Offender Management Bill

My Lords, as ever I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for tabling this amendment. Training for prison staff has arisen several times during our debates on the Bill, and it is helpful to be able to address the concerns in a coherent and joined-up fashion. Perhaps before considering the amendment, it would be wise to take the opportunity to pay tribute to the staff who work in our prisons. Their work is difficult, dangerous, thankless and very much hidden from public view, and of course they face particular challenges at the moment when the prison estate, as we know, is under great pressure. Yet, as all contributors to the debate have acknowledged, they have a crucial role to play in reducing reoffending, and one of the aims of this legislation is to make it easier for them to work more closely with probation staff in the community to that end. The amendment itself deals with two distinct issues, training and supervision. I shall deal first with training. The Prison Service takes the training of its staff very seriously indeed. Prison officer entry level training is delivered over an eight-week period, as the noble Earl understands, with weeks one and five spent in the officers’ establishment. During the course, officers are trained in the purpose of the Prison Service, interpersonal skills, diversity, security, self harm and suicide, radio use, and control and restraint. Officers may then go on to train in any of a range of specialist areas according to their skills and, of course, the needs of the service. All establishments are required to produce a training plan which is integrally linked to an overall business plan. Staff working with young people receive specialist training as specified in the service level agreement between the Prison Service and the Youth Justice Board. In 2006, the Prison Service management board approved funding for a new initiative called Professionalising the Prison Service. This is a three-year initiative that is designed to transform training across the service to ensure that staff are equipped with the right skills at the right time in their prison career. A key element is the introduction of a professional development framework. This defines clearly recognised development and progression routes for all staff employed by the service so that they have a clear understanding of the available career pathways. Learning will be competence-based and staff will be able to develop and extend their skills, knowledge and experience in order to maintain continuous professional development and, in many cases, progress to higher levels of responsibility. From September of this year, the achievement of a level 3 national vocational qualification in custodial care will become compulsory for new prison officers. Failure to achieve this will lead to termination of employment as a prison officer. An optional level 2 qualification will be introduced for support grades wishing to make the transition to prison officer. I do not think that it is necessary to make provision for this in the statute. Comprehensive information about the qualifications, experience and training required by a prison officer is already widely available in the public domain. We have agreed to make express provision in the Bill for probation training in response to particular concerns raised in the context of the new arrangements for the delivery of probation services. But the situation is very different in relation to the more established arrangements for prison training. There is no such statutory provision now and I do not think it is necessary for the future. I turn now to the second part of the amendment, which proposes setting out the seniority of supervising officers and the length and frequency of supervisory meetings. This degree of operational detail does not need to be set out in such a rigid way or, for that matter, to be underpinned by statute as the amendment suggests. But I will seek to address the concerns which lie behind the amendment by setting out how supervision arrangements work in practice. Unlike staff in other parts of the offender management service, few prison officers work on their own, or out of sight of other officers or senior members of staff. Because of this, the supervision they receive is continuous, flexible and less dependent on formal procedures such as supervisory meetings. It is difficult to see how the publication of standards would provide any improvement in the current situation. Supervision and oversight differ according to local conditions and are presently managed well within such a framework. Standards in these circumstances would be difficult to establish and then to measure, and any increase in formal procedures is likely to add significantly to the burden of bureaucracy and the cost to the service without necessarily offering any corresponding increase in the quality of service delivered. As to the seniority of supervision, which the amendment also seeks to prescribe, again it is difficult to see how such a standard could be effectively constructed or implemented. The Prison Service is already a very well structured organisation with a strong tradition of grades and seniority, and there is little day-to-day question about supervisory authority. But it is equally the case that the Prison Service has developed a strong reliance on multi-disciplinary teams, often led by managers who are not senior officers or any part of the officer grading structure but who provide supervision, oversight and, in some instances, even direct management of prison officers. The purpose of the amendment is well understood and much appreciated, but its implementation and operation would be fraught with difficulties of definition and scope. For those reasons and the reassurance I have given, I hope the noble Earl will feel able to withdraw his amendment. Let me deal with a few other points that came up during the course of the debate. The noble Earl thought that prison officer training was going to be reduced to seven weeks. I can knock that one on the head. I made it clear from my speaking note that prison officer training is eight weeks; there has been no reduction and no reduction is intended. He also suggested that private prison staff were perhaps lacking in experience and poorly trained. Private prison staff undergo a thorough training programme, which is equivalent to that in the public sector Prison Service, and successful completion is a condition of employment. The course offers a variety of modules which are tailored to the needs of the learner and the post to ensure that at the end of the course the person has the necessary technical and general skills to perform their duties. The course they undertake is approved by the comptroller as being fit for purpose. Course content, training standards and procedures are specified within the terms of each individual contract, which is an additional pressure point in raising standards. The comptroller is able to attend any training module he may wish and can request copies of all training materials given to staff to ensure that proper quality training is provided. The first private prison was opened, of course, in 1992, as has been much discussed today, and there is a significant amount of operational experience now within the system at all levels. This has been recognised by external bodies, such as the prison inspectorate, and the former head of the Prison Service, Martin Narey. I cannot accept that private prisons recruit people of lower calibre. They are delivering the standards which we require within the service and which we seek to set in contracts. The noble Earl also referred to the Norwegian experience. The problem is that it is not easy to compare prison systems across Europe because the roles and duties of prison officers differ widely from state to state. Offender management arrangements have grown up on national lines and responsibilities in respect of offender management are often very different. I was interested when the noble Earl said that Norwegian staff came over to the United Kingdom. I can only assume that was because they thought they had something to learn from us, which is a good sign. We are keen to examine best practice; we certainly examine it from across Europe. There is considerable regard for UK Prison Service practices and we have attempted to share with our European partners our best practice. I was entertained to find out, for example, that in Bulgaria prison governors are being led by the experience drawn from an English prison governor who has advised them on their reform programme. That, too, is a good sign. The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, made the point that there was a lack of reference to or mention of prison officers in the Bill. That is because the Bill seeks to change the arrangements for delivering probation services and increase the involvement of other providers; legislative change is not required for the Prison Service in the same way. Where it is right, however, the Bill makes provision particularly to clarify the role of probation staff in prisons and to enable prison staff to deliver programmes in the community, so it creates that necessary flexibility. That, in essence, explains why there are fewer references to the Prison Service and its particular needs and problems. I have provided a rather long explanation but, I hope, a reasonably comprehensive one, and I hope that the noble Earl will feel able to withdraw his amendment.