportion of the prison population aged under 30 has fallen since 2011 (from 46% to 35% in 2018), while the proportion aged 60 and over has grown (from 4% to 6% in 2018). Within this there has been a rise in the number of prisoners in the oldest age bracket – a 16% rise in the number of people aged 70 and over in prison over the past two years – which signals potential rising care needs in the prison population.

Data on the prevalence of mental illness in prisons is incomplete, but estimates range from 23% (of a sample of prisoners who reported previous contact with mental health services) to 37% (of prisoners surveyed by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons – HMIP – in 2016/17 who reported having an emotional wellbeing or mental health problem).This indicates that the prevalence of mental health issues may be higher among prisoners than the general population (estimated in 2007 to be around 23%) – although we do not know how the prevalence of mental health problems in prisons has changed over time.

There are also signs that an influx of new types of drugs – called ‘new psychoactive substances’ – is putting new pressures on prisons. New psychoactive substances – such as ‘Spice’ – are synthetically produced drugs, originally designed to mimic the effects of illegal substances (although they are now themselves illegal). They can cause aggression, psychosis and intense depressive episodes. In 2016, the prison and probation ombudsman described them as a ‘game-changer’ for prison safety.

Screening for the use of new psychoactive substances in prisons was first introduced in 2016. Since then, one year of data has been published, showing that they are by far the most prevalently used drugs in prisons: in 2017/18, 10.1% of mandatory drug tests were positive for their use, compared with a 10.3% positive drug test for all other drugs.

Input: the number of prisons has fallen – but prison capacity remains the same

There are 122 prisons in England and Wales, down from 137 in 2009/10. Since 2009/10, 20 prisons have closed or merged, and five new prisons have opened. However, despite a fall in the number of prisons, the overall capacity of the prison system was roughly the same at the end of 2017/18 as at the end of 2009/10, due to the larger size of the new prisons.

Only one brand new prison has been initiated and built since 2009/10: Berwyn, in North Wales. Originally announced in 2013, it began to receive prisoners in February 2017.

Two of the prisons opened since 2009/10 are privately operated: one (Thameside in London) operates under a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract, meaning that it was both built and is now run by a private company; the other (Oakwood in Staffordshire) was built by the public sector but is run by G4S. Another of these new prisons (Northumberland) was originally opened as a public prison in 2011 but was taken over by G4S in 2013. At the same time, G4S also took over Birmingham prison – previously a publicly run prison.

Just one prison has reverted from private to public management during this period: Wolds prison in Yorkshire, which had been run by G4S from when it opened in 1991, but was brought under public management in 2013 (following a critical inspection report and G4S’s high-profile failure at the 2012 Olympics) when the previous PFI deal ran out.*

* Wolds was merged with publicly run Everthorpe prison to form Humber prison

Input: staff numbers in public prisons are starting to rise again, following deep cuts

Prisons’ main strategy for dealing with budget cuts has been to reduce staff numbers. Across the whole prison estate, around 40% of spending went on staff costs in 2016/17 – down from 48% in 2012/13 (the earliest year for which we have comparable data). That equates to a 21% real-terms decrease in spending on staff over that period.[

Below is an analysis of what has happened to the public prison workforce. No information is publicly available on what has happened to staffing levels in private prisons.

Since March 2017, the number of prison officers has risen by 3,205 – a 17% increase. At the end of the 2017/18 financial year, there were 21,041 full-time equivalent (FTE) prison officers in public prisons in England and Wales – rising further to 21,608 in June 2018. This follows a large decline – of 26%, or 6,580 officers – between 2009/10 and 2013/14. This means that the Government has not only met its target (set at the end of 2016) of recruiting an extra 2,500 prison officers by the end of 2018, it has exceeded it.

This is the net increase – the actual level of recruitment into the prison service in 2016/17 was much higher. This has been key to meeting the Government’s recruitment target, as the retention rate for prison officers is low. In 2016/17, 4,933 new prison officers joined the prison service, while 2,088 left. If turnover continues at this rate – or worsens – HMPPS will be faced with the task of recruiting thousands of new prison officers every year, just to keep numbers steady.

This high turnover means that, even though there are now almost as many prison officers as there were five years ago, the composition of prison staff is different.

Experience levels have fallen. In June 2018 a third of prison officers had less than two years’ experience (compared with 7% in March 2010); 49% had experience of 10 years (down from 56% in 2009/10). While many of those individuals may well be competent and skilled, the overall decline in experience may have had a negative impact on the overall effectiveness of the workforce.** The Prison Service Pay Review Body has raised concern about the high levels of inexperience in the prison service, citing in particular the extra burden on longstanding officers to mentor new recruits.

Although the number of prison officers has started to grow, other parts of the prison workforce have continued to shrink. The number of prison managers has fallen consistently over the past eight years, from 1,434 in March 2010 to 905 in June 2018 (a 37% decrease).

** For example, HMIP concluded that the “inexperience of many staff” underpinned the problems it encountered at Nottingham prison in January 2018, where conditions were so poor that an ‘Urgent Notice’ was invoked, making the Secretary of State directly accountable for improving performance. See HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Report on an Unannounced Inspection of HMP and YOI Nottingham, HM Inspectorate of Prisons, May 2018. 

Output: prison safety has continued to decline

The essential activity of prisons is to hold prisoners in custody – to stop them escaping. On this count, performance has been good over the past eight years. Between 2009/10 and 2017/18 there were no more than two escapes a year (where a prisoner has to physically overcome some restraint or barrier to go out of the control of the staff) – except in 2016/17 when there were four. The number of absconders – prisoners who escaped from an open environment – fell steadily, from 269 in 2009/10 to 86 in 2016/17 (while the number of prisoners in open prisons rose). However, in 2017/18 the number rose again to 139.

But the work of prisons transcends just keeping people inside. We expect prisoners to be kept healthy and safe. It is also the Government’s stated intention that prisons should play a role in preparing prisoners for a life outside of prison – the ‘rehabilitation revolution’ hailed by former Justice Secretary Chris Grayling. However, the evidence suggests that prisons are struggling on all of those counts.

Output: prison violence continues to intensify...

Prisons have continued to become more dangerous for both staff and prisoners over the past year. In 2017/18 there were more than 9,000 assaults on prison staff (or 106 for every 1,000 prisoners). That means the frequency of assaults has almost tripled since 2009/10 – in both raw and per-prisoner terms. There was a 26% increase (from 7,159) in the past year alone. The frequency of serious assaults against staff has risen even faster – from 289 (or three for every 1,000 prisoners) in 2009/10 to 892 (or 10 for every 1,000 prisoners) in 2017/18.

Assaults on prisoners by other prisoners are much more frequent than assaults on staff. There were 22,374 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults in 2017/18 – nearly double the number that took place in 2009/10. That works out as 262 assaults per 1,000 prisoners – up from 142 in 2009/10. Serious assaults against prisoners rose even more rapidly: from 1,087 to 3,081.

These figures are themselves likely to be an underestimation of the actual number of assaults: a government audit of data collection practices in prisons this year found that assaults were underreported by 10% last year. So the actual number of assaults was probably even higher.

A number of things could have caused this serious increase in prison violence. It could be directly related to the pace of prison staff reduction. In 2013/14 alone, prison officer numbers fell by 15% (or 3,250 officers) – equalling the reductions seen in total over the previous four years. It may be that those previous reductions were sustainable, but that the 2013/14 staff cuts went too far. There may have been a ‘lagged’ effect, with problems caused by earlier staff reductions taking a while to show up in the data. The presence of new psychoactive substances has also clearly been a factor: due to both the violent effects induced by the drugs themselves, and also to violence associated with dealing and supply. A recent evidence review commissioned by the Ministry of Justice found that “the crucial factor in maintaining order is the availability and the skills of unit staff”.

Rates of violence among youth offenders are far higher than among the adult population. Across the whole ‘youth estate’ – including all 15- to 17-year-olds, not just those in young offender institutions – there were 2.77 assaults per prisoner in 2017/18, up from 1.84 in 2012/13 (the earliest year with comparable data). This, of course, has happened at the same time as the size of the youth estate has shrunk rapidly.

…and prisoners are self-harming with increasing frequency

Prisoners are also harming themselves with increasing frequency. The number of self-harm incidents rose by 88% (from just under 25,000 to just under 47,000) between 2009/10 and 2017/18. These incidents were gendered: there were 2,244 self-harm incidents for every 1,000 female prisoners, compared with 467 for every 1,000 male prisoners. The gender differential was much smaller among assault incidents: there were 366 assaults for every 1,000 male prisoners in 2017/18 and 318 for every 1,000 female prisoners.

One indicator is improving, however. Self-inflicted deaths in prison fell in 2017/18 to their lowest levels since 2012/13, after a big increase in 2015/16 and 2016/17. However, that still amounted to 69 self-inflicted deaths in prison in 2017/18 (0.8 for every 1,000 prisoners).

Output: prisoners’ access to rehabilitative activity appears to be worsening

The evidence on what prisoners do with their time – and how much access they have to activities that might support their rehabilitation and wellbeing – is limited. The Ministry of Justice stopped publishing data on the number of hours that prisoners spent “engaged in purposeful activity” (such as education or training) in 2011/12 – although, up to that point, average hours were rising.

There are concerns that the issues outlined above – a shrinking workforce and a violent environment – are limiting prisoners’ opportunities to engage in meaningful activity, by increasing the time they spend locked in their cells. In its 2017/18 survey, HMIP found that only 16% of prisoners were unlocked for the recommended 10 hours a day. We have no consistent data on how this has changed over time.

What we do know is that fewer prisoners appear to be starting and completing accredited courses that may support them on their release from prison. The number of prisoners completing ‘accredited programmes’, largely designed to support behaviour change and improve thinking skills, has fallen by 22% since 2014/15 (from 6,994 to 5,479). We have excluded ‘accredited substance misuse programmes’ from this analysis because responsibility for funding and commissioning all substance misuse treatment in prison was transferred to the NHS in 2013. There may be other cases within our figures where other activity has replaced formally ‘accredited’ programmes, accounting for some of the decline.

But there have been no such changes in the definition of academic qualifications. Here we can observe a clear decline. In 2016/17, 6,750 prisoners achieved a level 1 or 2 (pre-GCSE and GCSE-level) qualification in English, down from 11,760 in 2010/11 (a 43% decline). Similarly, the number achieving a level 1 or 2 qualification in maths fell from 10,950 to 6,800 (a 38% decline).

Have prisons become more efficient and can that be maintained?

In 2010, former Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke accepted large cuts to his departmental budget. This was on the understanding that the Government would bring forward legislation to reform sentencing and reduce the size of the prison population.

However, plans to introduce sentencing ‘discounts’ for early guilty pleas were scrapped in 2011, in the midst of political controversy over their potential application to rapists. At a press conference to announce this change, of course, then-Prime Minister David Cameron said the gap would be made up instead through ‘greater efficiency’.

As with most other services examined in Performance Tracker, economies were made in prisons through the pay cap: pay was frozen between 2011/12 and 2012/13, and increases were subsequently capped at 1% a year. But prison officers were among the first public servants to see their pay cap broken. In September 2017, they received a 1.7% pay rise for the 2017/18 financial year – and have been awarded a 2.75% increase for 2018/19.

Pay has not apparently been a barrier to recruiting the extra prison officers needed for the Ministry of Justice to meet its 2016 target of increasing prison officer numbers by 2,500 by the end of 2018. However, it may have contributed to the growing retention problem. High turnover will not necessarily be disastrous for the service, if it can continue recruiting at the rate it has this year. But continually replacing staff is of course much less efficient than holding on to them.

Another high-profile attempt at making economies was through the outsourcing of the maintenance contract in public prisons to Carillion and Amey in 2014 – large private contractors that promised to deliver the service at a much reduced cost. However, since the collapse of Carillion at the start of 2018, it has become clear that the outsourcers had seriously underbid, underestimating the scale of the task involved. The National Audit Office has estimated that Carillion was operating at a loss of around £12m on these contracts in 2017. The Carillion contracts have now reverted to a new ‘government-owned company’, which is receiving an extra £15m a year to provide an adequate service.

Since 2015, the Government’s key set of efficiency reforms have focused on creating new prison places. The 2015 Spending Review promised 10,000 new prison places – and four new prisons – by 2020, with five new prisons due after that. Estimated savings were £80m a year. However, these savings will not yet have been released: planning permission has been granted for three new prisons, but construction has not yet begun.

There are likely to have been productivity gains in some parts of the prison service. As far as we can tell (the unseen numbers for private prisons may complicate this picture), fewer prison officers are overseeing more prisoners – at this basic level, prisons are achieving more ‘output’ for each unit of ‘input’. There are indications, too, that those prisoners are becoming more challenging to oversee – with the rise of new drugs of particular concern.

One clear example we have is the ‘send money to someone in prison’ online service, which went live in 2017/18. By halving transaction costs, this is projected to save £17m over five years. A handful of sites have acted as ‘digital prison’ pilots – giving prisoners in-cell access to online services allowing them to make their meal choices, or make orders from the prison shop. But these are small-scale – and we do not know what size of savings they may have made.

Our ability to make a clear judgement on efficiency gains in prisons is hampered by the lack of data on private prisons – specifically, the lack of staff data. It is also difficult to discern what has happened to non-staff prison spending, such as catering and maintenance. However, given the scale of the deterioration in quality in both public and private prisons over the past five years, we cannot conclude that the service has become more efficient overall. This is particularly true of the past year – when spending and staff numbers rose, but violence and self-harm incidents continued to increase in frequency.

Although spending on prisons has risen, it remains 16% below the level in 2009/10 – meaning that it remains important for the prison service to maintain any genuine productivity improvements it has managed to produce. However, the more important question will be whether that extra investment is successfully used to produce an acceptable level of performance, particularly with regard to prison safety.

Have efficiencies been enough to meet demand?

The Government has more power to control the demand on prisons than for many other services examined in this report – by legislating to change the length and types of sentences that different types of offence and offender attract. But while there have been changes to legislation and guidelines around sentencing over the period since 2009/10, most of them involve increasing the use of custodial sentences or lengthening them: for example, the minimum term of a life sentence for murder with a knife was raised from 15 to 25 years in 2010, while the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 restricted the use of cautions.

In the case of prisons, the answer to the question of whether efficiencies have been enough to meet demand is a straightforward ‘no’. Any efficiency improvements that may have been made in parts of the system have been swamped by other demands, leading to a decline in quality, indicated by rising violence. Whether or not new drugs have been the key driver of rising violence, their presence has clearly amplified the challenges the prison system has faced in managing within a tightened budget.

This is particularly true after 2012/13. Before that point, there is evidence that efficiency improvements may have made up for falling spending: spending fell by 17% while prisoner numbers fell by only 5% between 2009/10 and 2012/13, but levels of violence and self-harm remained broadly flat. After that point, however, violence and self-harm rates began to increase – a trend that continues.

Some Green Shoots

This caught my eye and serves to remind me that with adequate staffing, insightful governance and the freedom and willingness to innovate, good things can happen and in some surprising places:-

Organic gardening helps inmates kick drug addiction

Physically and mentally, growing plants without chemicals has a transformative effect. Anyone who has spent time gardening knows the restorative effect it can have. There is something about dirt on one's hands, the pulling of weeds, and the creation of something beautiful and alive that draws people back, year after year.

So it's no wonder that gardening is being used to rehabilitate prison inmates battling drug addiction. One particular location, at HMP Rye Hill in England, has seen its Mandatory Drug Test failure rate go from 30 percent on average to zero in one year since implementing an organic gardening program. Food Tank reports on the program's stellar success, saying the HMP's horticultural program has

"improved self-esteem and self-control, better health and wellbeing, a shared community and improved communication among inmates who work toward a common goal, and behaviour changes inside and outside the prison."

There are numerous reasons for this, as outlined in a report commissioned by HMP. Gardening creates a space that is beautiful, peaceful, and conducive to reflection. It's a place where the inmates work at their own pace, with minimal presence of guards.

"Participants repeatedly write [in their diaries] about the pleasure, tranquillity and sense of freedom they feel as a result of working outdoors. Participants frequently reported feeling better for being outside and in touch with nature (even during the winter months)."

The physical activity involved in gardening leads to improved sleeping patterns, increased energy, and an overall sense of wellbeing, which translates to healthier lifestyle habits, such as quitting smoking and going to the gym more often. And as individuals struggling to free themselves from chemical dependencies, they value the philosophy behind organic cultivation.

The gardens give the inmates something to be proud of and to talk about when they meet family members. It builds a sense community within the inmates themselves, as all must work together for a common goal. Researchers reported seeing prisoners

"supporting each other in a myriad of ways, including supporting with specific tasks in the garden, making each other beverages, supporting with literacy and numeracy skills and also recognising when someone on the programme was having a difficult day offering emotional support."

HMP's sounds like a wonderful program that could be a model for many other prisons, mental health institutions, hospitals, schools, and other educational facilities around the world. It's living proof that we should never underestimate the power of the earth to heal, ground, and recalibrate us as humans.

--oo00oo--

About Rye Hill

HMP Rye Hill is situated in the village of Willougby, near Rugby, in Warwickshire. A PFI prison which opened in 2001, it is a category “B” training prison, acting as a national resource for sentenced male adults who have been convicted of a current or previous sex offence(s). The capacity of the prison is 625.

The sentence requirement for HMP Rye Hill is for prisoners who have been sentenced to over four years and have at least 12 months left to serve. No more than 15% of the population must be in denial of their offence. The philosophy of our prisons is to rehabilitate offenders and equip them to re-integrate into mainstream society on release. We seek to normalise prison conditions as far as possible and reflect life in the outside community. Our aim is to create an environment in which staff and prisoners feel safe, and causes of prison stress are minimised.

Central to our philosophy is the relationship between staff and prisoners. Our training and operational practices emphasise the need to treat prisoners with dignity and respect. G4S staff build positive and supportive relationships with prisoners in their care. We create a constructive regime through provision of suitable education and work programmes. We actively encourage prisoners to address the causes of their offending. This is achieved by the provision of a range of Offending Behaviour Programmes, active sentence planning procedures and by providing appropriate employment and training opportunities.

We provide an environment which is modelled on the terms, conditions, practices and standards both offered and expected by industrial employers. We give prisoners real work experience which reflects the ethics required in business. G4S provides opportunities for prisoners to gain national vocational qualifications that assist prisoners to find work on their release.

--oo00oo--

This from a G4S press statement 23rd October 2018:-

WHERE DEBATING MATTERS: BEYOND BARS AT HMP RYE HILL

Is space exploration a £15 billion benefit to the economy or a luxurious waste of time? This is just one of the topics that prisoners at HMP Rye Hill tackled at the inaugural Debating Matters ‘Beyond Bars’ competition. Debating Matters—described as the UK’s toughest debating competition—made its debut at HMP Rye Hill last month. In front of an audience of their fellow prisoners, the ‘Beyond Bars’ competition celebrates and rewards participants for constructive and well-thought out arguments, and the enthusiasm was palpable.

“When I started, I thought space exploration was great,” said Nick, a prisoner at HMP Rye Hill and participant in the competition. “But then I did some research and changed my opinion; now I think it is a waste of time and money. I know I can change your mind too.”

What is Debating Matters?

Debating Matters ‘Beyond Bars’ is an innovative and challenging debate competition aimed at engaging prisoners in rigorous and well researched public debate. It was launched by The Academy of Ideas in 2016 and aims to unlock the potential of inmates by promoting research, listening and communication skills, and encourages them to think about the world around them. It also promotes teamwork and “gives us (prisoners) the opportunity to see other people’s views,” according to Jason, another Debating Matters participant at Rye Hill. “It is proactive offender management,” he said. “It can help solve prison officer issues like violence because it helps us communicate in a more measured and useful way.”

Competition time

The competition followed a standard debating setup: teams of two face off on opposing sides of a statement—one in agreement and one against—where the winner is judged by whomever makes the most compelling argument. The teams at Rye Hill were put through their paces, facing tough subject matters including; accepting the risks of contact sports, filtering out fake news on social media and whether space exploration is a waste of time and money. The best two teams went through to the final to debate whether “monuments to controversial historical figures should remain.”

After the teams made their opening statements, the topics were opened to the audience—and it was obvious that they were prepared. During the debate, “space exploration is a waste of time and money,” the audience questioned everything from the impact that scaling back would have on employment, international relations and scientific research to whether the money saved from space exploration would be redirected to fund global issues, and the role of private companies in the future of space exploration.

“Debating Matters emphasises the importance of taking ideas seriously and presents a unique opportunity for prisoners to engage in creative problem-solving,” said Pete Small, Director of HMP Rye Hill. “It was great to see everyone get involved. I was impressed by all of the teams that participated in the competition; their dedication and enthusiasm just goes to show how important these kinds of events are.”

Three guest judges from all walks of life and professional backgrounds—including a senior lecturer, a writer and retired health professional—scrutinized and cross-examined the arguments. They praised the quality of the debates, the breadth and depth of knowledge, and teamwork that was displayed throughout the competition.

The grand final was a culmination of expectation and excitement, as the teams energetically commanded the debate; should we remove historical monuments because they are a physical rallying point for protests, or is it acceptable to effectively wipe out periods of history? Ultimately, the winners were crowned thanks to their “rigorous, ingenious and persuasive” argumentation.

Claire Fox, director of the Academy of Ideas, praised the quality and standard of the debates throughout the day. “It is the start of something,” she said. Jason and Nick agreed; they had already pitched several new topics for future debates to Pete Small earlier in the afternoon!

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This from the Independent in December 2015:-

Rye Hill: Inside the prison changing the landscape for serious sex offenders

Woodwork and painting, lettuce growing and landscape gardening. These are not the first things that spring to mind when imagining life inside a sex offenders’ jail, yet you’ll find them at HMP Rye Hill. Run by the private security firm G4S, the Category B training prison, just outside Rugby, was transformed 18 months ago from a mixed-population prison to one solely for serious sex offenders.

More than 90 per cent of the 623 inmates are serving sentences of at least 10 years. And around 65 per cent are guilty of sex offences against children. Its population is set to rise, given that sex offenders are the fastest-growing part of the British prison population. With space for just two more inmates as things stand, a planning application has been made to extend Rye Hill enabling it to cater for more than 1,000 inmates.

The Independent was given a guided tour the day before government inspectors publish a report on Rye Hill after the first unannounced inspection since its transformation in summer 2014.

Nick Hardwick, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, said it was “a positive inspection” and that Rye Hill had “some real strengths”, such as its activities centre, its gardening projects and its offender management. One area for improvement was health care. More than 100 prisoners are aged 60 or older – the oldest is 86 – and some are now suffering from dementia, diabetes or other age-related illnesses. Six prisoners are terminally ill.

Given the nature of their offences (perhaps it’s of little surprise that 60 per cent of prisoners receive no visits from family or friends), many people will question whether they deserve improved conditions. Yet that is not the view of staff here, led by Richard Stedman – who at 35 is the UK’s youngest governor.

“We are fundamentally about reducing risk,” he says, a theme he returns to throughout our tour. “With a much older prisoner profile, you see a much more passive population, physically, but it is a population who are much more sophisticated and much more able to manipulate to condition and groom other prisoners.

“They will also try their best to manipulate staff. So we have had to completely rethink the way we train and encourage our staff to engage with prisoners, because that literally changed overnight [with the prison’s transformation].

The inspectors said they were concerned the prison was not sufficiently alert to the risk of prisoner-on-prisoner sexual grooming, something Mr Stedman acknowledges.

“When someone comes out of a cell with a black eye, it’s very obvious that someone has been assaulted. [Grooming] is a much more hidden risk and those behaviours and issues become visible over weeks, months and years, so that comes back to the relationship that staff have with the prisoners – and they are much more able to know what signs to look for.”

Inside the activities centre, older inmates and those with mental health issues are finishing their three-hour morning session. “Some people just come down here for the social aspect,” says Clare Witt, head of activities, “because otherwise retired prisoners would just be locked in their cells all the time. We have just eight people who are retired and don’t attend any work or education and that’s their choice. It’s not enforced.”

The landscape garden, where higher-risk prisoners on the substance-misuse residential unit spend up to six hours a day, has been built from scratch by the prisoners themselves – taking them away from any problems they might have on their wing. Mr Stedman says: “The value and impact that the garden makes on some of our most complex prisoners is an absolutely critical element of what we do.”

About a third of the inmates are still in denial over their crimes, which is one of the reasons only 59 have completed Rye Hill’s sex offenders’ treatment programme this year. The aim next year is to have 96 complete it. Louise Sharpe, the programme’s clinical lead, said the one-year course is aimed at inmates with a higher intellect and looks at what has made someone offend. “We would look at their sexual interests, relationships problems, how they feel about themselves and their lifestyle.”

Prisoners often arrive at Rye Hill with no trust in authority and no trust in what staff are trying to do. Re-engaging and rehabilitation is a slow process but time is not an issue – few people ever leave prison. They either die here at Rye Hill or move to a Category C jail.

Mr Stedman says: “What we do in prison isn’t just about locking people up and security. You have to combine that element with the work that is about change and creating that environment where people can change. And that doesn’t happen overnight.”