Improving the prison estate
This report examines the condition and capacity of HM Prison and Probation Service's prison estate.
Background to the report
Since 2015, against a backdrop of worsening living conditions for prisoners, HMPPS (Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service) has changed the way in which it maintains prisons and launched a programme to improve the condition and suitability of prison accommodation. It opted to contract out facilities management, create 10,000 new-for-old prison places and change its estate to better meet the needs of prisoners.
Content and scope of the report
This report examines how HMPPS handled these changes and what it achieved. It:
- sets out the condition of the estate and the capacity within prisons to accommodate the prison population;
- examines HMPPS’s approach to managing the maintenance of its prisons; and
- assesses HMPPS’s performance in transforming its estate by building new prisons, selling unsuitable prisons and reorganising prison places.
HMPPS has committed to providing a safe, secure and decent prison estate, but its plans to achieve this are failing. It has not been able to provide enough prison places, in the right type of prisons, and at the right time, to meet demand. The Prison Estate Transformation Programme’s plans to create up to 10,000 new prison places to replace ageing, ineffective prisons proved undeliverable and outsourcing prison facilities management has not delivered expected efficiencies. If successful, these initiatives could have made a difference, but as it stands the prison estate is not meeting the needs of prisoners or those working in the prison system. It represents poor value for money.
HMPPS is taking welcome steps to improve its understanding of the condition of the prison estate, and now better understands the significant gap between its ambitions and the available resources. Learning lessons from its experience in delivering the programme will be crucial as it responds to the government’s new commitment to create 10,000 new prison places. But HMPPS must resist a reactive approach and put its long-term plans on a secure footing. Achieving value for money will ultimately depend on HMPPS working with the Ministry and HM Treasury to develop a long-term, deliverable strategy that will provide a prison estate that is fit for purpose.
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This from the Guardian:-
Two in five prisons in poor condition, watchdog finds
Report says a backlog of major repairs will cost £916m as safety breaches reach a record high
The government is failing in its efforts to improve prison conditions, with record levels of safety breaches and “huge” backlogs in repairs, Whitehall’s spending watchdog has found. The National Audit Office said plans to “provide and maintain safe, secure and decent prisons” had not been carried out.
A report released on Friday found that safety in two out of every five inspected prisons were rated as poor or “not sufficiently good”, with recorded problems at an all-time high. Over the last decade, the Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) has taken 1,730 cells permanently out of use and it expects to lose another 500 places every year because of the poor conditions of the remaining estate, the NAO said.
In the next three years, 41% of prisons need major repair or replacement work. There is currently a backlog of repairs that will cost £916m to fix, according to the report. The prison population in December was around 82,300, equating to 98% of its capacity.
The report comes as ministers aim to pass emergency legislation to block the automatic early release of convicted terror offenders, which is likely to put further pressure on the prison system. The move follows three attacks in recent months by men convicted of terror offences, including the stabbing on Sunday of two people in Streatham, south London.
Responding to the report, Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee, said the ministry had failed once more to oversee outsourcing firms or get to grips with management of a crumbling estate.
“As with probation reforms, the ministry has not got outsourcing right. Provider performance has been poor and planned savings failed to materialise. The ministry is on course to deliver just a third of previously promised places. The government say they want people to serve more time, but soon the prison population could exceed capacity. As the Streatham attack highlighted, the Prison and Probation Service urgently needs a long-term plan to improve our prisons and will need the funding to do this.”
In 2015, HMPPS outsourced management of prison facilities to Amey and Carillion, expecting to achieve savings of £79m, but had an inaccurate and incomplete understanding of the condition of the assets, the report said. “Due diligence was not sufficiently robust and HMPPS severely underestimated the demand for reactive maintenance work arising from vandalism and failing assets.” HMPPS expected to pay providers £17.7m for variable costs by 2018-19 – the fourth year of the contracts – but has paid £160.4m, according to the latest findings.
The government has “struggled to create new prison places”, with only 206 built and 3,360 under construction out of 10,000 new for old places it committed to create in 2016. “The main reason behind these failures was the delays in agreeing and receiving funding to build new prisons. This meant construction work began later than planned,” the report said.
It recommended that HMPPS develop a long-term strategy on condition standards and minimum levels of investment. Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: “The government has recently committed to creating 10,000 new prison places and needs to learn lessons from its recent experiences.”
The Ministry of Justice said it “recognised” the need to invest in maintenance and safety and pledged to spend £256m more to carry out improvements over the coming year. A spokeswoman said: “We will always have enough prison places to keep offenders behind bars, and the government’s £2.5bn investment will create 10,000 modern places, on top of the two new jails already being built.”
This from the Guardian:-
Two in five prisons in poor condition, watchdog finds
Report says a backlog of major repairs will cost £916m as safety breaches reach a record high
The government is failing in its efforts to improve prison conditions, with record levels of safety breaches and “huge” backlogs in repairs, Whitehall’s spending watchdog has found. The National Audit Office said plans to “provide and maintain safe, secure and decent prisons” had not been carried out.
A report released on Friday found that safety in two out of every five inspected prisons were rated as poor or “not sufficiently good”, with recorded problems at an all-time high. Over the last decade, the Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) has taken 1,730 cells permanently out of use and it expects to lose another 500 places every year because of the poor conditions of the remaining estate, the NAO said.
In the next three years, 41% of prisons need major repair or replacement work. There is currently a backlog of repairs that will cost £916m to fix, according to the report. The prison population in December was around 82,300, equating to 98% of its capacity.
The report comes as ministers aim to pass emergency legislation to block the automatic early release of convicted terror offenders, which is likely to put further pressure on the prison system. The move follows three attacks in recent months by men convicted of terror offences, including the stabbing on Sunday of two people in Streatham, south London.
Responding to the report, Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee, said the ministry had failed once more to oversee outsourcing firms or get to grips with management of a crumbling estate.
“As with probation reforms, the ministry has not got outsourcing right. Provider performance has been poor and planned savings failed to materialise. The ministry is on course to deliver just a third of previously promised places. The government say they want people to serve more time, but soon the prison population could exceed capacity. As the Streatham attack highlighted, the Prison and Probation Service urgently needs a long-term plan to improve our prisons and will need the funding to do this.”
In 2015, HMPPS outsourced management of prison facilities to Amey and Carillion, expecting to achieve savings of £79m, but had an inaccurate and incomplete understanding of the condition of the assets, the report said. “Due diligence was not sufficiently robust and HMPPS severely underestimated the demand for reactive maintenance work arising from vandalism and failing assets.” HMPPS expected to pay providers £17.7m for variable costs by 2018-19 – the fourth year of the contracts – but has paid £160.4m, according to the latest findings.
The government has “struggled to create new prison places”, with only 206 built and 3,360 under construction out of 10,000 new for old places it committed to create in 2016. “The main reason behind these failures was the delays in agreeing and receiving funding to build new prisons. This meant construction work began later than planned,” the report said.
It recommended that HMPPS develop a long-term strategy on condition standards and minimum levels of investment. Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: “The government has recently committed to creating 10,000 new prison places and needs to learn lessons from its recent experiences.”
The Ministry of Justice said it “recognised” the need to invest in maintenance and safety and pledged to spend £256m more to carry out improvements over the coming year. A spokeswoman said: “We will always have enough prison places to keep offenders behind bars, and the government’s £2.5bn investment will create 10,000 modern places, on top of the two new jails already being built.”
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National Audit Office report on improving the prison estate
Commenting on the findings of today’s (7 February) National Audit Office report on improving the prison estate, Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust said:
“This startlingly frank report says that the government is failing to provide safe, secure and decent prisons. It describes in forensic detail how a succession of plans have disintegrated almost as soon as they have been announced, resulting in a failure to build new prisons, or close old ones, or maintain the current prison estate in a useable condition. To cap it all, there is no plan in place for the future.
“Scarcely a week passes without another high profile announcement of longer sentences or delayed release dates, despite the absence of any evidence that more imprisonment does anything to deter or reduce crime. This report exposes the recklessness of that approach, sending people to a prison system that shames us as a country, and all too often serves only to entrench the behaviour it is supposed to change.”
There are currently more than 83,000 people locked up - and the number is forecast to increase. The report said analysis by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) showed that from October 2022, demand for prison places could begin to outstrip supply, as an increase in police officer numbers potentially leads to more offenders being caught. Further pressures are expected because of sentencing reforms, with the most serious offenders spending longer periods behind bars. The NAO report also criticised prison conditions, with poor safety reaching "record levels" and "huge maintenance backlogs".
Ministers have announced a new £2.5bn prison building programme but the NAO said no timetable has been set and the 10,000 places which they have again promised may not be enough to keep up with the expected rise in the prison population. The Ministry of Justice said it recognised the need to invest in maintenance and safety and pledged to spend an additional £256m to carry out improvements over the coming year.
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So, yet more confirmation of a pretty grim picture of very poor management by HMPPS, of which probation is of course part and regular readers will be aware I'm strongly of the opinion that if this vital public service is to survive and be useful, it must break free of the dead hand of civil service control and return to being independently run.
I want to end this post by making an important point and it concerns the degree of traction that probation practitioners can still exert despite official attempts to stifle discussion and debate within NPS. The following is from an email I received yesterday from the NAO and I hope they will not mind my quoting from it:-
"Dear Mr Brown,
The National Audit Office has today published a report on Improving the Prison Estate which we hope will be of interest to your subscribers. You can find a link to our report here: https://www.nao.org.uk/report/improving-the-prison-estate/
We have found your blog to be an excellent source of information on developments in probation and prisons sectors, particularly in terms of canvassing a broad range of perspectives from practitioners on the ground.
You may be interested to know that previous discussion threads on your blog helped to inform our approach to data collection and fieldwork for our value for money study on Transforming Rehabilitation: Progress Review which we published in March last year. This, combined with insights from our focus groups with probation officers, culminated in Figure 4 of the report which examined workload rates across different National Probation Service sub-regions."
Readers will recall it was that NAO report that put the final nail in the coffin marked TR and as discussed here.
Y'all must keep diggin' on James Brown, people.
ReplyDeleteWell done to JB for persisting with the blog & its anonymous posting concept, to those who contribute for sharing their stories & respecting the blog's integrity, & to the NAO et al who visit & read the often raw but otherwise unheard accounts of life in the Probation trenches.
What a pity NPS, CRCs, HMPPS & relevant ministers don't share such consideration for Probation staff, their work & the impact on those they work with.
Maybe Napo and Unison will start engaging constructivley with Jim Brown's Blog but that will probably need members to force the issue rather than leave it to their employees to lead them.
ReplyDeleteNapo hate this blog and from what is often seen as the true record not the Napo spin.
DeleteYes that's perfectly true and to be honest I decided some time ago that acknowledgement, let alone endorsement would be both unwelcome and almost certainly unhelpful in remaining an independent platform for debate and discussion.
DeleteI don't know what NAPO is for. I'm pretty sure the top table don't know either.
DeleteIt seem that it's not just failing to deliver 10,000 new prison places that's attracting attention.
ReplyDeleteThe governments plan to recruit 20,000 more police officers is less then half of what's needed.
https://www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-51417872?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCKAE%3D#aoh=15811550704111&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s
'Getafix
Officials working on Boris Johnson's pledge to recruit 20,000 new police officers in England and Wales within three years say more than 50,000 will actually be needed.
DeleteHome Office and police officials say the target is not high enough because so many are set to leave the service. It comes as campaigners say officers need a starting salary of £24,000 or more for the original target to be met. The Home Office said forces had been recruiting "at pace".
Reversing cuts to police officer numbers was one of Mr Johnson's first policy pledges when he became prime minister in July last year. But those leading the recruitment drive now say the total needed is much bigger because they have to factor in police officers who will be resigning or retiring from the service. Current figures show that only one in 10 candidates who applies to join the police is successful - meaning half a million would have to apply to reach the 53,000 goal.
The figure has been reached by the Uplift team responsible for recruitment. It includes Home Office officials alongside representatives from the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs' Council. Forces in England and Wales lost 20,564 officers between March 2010 and March 2019, Home Office figures show.
The Police Federation and the Superintendents Association say starting salaries, which can be as low as £18,400, have to be raised to encourage applications. In a submission to the Police Remuneration Review Body (PRRB), they said:
"The starting salary, and early progression pay, are key. Without addressing these we believe there is no hope that the recruitment targets will be achieved. We believe the minimum starting salary must be set at £24,177."
They called for wages to be made the "top priority" this year and said there should be a 5% pay rise across all ranks. The bodies also warned of a potential "catastrophic failure" in policing if resources are not made available. If pay is not increased, new recruits could be earning 15p an hour above the national living wage.
Police Federation national chairman John Apter said: "While we are starting to see some positive moves from the government, they need to show they are serious about their commitment to policing, by paying police officers fairly for the uniquely challenging and often dangerous job they do. Politicians must now put their money where their mouths are and pay police officers fairly. This is only what they deserve."
Analysis
DeleteDanny Shaw, BBC Home Affairs correspondent
Never before in the UK have so many police officers been recruited in such a short space of time - so can it be done?
Policing is an attractive career - offering relatively secure employment, and serving the public, in a potentially wide variety of roles.
Many forces have had little trouble turning the recruitment tap on after years when it slowed to a trickle.
But the flow will be hard to maintain with competition from other public services, such as probation, prisons and schools. The starting salary for police officers, particularly for apprenticeship joiners, is clearly one issue; another is the new requirement for them to have a degree or study for one while on the job.
Officials leading the recruitment surge say they won't "lower the bar" for applicants, by relaxing the criteria and standards, but they may "widen the gate" by being less selective.
In recent years, some forces were able to choose the creme de la creme of candidates, because there were so few training places. If they want to hit Boris Johnson's target they can't afford to be as picky in future.
A Home Office spokesman said: "Last year we gave forces the largest pay award since 2010 - accepting the recommendations of the Police Remuneration Review Board of a 2.5% pay rise in full.
"This gives forces the flexibility to offer constables who do not join through an apprenticeship route a starting salary of £24,177.
"There is no doubt that policing is a desirable career - the numbers of people joining the police has reached a 10-year high and forces have been recruiting at pace to put 20,000 more officers on our streets."
I note that nominations are being sought for probation officer of the year/decade/millennium.
ReplyDeleteJim Brown gets my vote!
The blog has been very quiet on the topic of OMiC which I predicted would be a disaster, any views anybody?
As for Omic as a PO being given jobs that that prison don't have the resources to cover and told that we work for HMPPS now. God knows what it will be like when we cone under the line management of the Governor. They set Oasys targets and supervision targets that there is not enough time to meet because we are expected to deliver for example Court documents to offenders appealing their convictions. Cover a large amount of admin tasks, but our stationery, etc. Oh and the prison does not promote diversity as it claims nor understand we are on more flexible working patterns. Horrid but apparently less stressful than our counterparts in community offices. It sounds horrendous out there.
ReplyDelete