05/08/2020
Police Oracle
Work with offenders profiles the next chief prison inspector.
The MoJ has just announced that the government’s preferred candidate to be the next Chief Inspector of Prisons is Charlie Taylor.
Mr Taylor is best known in youth justice and education circles. A teacher by profession, he was Head at two special schools for children with severe behavioural difficulties between 2006-2011 before moving to the Department for Education where he was Expert Adviser in Behaviour to the Secretary of State for 18 months, completing reports on alternative provision and school attendance. In 2012 he became Chief Executive of the National College for Teaching & Leadership until 2015. He then became a director at the Ministry of Justice where he is best known for his authoritative review of the Youth Justice System. The “Taylor Review” (published in December 2016) argued for a devolved youth justice system and a network of secure schools which the government accepted in principle although work in setting up secure schools has been extremely slow. The MoJ eventually announced in the summer of 2019 that the Medway Secure Training Centre in Kent would be converted into the first Secure School and will be run by the Oasis Charitable Trust. The school is yet to open. Mr Taylor was also Chair of the Youth Justice Board from April 2017 to March this year.
If confirmed in post, Mr Taylor will take over from Peter Clarke who had a very different professional background as a police officer. Mr Clarke has been Chief Inspector of Prisons since 2016 during which time he has been highly regarded as a direct and committed individual not afraid to take on the Ministry of Justice. It was Mr Clarke who said in his annual report for 2017 that prison reform would not succeed unless the violence and prevalence of drugs in jail were addressed and prisoners were unlocked for more of the working day. The following year he issued the first urgent notification of a failing prison, using a system he had introduced himself, to make the Justice Secretary formally responsible to develop an action plan to address the problems in any particular establishment within 28 days. Last year, he went further still by questioning whether Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service was up to the job of turning round failing prisons, when he and his inspectors found that HMP Lewes had declined markedly despite being put in “special measures” by HMPPS.
If and when Charlie Taylor takes over from Peter Clarke he will find that the inspectorate’s reputation for independence and willingness to criticise government has been enhanced.
The next step in the process is for Mr Taylor to attend a pre-appointment hearing by the Justice Select Committee. Pre-appointment scrutiny is an important part of the appointment process for some of the most significant public appointments made by Ministers and is designed to provide an added level of scrutiny to the appointment process.
Pre-appointment hearings are held in public and allow a Select Committee to take evidence before a candidate is appointed. Ministers are required to consider the Committee’s views before deciding whether to proceed with the appointment, although, in reality it is extremely rare that a preferred candidate is discarded. That is not to say that Mr Taylor will necessarily be given an easy ride by the committee, recent prison and probation chief inspectors have received very rigorous scrutiny from the Committee which has been chaired by Bob Neill MP for some years.
Once Mr Taylor is in post, he will have a critical role in overseeing prisons’ response to coronavirus and, in particular, in judging whether they maintain a fair balance between maintaining a positive and fair regime while keeping COVID-19 in check. Mr Clarke’s recent series of short scrutiny visits suggest that there is much less support for the very restrictive current prison environment now compared to when it was introduced over four months ago.