18/10/2022
Police Oracle
It is increasingly hard to retain prison staff due to better pay and conditions elsewhere, including other parts of the public sector, particularly the police, a new report has warned.
Ahead of the government's medium-term fiscal plan, the Institute for Government (IFG)/Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) has published its annual public services stocktake. The report is determinedly downbeat, revealing that public services won’t have returned to pre-pandemic performance by the next election, which in most cases was already worse than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010.
Performance Tracker reviews the state of nine public services – general practice, hospitals, adult social care, children’s social care, neighbourhood services, schools, police, criminal courts and prisons – and their comparative and inter-connected problems. This Work with Offenders article focuses on the report’s analysis of prison performance.
Prison performance
Prisons have been placed in stringent lockdown regimes throughout the pandemic, and many restrictions are still in place. This successfully limited the spread of Covid and the number of prisoner deaths, but led to several harmful consequences. Long periods spent in cells, delays for routine health appointments and severely reduced access to education, training and work have all harmed prisoners’ wellbeing and prospects. And though prison governors have, since May 2022, been able to lift Covid restrictions, the prison workforce is insufficient to do so safely in all prisons, with some prisoners still being kept locked in their cells for most of the day. Today’s inspection of Pentonville Prison was forthright in its conclusions:
“It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Pentonville cannot safely and decently care for its current population, as illustrated, for example, by the high number of prisoners with mental health needs who could not get prompt appointments, and the wholly inadequate access to purposeful activity.”
Prison spending
Spending on prisons fell by almost 20% between 2009/10 and 2015/16 when the Government realised that staff cuts in particular had resulted in much more violence and self-harm. The Government then reinvested in prisons, increasing spending right through to the first year of the pandemic, when a number of Treasury-approved schemes were implemented to ensure the continued supply of staff and to minimise the risk of unrest. Day-to-day spending rose 5.6% in 2020/21, but was expected to fall by around 8% in real terms in 2021/22 as Covid support measures came to an end.
Staffing
The number of prison officers increased slightly during 2021/22, having remained flat during the first 12 months of the pandemic. But retention worsened substantially, with 3,387 officers leaving in 2021/22, compared to 2,116 in 2020/21. This was more than offset by the recruitment of 3,845 staff, an increase of 1,435 compared to the year before. Key stakeholders interviewed for this report noted the success of recruitment campaigns but added that it was increasingly hard to retain staff due to better pay and conditions elsewhere, including other parts of the public sector, particularly the police.
However, many prisons still do not have sufficient staff to reinstall a full regime. The situation has been exacerbated by high levels of staff sickness. In 2021/22, more than 350,000 days were lost to sickness, 21% higher than in 2020/21 and 43% more than 2019/20. Covid-related absences still accounted for more than 20% of the total in 2021/22, with a further 10% due to other respiratory illnesses. The report also notes that as a consequence of high staff turnover, the prison workforce is also relatively inexperienced, with more than a fifth of prison officers having been in post for less than two years. Newer staff are less likely to have the trust of prisoners or interpersonal skills that more seasoned officers have, and will tend to be less effective at de-escalating potentially violent situations – something that also has implications for how safely prisons can accommodate the expected rise in the prisoner population.
Impact on day-to-day prison life
The final section of the IFG report highlights the impact of the current situation on day-to-day life in prison:
“Prisoners are waiting for a long time to access a wide range of routine services. Recent inspection reports found prisoners waiting several days before they could call their family after arrival, four weeks for GP appointments, more than 26 weeks to see an optician, and “unacceptable” waits for refunds from prison shops. Worryingly, in one establishment, vulnerable prisoners waited several weeks for a bed on a specialist wing and only 19% of prisoners said that emergency cell bells were answered within five minutes.
The prison maintenance backlog for the highest priority capital works has also grown from £900m in 2019/20 to £1.3bn in 2021/22. These are projects needed to address “significant health & safety and fire safety risks, and/or critical risk to capacity”.