Transcript of public session: Mr P Carroll, HM Prison Service and Mr B Caton, Prison Officers’ Association

Wednesday, 2 June 2004
10.30 am

Sir William Morris: Good morning everyone, and a special welcome to you, Mr Carroll, and indeed Mr Caton.

Can I first of all start by saying thanks to both of you for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning and indeed to give evidence. Let me say that we feel somewhat honoured to have the unique experience of being addressed by a representative of the two principle interests for industrial relations in a very important public service, the Prison Service.

I appreciate that for some of our witnesses the process may seem daunting so I thought it would be helpful if I set out very briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning. First let me introduce myself and the members of the panel.

I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and I have been asked to chair the Inquiry. As you can see, there are two other members of the panel. On my right is Sir Anthony Burden who recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary after a very long and distinguished career in the Police Service. On my left is Miss Anesta Weekes QC. Anesta is an eminent barrister who sits as a recorder and part-time chairperson of employment tribunals. She was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry.

Gentlemen, as you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent Inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. The Inquiry that we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial in nature or character. We have taken the deliberate decision that our focus would be on the Metropolitan Police Service itself as an organisation, and not the individuals who make up the MPS.

We are very keen to enquire into those issues raised by our terms of reference so that we can make appropriate recommendations for further good practice rather than concentrating on making criticisms of the MPS or individuals. Among other things we are required by our terms of reference to establish whether the policies, the practices, the procedures and conventions, including structure of the MPS, in relation to professional standards in employment matters are good, effective practices. We are keen to take a comparative measure with other public organisations.

In that context we are particularly keen to learn from the experience of the Prison Service because we see some elements where both services are common. For example, like the MPS, you both employ large numbers of uniformed officers who have a significant public duty and responsibility. You both have custodial responsibilities and you both share the same sponsoring department in Government, namely the Home Office.

At the end of these introductory remarks, I will lead on some questions to you both, followed by the remainder of the panel, my colleagues, who will have additional questions to put to you.

When we have completed all our questions, I will offer you the opportunity make a brief closing statement, if you wish. But for the record, let me point out that a transcript of our proceedings is being taken so that we can have a proper record of all the evidence given to us by all our witnesses, and this will be published on our website shortly after this morning's session.

Before I begin, for the benefit of the transcript, I wonder if you would mind formally introducing yourselves to the Inquiry.

Mr Caton: My name is Brian Caton. I am currently the general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association. I have held this post since 1999. Prior to that I was the assistant secretary of the Association. Prior to that I have served on the National Executive Committee, I have served as the Association's national vice-chairman, and was acting chairman for a period of time in the 1990s. Prior to that I was a serving prison officer of Wakefield Prison for 20 years, during which time I was branch secretary, and also very active in the trade union movement external from the POA, being president of the Trades Council, both in Wakefield and in the county association trades councils in Yorkshire and Humberside.

Sir William Morris: Thank you.

Mr Carroll: Good morning. I am Paul Carroll, I am the head of employee relations for the Prison Service. I am an operationally-based governor grade, having been in the service for 28 years and having served as a prison officer and all the other uniformed ranks, rising to my last operational post as governor of HMP Lewes. I have been in that post since July of last year.

Questions by Sir William Morris

Sir William Morris: Thank you both very much. We will let you determine the division of labour between you as to who responds to the questions, but we are keen to hear from you both.

I wonder if we could start by inviting you to give us a profile of the employees in the Prison Service, including numbers, and how, if at all, they are divided. By that I mean between, say, prison officers and other staff who support the work of the prison officers, just to give us a picture as to what the service looks like.

Mr Carroll: Right, there are approximately 43,000 employees in the Prison Service, of which, I think, we would say 33,000 of them are prison officers or uniformed support grades. So the vast majority of our staff are clearly uniformed grades.

Sir William Morris: Have you got any statistics on the gender breakdown in the 43,000?

Mr Carroll: We have got statistics. We do have targets for the recruitment of people from across all spectrums of society, both gender based and disability, and clearly we do have that target, which I think is 5.9 per cent. We are just underachieving on that target at the present time, but certainly there is as part of our action plan in relation to the CRE Inquiry which has taken place into the Prison Service over the last 12 or 18 months, we certainly have plans to increase the number of people from across the spectrum.

Sir William Morris: Is your target set by your Government body or is it set by the Home Secretary?

Mr Carroll: They are Home Office targets.

Sir William Morris: Fine. We are very lucky to have been provided with a copy of your voluntary agreement between the Prison Service and the Prison Officers' Association which sets out an approach to the resolution of an industrial relations issue, which we find very interesting, and there is a reference, which we will call up, and it is an ACAS reference – ACAS/3/1. It is on the screen.

What we are not clear about is the status of this particular document. Just following popular reporting, we know that negotiations and discussions have been taking place around some sort of an agreement. Could I invite you just to comment on the status, if it is out of date, or if it is a draft, or is it what you are working to. That would be extremely helpful to us.

Mr Caton: The voluntary agreement I think was produced following very lengthy discussions between the Prison Officers' Association and the employer, the Prison Service. When I say lengthy, we had, I think, 27 or 28 drafts of this, so it was a lengthy period of time.

Sir William Morris: That is not many!

Mr Caton: As a T&GWU member I know it is not many!

As the POA general secretary, it took a lot of getting together. Unfortunately, it seemed to at times not be fit for purpose in our opinion. We had tried, and were given assurances that we would be able to review the document to make it better, to alter some of the clear problems that were developing in the administration of it, not particularly in the methods that it tried to achieve in industrial relations, but certainly in the way in which they manifested themselves through the administration of the actual agreement.

We thought it necessary to give notice to withdraw, and that notice actually runs out in January next year. In the period between our withdrawal, in November I think – January, sorry – they initiated discussions that followed, that we have now got a new document that is going to be presented by ballot to our membership with a recommendation from the National Executive Committee, the POA, that we accepted. The backdrop, actually, I think, is probably something that needs to be said.

We do not believe that all the legal issues that are contained within it are right and proper; we do not think they are fair. We had our trade union rights taken off us in 1994 by the then Conservative Government, by use of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 127. The current Home Secretary, and indeed his predecessor, gave us assurances that that would be removed, but only on the basis that we put in place basically the same restrictions on a voluntary basis. We do not believe that is right or proper, and indeed we have a case registered with the International Labour Organisation to try and rectify that through law. We are hoping that the Government will remove those impediments that are currently in that agreement, and indeed in the one that we recently decided to put to our membership for acceptance.

What we have been able to achieve is, I think, a good deal of industrial relations stability by use of the voluntary agreement, but we still consider it to be an unsatisfactory method of doing it. We would sooner have more partnership and less legislation.

Sir William Morris: Okay. Could you just indicate to us the type of industrial relation issues which the agreement covers and what, if any, are the exclusions?

Mr Carroll: Yes. The idea of the agreement was clearly to facilitate the introduction of a pay review body and also to facilitate stabilisation of what was a fairly rocky industrial relations situation. One of the things that we did was to actually ensure that there was a third party arbitration system in place through ACAS, but, of course, one of the documents' founding principles was that we had to put in some form of exclusions from the document because there is a need for an operational service such as the Prison Service to effectively manage itself and to ensure that negotiation and consultation takes place appropriately but that there were decisions that could be made to respond to operational needs.

So the exclusions that we put in were in relation to shift patterns, was one of the fundamentals. We have a principal whereby we have people who come into the establishment, or the establishment themselves will establish what work needs to be done within the establishment, which we call profiling. The profiles are agreed and have to be agreed, and are part of the disputes procedure with the trade union side. The actual shift patterns that come from that we excluded from the disputes resolution because there had to be an ending to – once you have agreed the profiles, the shift patterns virtually fall out from the profiles, so That was agreed.

The issue of pay, clearly, because there was a pay review body, was excluded from the disputes resolution because an independent body is already deciding upon that. Those were the main two exclusions that we detailed.

The difficulty that I think Brian is alluding to in his comments relate really to – in the first document in the voluntary agreement there is a bit about what is in scope and what is not in scope. The difficulty has occurred that any document in its origin is developed by a team of people. Those people in a service such as the Prison Service eventually move on. Therefore, new people come in to take their place, such as myself. The difficulty that Brian has experienced was that what they believed were agreements that would take place were being given a different interpretation by new people who were arriving.

The document is a living document, and one of the other problems we found was that in the Prison Service, both on the trade union side and on the management side, staff are replaced, so branch officials would become replaced and governors become replaced. We embarked on a very thorough training process before we implemented the voluntary agreement so that people all understood what the agreement was about, how to implement it – of course those people have moved on – and so we now have establishment governors who have not been trained in the way that perhaps they should have been and branch officials who have taken up posts who equally have not received that training. So I think those are the weaknesses that we identified.

One of the issues that took place as well is that the then Director General of the Prison Service, Martin Nerey, had the decision-making power to decide what was in or out of scope, and once he had made that decision, that was then considered to be the end of the matter. That was due to the union's representations agreed to be unfair, and it was then decided that, if we ruled something out of scope, that it was not within the scope of the terms and conditions of the voluntary agreement, then the POA could actually lodge a failure to agree, which would then go to the third party, ACAS arbitration, to decide whether or not the issue should be in scope.

We did run into some fundamental differences about the wording that any scope issue – where we were putting something to arbitration on scope, how that wording should be put together, but after, shall we say, a long and somewhat strenuous discussion, we managed with ACAS to find a way through that problem. Our contention is that interestingly enough, prior to the POA giving us notice to withdraw from the agreement, the agreement, which is now two and a half, three years old, has suddenly started to move forward and many of the disputes that were sort of stagnant and not being resolved have now actually moved forward very quickly since our meeting in November. Our contention is that perhaps we have jumped off the cliff a little bit early in abandoning the voluntary agreement.

However, we do have a new document which we are working with the POA on. We are hoping that that goes to a ballot of their membership and that that will be introduced shortly.

With Brian's permission, obviously this is a restricted document, but I have a copy here for each you have to go alongside the current voluntary agreement, which may be helpful to you.

Mr Caton: If I can just say, to be as candid as I can, whilst we will work and try and get constructive operation of industrial relations, we are far too important a service not to do that. When things go wrong in prisons they normally go dramatically wrong, and we do not want our members put at risk in having to put those things right, because despite popular belief we have a good relationship with the police officers that come and circle our walls from time to time, but it is prison officers that go in and face the riots, not police officers. We do not want that to happen. But I have to say, we are a free and independent trade union and we believe that we are a responsible trade union. We also know that we are one of the most shackled public sector trade unions in Europe, by the laws that have been passed against us and the way from time to time those laws are interpreted.

For example, we recently had faced a position where the pay review body had recommended a 6.5 per cent pay rise, the Home Secretary and the Prison Service had decided that despite the independent assessment that should be paid and they decided to stage that. This was the first occasion that the pay review body had reported on prison officers' pay, and we found that quite unacceptable.

Whilst we were trying to calm our members down – who were very angry indeed at the results that the Prison Service interfered with an independent body – our members decided that they would do basically three things: one, turn up for work on time; secondly, take their meal breaks on time; and thirdly, that they would adhere to the security manual, the security manual that if they do not adhere to normally they would get sacked for not adhering to it. That was classed as industrial action. The Home Secretary authorised the issuing of a judicial notice against the POA, something very unusual is that it had a penal notice in my name listed against it. In fact, they were going to imprison me for actions that I had not either authorised or asked to happen, and in fact I was spending a lot of time going round the country trying to get rid of. For that, I received a writ with a penal notice.

Our intent is absolutely certain, that we have got a twin track approach: one, we want good, stable industrial relations because of the nature of our work, but secondly, we want to be treated no differently from any other public servant and certainly no differently from any other prison officers treated under International and European law. And we will continue to do that. That does not mean to say that we are threatening the employer or anything like that, we are trying to work constructively to build up good industrial relations; the idea being that in our opinion, there should be no need to take industrial action rather than it be an option removed by law.

Sir William Morris: I need help from both of you, because you have made reference to a voluntary agreement and this is what we called up earlier, and you are now embarking upon a revision of that. When you used the word "voluntary", what comes into my mind is the opposite to that in industrial terms. The proposed agreement which you will be balloting on, Brian, sometime in the next month or so, that is not a statutory agreement, is it?

Mr Caton: Yes, it is, Bill. The thing about the word "voluntary", we removed it from the new agreement because it is anything other than voluntary. It is like, "Will you please shout 'ouch' voluntarily. By the way, I am going to shove your arm up your back until it makes you shout 'ouch' and then you are volunteering the word".

Sir William Morris: But this will not have the force of law, will it?

Mr Carroll: Yes, it does. The annex at the back of the new document incorporates the legally enforceable element of the agreement. The negotiating team, which I was part of, and Brian was part of, what we recognised was the fact that there are issues which Brian has mentioned this morning surrounding the legal imposition of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 127, which Brian states shackles prison officers, and it certainly does stop any inducement for industrial action under law.

We are in the process of trying to remove that particular element of the – or disapply that element of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, as promised by the Home Secretary. It is slightly more difficult to do than it is to actually set up, as anything in law seems to be.

But clearly we recognise that the POA have an issue in relation to anything that is legally enforceable.

Sadly – and I have lived through this through my service – in the early 1990s and previous to that, the only disputes resolution was that the Director General would hear the issue and make a decision and that was the end of it, that was the end of it, which was considered to be unfair by the trade union side. But the problem was with that system, we had so many spasmodic disputes taking place across our 130-odd establishments that it was difficult to actually bring any control to bear and to move the Service forward.

This document, it is our belief, and I think that without speaking for Brian, I think that they would agree it has brought some control to the way that we do our industrial relations. It is not a partnership agreement in as much as Brian would like to see it, because obviously there is the legally enforceable bit that, if there is an inducement to go on strike or to not work normally or to affect the operation of the Service, the Service would act under law to take out an injunction against the POA to actually stop them from doing that.

We think that we would like to see, in the years to come, a position where that would not be necessary. We do not believe that we have reached that stage yet because there are elements of people working within our service who still think that they are able to say to the governor that they are not going to do this, that or the other, and we feel that we need that protection at the present time.

The other issue for us is that, to remove section 127 – or disapply section 127, I will have to carefully choose my words on the law – one has to, through the process we are going through, which is the Regulatory Reform Act, one has to ensure that where a Minister is trying to disapply a section, that any protection that is afforded to the Minister already in place is not lost.

We can only disapply section 127 through the provision of having the voluntary agreement in place, which is the protection that is afforded to the Minister. So our difficulty is – or was – that the POA offering to withdraw, giving notice to withdraw from the voluntary agreement, placed us in a difficult position in relation to fulfilling the Home Secretary's pledge to remove section 127. That is why there has been this effort to separate the legal issues – and we are quite happy for Brian and the trade union to take us to court in the ILO – I am sure it will be an interesting day out – and for us to actually defend our position within that arena. However, what we have done, and very successfully in partnership, I believe, we have set aside the legal aspects – we will deal with those through the courts – but we have set up systems which address many of the complaints that we were receiving from local branches, from the national branches, in relation to scope and how the system was administered. What we have now got is a situation where we think we have got a better document that gives us a better level of partnership working in the mainstream but the Prison Service is also protected from, shall we say, the wildcat element.

Sir William Morris: Can you just enlighten me here. This agreement is the subject of discussions between the Prison Service and indeed the Prison Officers' Association. It will be a document ultimately which has legal force.

What is the process of giving it legal force? Is it enabling existing powers by the Home Secretary or has it got to go through some new process?

Mr Carroll: The system is that if we felt that a branch, or the national body, was threatening to –

Sir William Morris: No, no, sorry, I have not made my question as clear as it needs to be.

You have an agreement, it covers all aspects of concerns, it meets the requirement of the Service, the Prison Officers' Association members are satisfied. But it is just a document. How does it get legal force? Does the Home Secretary using enabling powers sign an order or does it have to go through – I just want to understand, if you like, the legal process to give it legal force.

Mr Carroll: Because it says in there, in the document itself, it is legally enforceable, and in the annex there are a set of words that will say that the Home Secretary will seek injunctive relief in the event of a breach any of these terms and conditions. And so de facto the Director General of the Prison Service or one of his representatives at director level will decide whether there is a breach and then the Home Secretary will write to the unions and, if necessary, would then go to the High Court to seek an injunction.

Sir William Morris: So it is enforceable through common law contract law?

Mr Carroll: Yes.

Mr Caton: It becomes civil law – currently, 127, if we commit a breach of 127, which I have to say we have breached more since it came in in 1994 than we did between 1939 and 1994, we have broken the law on numerous occasions on issues of Health and Safety, on issues of privatisation, which is why the law were brought in, because we are running a very successful campaign against prison privatisation, so we have done that.

The status of the document is that we sign up to say that we will adhere to it, provided, we would say, that the Prison Service do. Of course, in signing that we recognise that we are signing a document that, in our opinion – and we believe in the opinion of those who will scrutinise it at international level – does not meet the terms of ILO conventions in regard to that, first of all, you can take away somebody's trade union rights provided that you replace them with compensatory arrangements. Those compensatory arrangements should be free from interference from the state, well neither the pay review body, nor indeed, we would say, the voluntary agreement are actually in line with that international law.

So that is the reason we are taking it. We have got the compensation and we have signed up to it, but we know that we are signing something that actually breaches international law.

Sir William Morris: So am I right in assuming that this document, when it has completed its process of discussion, negotiation, consultation, endorsement, fulfils all the operational needs of the Prison Service as the Service sees it, and that becomes an agreement which is legally enforceable? It might not be the utopia but it covers the operational needs of the Prison Service.

Mr Carroll: We believe so, yes.

Sir William Morris: And that includes arbitration and mediation, all those safeguards in terms of the various steps to ensure that you do not move from 0 to 100 in 10 seconds?

Mr Carroll: Yes, we build in lots of control measures which hopefully should actually slow the pace down of any dispute so we can settle it.

Sir William Morris: And it forms part and parcel of the contract of employment of the prison officers?

Mr Carroll: No, because not every prison officer is a member of the POA, and therefore this is a joint industrial relations procedural agreement between us and the trade union body that is recognised for negotiating purposes within the Prison Service, i.e. the POA. Those people who choose not to be POA members would clearly be bound by that document, although it does not form the terms – it is not a contractual issue.

Sir William Morris: Okay. That is extremely helpful, thank you very much indeed.

Can I, at this point, invite Miss Weekes to pick up on the questions that we would like to put to you.

Questions by Miss Weekes

Miss Weekes: Can I turn now to a topic which is really designed to get your views as to how happy your officers and staff are. I thought you would smile.

I want to look, first of all, at the historical basis of the conditions of service for uniformed staff, then I would like to turn to the statutory background for dealing with misconduct and workplace issues; a little bit about the balance of lifestyle and work issues; and then finally how you deal with management, good/bad managers, performance.

So it will be a little bit of a whistle-stop tour because I know that Sir Anthony would also like to ask some questions.

Can I come back to the difference, if there ever was one, between officers and staff in terms of their conditions of employment. Was there historically a difference?

Mr Carroll: Yes, there is. Clearly, officers are employed as prison officers and have terms and conditions which relate to working in an antisocial environment, really, and therefore that has grown into a structure that – a pay structure and a terms and conditions structure, that is unique to them. That includes an attempt by the Prison Service to introduce a job evaluation system at the higher grades initially, governor grades, which created an evaluation system and a new grading system. Then, of course, there are those people who work as support staff, such as, I suppose we have got people who are working as electricians, plumbers, we have got people who work as caterers, people who work as form managers, we have got people who work as clerical officers, and they all have their own terms and conditions because of the grades that they are.

So whilst they are all embraced as civil servants, there are all different fundamental grades and pay scales. I think the pay scales are the most confusing thing that you can probably pick up and you immediately put them down again. So the answer is yes, really.

Mr Caton: There has been, over the years, certainly since myself and Paul joined the Prison Service, there was a very clear distinction between the uniformed prison officer and others, a very clear distinction, even down to the fact that in the main we were managed by uniformed officers only; the governor gave instructions and the uniformed structural grades carried those out.

So we had chief officer 1, who was, if you like, to use a military kind of analogy, the regimental sergeant major, maybe a little bit more than that, because many chief officers actually run their prisons, they run them on the orders of the governor, but they were certainly in charge. Principal prison officers who ran, in most prisons, a wing, and a senior officer who would be responsible for the day-to-day running of that wing and the deployment of officers.

Officers ran landings, depending on their seniority, and had other officers working with them. So it was a very – people say it was a military kind of thing but it was not actually. It was more based on a naval kind of ratings thing, where you had a captain, a chief petty officer, a petty officer, then you had leading hands and hands, who were very similar, to a certain degree, as is the fire service.

There was a document done in the mid-1970s called MR3 Report, which was never to be seen again because it was too radical, it spoke about doing away with chief officers, doing away with principle officers, having more professional managers in and bringing the Service together. Well, they did shelve it but not for very long because that is what we have got now. Rather than the governor and his governor grades being purely administrators, they are operational managers, they are very much operational managers now, very directly involved in the day-to-day management of not only officers but prisoners.

So there has been a change, and indeed the Prison Service within the last ten years has brought out a staff handbook that covers all Prison Service employees. So they are bringing it in, although it is very difficult, as Paul quite rightly says, because the terms and conditions – and the work that they do is very different. Lots of equal pay claims from workers in prisons because they are now on lower pay, and I understand their concern and their frustration at their pay being less than what a prison officer gets.

Because there has been constant change in the Prison Service, there has never been a period of stability for us to settle down and really examine and steady all these kind of things out. We went years without change and now we have gone probably as long constantly changing the Prison Service.

Miss Weekes: The Metropolitan Police Service, as you probably know, the uniformed officers are not employees, Crown servants. Administrative staff, staff officers, officer staff – they are really called police staff – have contracts of employment and they have full access to employment tribunals. Police officers have to access employment tribunals for discrimination matters, so there is that quite big distinction.

Some have said to us that the time has come to have both uniform and non-uniform on employee status pretty much at the level you are at. Are there any drawbacks to that, do you think, bearing in mind you mirror the distinctive difference between the officer role and the support staff?

Mr Caton: We did a very important court case many years ago to achieve our ability to go to employment tribunals, as they were then – sorry, industrial tribunals as they were then, employment tribunals as they are now. We think that was a major step forward with regard to dealing with the problems that prison officers face from time to time.

What I would say is we have seen a rise in, through our association, a huge rise in legal costs to the association because of that, and most people, the day that you sit them in front of a lawyer, be it one of our lawyers or anybody else, the lawyer says, "I cannot turn the clock back. What I can do is send you on three continental holidays. You will get compensation. We cannot alter what was happened to you but we can try to make sure it does not happen to anybody else."

But the main thing that seems to be in people's minds is, "Well, I will get this wodge of money". I am never convinced of the rights of that, but that is actually, if you like, an upside of a downside of being able to go to tribunals.

We take many tribunal cases, but I have to say that a lot of our difficulties are sorted out because of our access to the Civil Service appeal board, which we have also got a right to go to. So if we go all the way through, we have disciplinary cases or we have a grievance that does not come to an acceptable solution lower down the line, then we would move to a Civil Service appeal board, if it is appropriate, and an employment tribunal.

So there is, if you like, a great deal of fairness that prison officers experience. Even at the end of the day when they get nowhere, at least they have had more than a fair crack; whereas without an employment tribunal, if we did not have the Civil Service Appeal Board – I think I can understand the frustration of the bobby on the beat, if you like. My son is a policeman as well, so I understand the frustrations that they experience in not having a case ventilated independently and appropriately. That would frustrate – well, it did frustrate prison officers. Myself and Paul were around at that time when we took the case.

Yes, I think we get a fair crack.

Miss Weekes: Okay. Before turning to disciplinary measures, which I would like to come back to, because that is quite important for us here, can I just touch on the balance of lifestyle and operational duties, not an easy topic for any prison governor or anybody else.

How well do you think the Prison Service balances lifestyle demands and workplace duties?

Mr Carroll: Well, I think there are several issues surrounding that question, to be honest. I think that we are very responsive, as an employer, to working flexibly. There are some operational constraints. You could not afford to have everybody saying "I want to work 20 hours a week", so we do have to, as an establishment, put some control measures on that and say, "Well, yes, okay, you can work flexibly but it has to meet these conditions".

So there has to be some control because you cannot have somebody saying, "I want to work weekends only" or "I will work Tuesday and Wednesday". But by and large we are trying to meet the needs and recognise that there are people who want to work flexibly and want to work part-time, and I think that as we go on it may suit the Service for us to get more people who work part-time.

I believe that certainly there are many mothers who may be a good source of employment for prison officers who could return to work as prison officers working something like, you know, the 9 to 3 shift, which is very handy for us. So we are tailoring some of our policies to do that.

The other issue for us, of course, is the European working time directive, and the Jaeger ruling in relation to the European working time directive, which we believe is unbalanced and unworkable. The working time directive affects us very much in relation to the fact that many prison officers may, because of the operational needs of the job, not get the 11-hour rest between shifts. Most of our shift patterns across the estate have been designed to meet a profile and then the shift patterns have been designed to meet the needs of the work, but also to recognise the needs of the staff, so that we give staff a shift pattern that they are happy with. That is what we strive to do. Sometimes we do not achieve that.

Unfortunately with the working time directive, we now are in a position where we are going to have to, because of legal challenges from some of Brian's members, independently, I have to say, on their own volition, they have taken to us court and are winning some of those cases, or are winning some of the arguments, so we will have to introduce working time directive shift patterns. But we are trying to temper that with a system called self rostering, which seems to work successfully in some of our jails, where staff can choose what hours they wish to work.

We have to control that, obviously, but, for example, somebody may wish to work every weekend or every Saturday, or every Sunday because they want to play football on a Saturday, and that seems to work very well. Lots of people car share, so if they can all work their shift together, then fine. So we are looking at all those options. So I think that the Prison Service is coming up to meeting those challenges and I think there are some considerable challenges ahead as well.

Miss Weekes: Can I just pick you up on one aspect, and it is something that gives all public organisations a difficulty, and it is whether or not certain sectors of your employees suffer more than others in not being able to have that lifestyle balance. For example – it is only an example – young mothers who naturally want to take time off to have a child or two but desperately want their job; they still want to be considered valuable to their employer, but they realise that they have to go back home at 4 o'clock to pick up the child. It does not always work well operationally. How do you think you have dealt so far with, particularly, young women with children?

Mr Carroll: I think that certainly where there are requests to work flexibly in that way, that we are able to meet that need. I can only speak from my own perception of the way the Prison Service is moving, and I think that mothers and women in particular in the Prison Service have forced their way into a position whereby their needs are very much recognised. I think that, if you looked at the senior management posts within the Prison Service, as against other government bodies, you would find that many of our governing governors in establishments now are ladies with families who manage to balance both needs, and we are very proud of the fact that we are very gender neutral, if you like, in as much as the opportunities are there for all, and those opportunities are given to those people with the abilities to do the job, irrespective of gender.

Mr Caton: The Prison Service that I joined as a prison officer, and Paul joined as a prison officer, we had very few women working in male establishments and vice versa; it was basically two services. Because of the nature of the work as well, it was very difficult to see a time, for many people, including myself, where that would change. Well, it has changed, and it has changed dramatically, and it has changed, I think, for the better for all. Not only are our colleagues female colleagues with young children, but many of our male colleagues are now part-time, they work part-time successfully, they job share, there is flexible work, there is a great deal of sabbaticals given out; far, far better than it ever was in the Prison Service.

The difficulty, I think, with work life balance issues is that at the end of the day someone has got to work unsociable hours in the Prison Service. Someone has got to work nights. We cannot just leave prisons and come back in the morning. Somebody has got to work those horrible shifts that coincide with when everybody else is having a good time. Somebody has got to work New Year's Day and Christmas Eve. Somebody has got to work evenings. Somebody has got to work weekends.

The difficulties I think we have as an association, apart from our difficulties with the Equal Opportunities Commission which flare up every now and then, and we do try to meet with them fairly regularly, because there is this belief that we do not care about gender issues which is absolutely wrong. Both as a trade union and as a service we try and get them right. But I have a deal of sympathy with some prison officers who, because we have got flexible working and because we are trying to ensure that people get a fair deal, always seem to get the rough end of the stick. In other words, when you look at the detail, and it is all laid out, the person who is left to move their shift is the person who is male, single and available. And I think sometimes we have to say, "Just hang on, you cannot continually make this person work all the bad parts in order to create the good". We have to share some of the unsociable work.

Some of the ways in which governors, and indeed POA committees working together up and down the country have challenged that have been very good indeed. They have gone out to say, "Yes, there are red periods in each shift system and you will have to work some of them. It is up to you how you do it, but you will have to because not to do so makes it terribly unfair".

Miss Weekes: What guidance does the Equal Opportunities Commission give to you?

Mr Caton: We are still meeting with them. The Equal Opportunities Commission are quite anxious to see what the trade union is doing as a trade union on gender issues, and I think it is right that they should be concerned about that, if, for nothing else, as traditionally we are seen as white, middle aged men working in a male-dominated environment. I think that, to be honest, I think the EOC at times look at things through very strange-coloured kind of spectacles, because that is not the case, and if there is anything we can do to make things better.

We have a women's committee and our agenda is guided by that. They attend the TUC Congress, the women's conference. We meet with our women member representatives regularly. We do not have reserved seats for women, something that I personally think we should have on the National Executive Committee, but we try very hard to do it. We have got, I think, about 6,000 female members, a lot of them NHS employees actually, but a lot of prison officers, uniformed prison officers.

We would be a very foolish union not to recognise their needs. The difficulty that we have is getting them to come forward, a real, real difficulty. I will give you two examples: we have two very large female branches, both of whom have got, out of the seven officials, both of whom have only got one female on each, yet they are female branches with huge female membership, with lots of female problems, and yet they elect males to deal with them. I do not know why that is, and I do not know whether our training is hitting the right mark, or whether the Prison Service training is pulling these people forward to be representatives, I do not know, but it is something that we want to put right.

The same at senior levels in the Prison Service. I think they are slightly unrepresented. I think that needs to be addressed, but I think it is more a perception – I go back to my EOC – I think it is more the perception of the EOC than a reality but we need help to do that.

Miss Weekes: But it is quite clear that you are working through those issues and it is quite clear you have identified them.

Can I deal now with the disciplinary regime, because of course the way a public body treats its own sends a message to everybody else that deals with them, particularly if you are a very important public sector service, which you are.

I imagine you conduct staff surveys. Are your staff confident that the system of discipline, how they are dealt with on issues of misconduct or performance at work, is a fair one? Do they trust it? Do they have confidence in it?

Mr Carroll: I think there will be an element of agreement and disagreement on this between us. Certainly the conduct and performance policy and the policy in relation to attendance, i.e. for persistent sickness or lateness, has been an agreed document between us through our written council meetings.

Whether staff perceive them as being fair, clearly, I suppose it depends whether or not you are the subject of one. I have been both the investigator and the governor who has actually sat and heard many of the end cases. I think the system is fair because it is transparent, it is set out procedurally, and of course everyone knows where it can go, they all know what representation and what they are able to have in relation to defence, or somebody to accompany them at the interviews. So it is a transparent document, it is a fair process.

The difficulty comes, of course, in as much as any investigation ultimately will depend upon the view of the investigating officer as to whether or not there is a bona fide case to actually be presented, and of course that is where the contention, I think, comes in.

The other issue is that when you get to the hearing it does not have to be as it would be in a court of law, beyond reasonable doubt; it has to be a balance of probabilities. So if I, as governor hearing a case, believe that Officer Bloggs had punched Prisoner Jones, I could dismiss that person on the balance of probabilities, and in fact I have dismissed people on the balance of probabilities.

I think that – and I will not put words in Brian's mouth – I think the issues that staff would say are that the management – and I have heard this said – that the management will use the code of discipline to actually effectively remove somebody from a post who has been ineffective or is constantly being investigated, and will move to any measure to get rid of that person.

I disagree. Having done the hearings and sat there, there is a huge responsibility on you, as the hearing governor, because you are deciding someone's fate, their career fate and their financial future.

However, there are certain principles that the Prison Service cannot allow staff to ignore; that is the fair treatment and decent treatment of prisoners, the recognition of the Prison Service and national guidelines on race relations. We cannot ignore sexual harassment or any of those type of issues, which are many of the issues that we get faced with and many of the cases that come into our province.

I, regrettably, had to dismiss a governor grade at an establishment some 12 or 18 months ago, basically on the grounds that if he had come into the hearing and admitted what he had done, then there would not really have been an issue to dismiss him. But because of the fact that for two and a half days he persistently lied and placed somebody else's job in jeopardy, the man held a senior position within the Prison Service and you cannot tolerate that.

I think personally, and watching other colleagues, that this system is equitable and applied fairly; staff are fully aware of what the system is, and I think that the majority of managers try to find other solutions through informal advice prior to going to the disciplinary.

Miss Weekes: Just to follow up on that very helpful description, you, of course, because your staff are Civil Service grade, they have a final appeal, as it were, to an employment tribunal if they think you have unfairly dismissed them. I think it is quite important to emphasise that.

Mr Carroll: Absolutely, yes.

Miss Weekes: You might have a different point of view.

Mr Caton: Yes, I have. Not that different: I think many prison governors are very fair and equably-minded people, until they get a pen in their hand and then they tick the dismissal box in some of the most strange cases I have ever seen. It seems to be a constant theme: I am going to make him stand on his toes or her stand on her toes, but I will tick dismissal anyway. That is the first thing and I think that is wrong.

I am not, by the way, a punitive minded person. I brought mediation into the trade union's rule book before the Prison Service brought it into being an option in the disciplinary field, or indeed in dealing with things. So I am a firm believer in mediation, I think mediation is a better option than any kind of punitive effect, provided it is carried out correctly and appropriately and timely.

The disciplinary code again, when I joined the Prison Service, was that you had a disciplinary hearing. Your appeal process, should you have been found guilty, was to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State would appoint normally an ex-regional director, or as we colloquially call them, an ex-cricket playing gentleman who would arrive from the Oval –

Miss Weekes: Was it a British gentleman or a West Indian one?

Mr Caton: Absolutely all the time British, white British. They would arrive, talk to you for a while, and then normally say, "Well, I do not think there is sufficient evidence to pursue this, and therefore take this as a warning. Go back to work". I do not think that was right either, because I do not think they examined things correctly.

The issue of the balance of probabilities, or the criminal standard of proof – and the police, I think, are still hanging on to the criminal standard of proof.

Miss Weekes: The most recent statute does in fact say balance of probabilities.

Mr Caton: Right. I think it is absolutely right under the civil standard of proof on most cases to be correct. I think where there are serious cases, and particularly those involving prisoners, serious cases involving prisoners, it should be the criminal standard of proof, the reason I say that is that quite often courts will refer things back because they do not want to pursue them for a governor to deal with, and the governor will deal with them and find the person guilty, even though courts have found them not guilty of the same charge, assault or whatever, and I think that that double bite cherry is wrong.

There is a third bite of the cherry that the prison service have if you are a qualified nurse, which a lot of our members are, because when they get through all that, having been through an internal investigation then a police investigation and a court case, they come out of the court case and they are still not guilty, they will then refer them to the professional body.

Miss Weekes: That is right, is it not?

Mr Caton: I do not think it is, no, because –

Miss Weekes: There is a difference between what a court of law does in crime to what your organisation says is the acceptable behaviour and professional standards that you want in your organisation.

Mr Caton: Yes, I understand that, but it seems that it is not done for that purpose. It appears that it is done: well, we failed in the court, we will have a go in the disciplinary. And if you fail in the disciplinary then let us see if we can get the pin number off them and stop them practising.

I can understand why it is done; in a lot of cases I would probably support that somebody should be reported to the professional body. Some people when they come out of court clearly have brought the good name of the Prison Service into disrepute and I think this is right and proper, but at times I do think that discipline seems to be in the Prison Service, from some people, not all, a big stick rather than anything else.

Sir William Morris: What about the principle of that, though? Forget whether there has been bias, prejudice or whatever. What about the fundamental principle that you have two separate tracks which can either run concurrently or separately? Basically what you are saying is, if you are cleared in court then the discipline should not apply.

Mr Caton: If it is exactly the same case, no, I do not think it should.

Sir William Morris: I just want to be very clear about the principle.

Mr Caton: My view is –

Sir William Morris: Why should it not?

Mr Caton: Well, I think that people have been proved not to have committed an offence. Having gone through the most recent ones, we had a fraud case including 30-odd instructional senior officers of the Prison Service who were instructed at Wakefield, they went through a very lengthy period of suspension, three years of suspension, a very high profile court case, and were found not guilty. They came back and went through a Prison Service investigation and eventually the Director General, on our representations, decided he would not continue the disciplinary hearings.

My view was that, having been found not guilty within a court, no case to answer, to then pursue it through a disciplinary hearing was unfair and unwise. So unfair and unwise that they ended up retiring on medical grounds. I thought that was wrong and cruel.

The police never wanted to prosecute anyway; it was the Prison Service that insisted these people were prosecuted, and then when the prosecution collapsed they then said, "Okay, we are going to put you through an internal investigation". I think it is the way in which discipline at work is perceived at times by some members of the Prison Service – some, I have to say, quite senior members of the Prison Service – and constantly the excuse given, as it is in many other things, we are a uniformed discipline service, and that gives you the right to be treated differently than another worker. I do not agree with that. I do not think the fact that you wear a uniform, and the fact that you are a public servant should give people the opportunity to punish you and penalise you twice, or three times in some cases.

A lot of the times that it happens, when you sit down with people at the end of it, they will admit that they perhaps should not have gone down the certain routes they have gone down. Unofficially, certainly the Director General did on a number of occasions with those people.

Mr Carroll: Can I just add, I think one of the things which is lost here is that one of the purposes of investigating is that the Prison Service is clearly a very high profile organisation. We are responsible for some very public figures who are prisoners who are household names, and irrespective of who they are, whether it is somebody who is a gas meter bandit or Jack the Ripper, if there is something which occurs which is a public concern, we have a duty to investigate, as far as we are concerned. That investigation – and I tried to make this clear just now – that investigation process is not about, at the commencement of that process, trying to apportion guilt or blame, it is about establishing the facts.

For me, the investigative process, in many cases where a complaint is received by a prisoner, and many of the people who are in our prisons are actually in there because they are not actually honest, we have to actually try to do that investigative process to try to exonerate staff in some cases, because a prisoner will make a complaint and if you do not actually investigate it then the next thing you are faced with is a civil case and you cannot defend yourself. So I think the investigative process helps that.

The point that Brian is making about the criminal cases where we have referred matters to the police and then they come back, on many occasions, yes, they have been deemed to be so serious to the governor that it is a matter that prima facie, at first looking at it, we do not want to get involved in it, we have not got the expertise to actually look at that element of the criminality, and the CPS will then make a decision that it is not a case that can go to court and refers it back. The issue for us is that we then need to investigate to see whether that member of staff has actually fulfilled the basic requirements of their job. We may not be looking to actually establish criminal proof –

Miss Weekes: Well, it may have nothing to do with crime at all, that is the point.

Mr Carroll: Yes.

Miss Weekes: I know the Chairman would like a short break, but I am very anxious just to deal with three other points, which is delays and informal resolution and management skills, if I may.

Sir William Morris: Can I suggest that we have the short break and then you can pick up.

11.45 am
(A short break)
12.00 pm

Sir William Morris: Miss Weekes.

Miss Weekes: Thank you very much.

Two things really, arising out of our discussions in relation to how discipline and the process is dealt with. What is your average time from the service of notice upon an officer that he will be investigated with the potential that you will bring disciplinary proceedings, and the end of the process? What is the average?

Mr Carroll: There are timescales set that the investigating officer will have a deadline to meet, and he has an interim report to put in and then a final report. The issue and the difficulty with any investigation is the availability of all the witnesses, because you cannot put your final report together until you have got those people.

I would say that on average we are talking about somewhere between two and four months to actually complete a report. Some will be at the extreme end of the range because a key member of staff may be off sick and the doctor says he cannot be interviewed or whatever –

Miss Weekes: What is the extreme?

Mr Carroll: I did a hearing on an investigation which dragged on for 18 months, purely for the fact that there had been an investigation in relation to a theft, the police had actually issued a police caution and then that person had appealed against the police caution and the police removed the caution, so there then had to start a second investigation to find out whether or not there was a shift which took place in the prison. So that whole thing, from start to finish, took about two years.

Miss Weekes: And you call two years/18 months extreme?

Mr Carroll: I would say two years is extreme for the type of things that we are investigating. I mean, I think that in the context of your Inquiry in relation to the police –

Miss Weekes: There are bigger issues?

Mr Carroll: There are perhaps more complex issues and bigger issues rather than the issues that we are dealing with, which are going to be: did Mr X say so and so? Did he treat this prisoner like this?

Miss Weekes: Was there an assault?

Mr Carroll: Yes, was there an assault? Is this sexual harassment? Were the handcuffs applied correctly when this escape took place? Those are the issues that we investigate, so we are able to investigate them much quicker.

Once the inquiry is finished and the report is given to the commissioning authority, then we have very, very firm deadlines in relation to when we move to a hearing.

Miss Weekes: Do your deadlines work?

Mr Carroll: By and large, yes. The problem once again, of course, is getting all the witnesses available. But I would say one of the fundamental principles that we recognised is that when a member of staff is facing disciplinary hearings, the important thing is that that member of staff gets the matter dealt with as quickly as possible, because we recognise that it is a stressful environment, and many of the disciplinary things that we deal with are: we had to investigate this, it has been found that you have been in breach of the Prison Service rules, and this is our award, which is a verbal or a written warning, and they are very small things, which are a slap across the wrist really and they lie on the person's record and 12 months later you take them off. They are not serious serious, but that person has not given due care and attention to their job. But it is still a stressful environment for them to be in so we are all very conscious of that. But I think that we have very few investigations which drag on for a long period of time because we do not have the complexity.

Miss Weekes: Okay. Can I ask about management and the role that both of you would play in ensuring that there are good managers and that they manage.

Mr Carroll: Brian, perhaps you would like to go first on that.

Mr Caton: Yes, I will. I think at times I am a little bit critical of managers at all level of the Prison Service. I think there is – I think the Prison Service itself, as I said earlier, never seems to be in a stable enough state at any one time to say, "Well, okay, what we really need to do is to ensure that these things now happen". Everything is in post change that we have got very little control over, and when I say "we", I mean the Prison Service as a body.

Things dramatically change all the time, and therefore we never get, if you like, a good handle on things. I think that is the same with management; we suffer as well. I think the similarities with ourself and the police forces are similar in that regard.

We basically need two different approaches depending on what is happening. If we have got the day-to-day administration of a prison, lots of human beings confined, lots of at times very dangerous and damaged, difficult people at times, and we have to manage that, that needs good management skills; I would say unique management skills because it is a custodial environment, and you have to manage the staff and you have to manage the sentence, make sure the sentence is carried out, make sure we try to rehabilitate. All of those things coming together are very difficult for managers to do at all levels, predominantly, at the end of the day, the governing governor, particularly because they pick up when things go wrong.

The other thing that we need from managers is that when things have gone wrong dramatically we need leadership. Prison officers go looking for leadership and a lot of the times they do not find it. Unlike the police, the recognition of prison staff more generally – prison officers particularly – for the way in which they deal with serious disturbances, serious events, and quash them very quickly, it goes in the main unrecognised because behind the prison wall we have got no method of them being rewarded or recognised for that. And neither have we got any kind of mechanism for awarding people bravery awards or long service or good conduct awards. We have none of that in the Prison Service like the police have.

If you like, when things go wrong people look round and say, "Well, that person was a bad leader", but it could be that she could be a brilliant manager, brilliant at administration of the prison, brilliant at making sure that prisoners arrive at correct courses, making sure she or he has the right resources to deal with the rehabilitation of the offenders or the security of the prison and is very, very good at it.

On the other hand, someone who is very bad, quite wasteful, seen by the Prison Service as being not very 51 good at managing the day-to-day business of a prison, when things go wrong, they are absolute heroes; they express brilliant leadership qualities. Prison officers would crawl over glass for them in those kind of situations but they are not very good. Now, to get the hybrid of those two is very rare indeed, and I would put that down not to selection but more to training, to try and bring out the best that people can, and having the right people available at the right time.

It is easy to sit somebody in an office who is a brilliant administrator, but if that person happens to be stood on the centre when the prison is on fire and they are no good at dealing with that – and I think the police suffer a similar kind of thing.

Miss Weekes: You are right, the debate is something that has come before us. Operationally, most certainly, the Metropolitan Police have a very good reputation in and outside of the UK.

We have received some evidence which suggests that they may not always manage internally staff issues as well as they do operational issues. It is not across the board, but there is sufficient evidence for me to say cautiously that they may not always manage the internal issues.

What are your suggestions or pointers to getting that balance better, because it is clear you have that debate yourself.

Mr Caton: I think we have it silently behind doors, where people say, "Well, that person is a very, very good governor", I might say that some of the people who have climbed to the very top of the Prison Service. I have worked in riots of which in my career as a prison officer we had quite a number. In a riot situation they were a liability, an absolute liability. Good people, but better sat away from that. In regard to leadership, they are not very good at all.

I believe that with early training, proper methods of testing people before you put them in a position where they would have to use those skills, and accepting that it exists I think would be a good thing; accepting that some people can sit in-house and do lots of good work at the Prison Service headquarters, but they are not very good at dealing with literally hands-on work that the Prison Service unfortunately has to do from time to time.

Although we are probably better now, I do not think we have quite measured up to what managers need to be able to do.

Miss Weekes: Why do you think you have not? This is not critical, but the Prison Service has been running for some time, you are going through changes. It would be surprising if you could not put your finger on: what is required of a good manager for my organisation and why am I not getting them?

Mr Caton: I should really let Paul speak, but my view has always been that we moved from having a uniformed service that was led predominantly by chief officers to the amalgamation of governor grades into that, and in the process of that we just accepted that anybody who would rise through the ranks of governor, many of whom would have probably been chief officers, would necessarily have the skills to deal with things when they go wrong.

I think the other thing is that we like to think that things are not going to go wrong, and we train people to be, I would suggest, more administrative nowadays than how we used to train uniformed prison officers in leadership skills. We are a different Prison Service now, we do not have as many disturbances, but when we do have them we still need those leaders and we still need people to be able to respect those who are going to tell them to go into dangerous situations.

Miss Weekes: Is that your view?

Mr Carroll: No. I have to say that I think there is a tradition within the Prison Service which has to change. The governor of an establishment is considered to know everything about everything, and it is impossible to do that. Therefore, what Brian talks about – staff will come and ask you questions, or expect you to deal with problems and to give them a solution, in many cases to their own particular personal problems, or you are supposed to be able to answer a question on accountancy, and there has been this tradition that governors are the all-knowing person about everything.

I think that the Prison Service has recognised this and is now trying to professionalise the service. Brian, I think, has referred more to the operational side of the service in the case of violent conduct by prisoners.

Miss Weekes: But what about people management?

Mr Carroll: People management is the essence, and it is, I think, something which is recognised by the Prison Service. My view is that because the Prison Service is now subject very much to local recruitment, local promotion, there is this gap in knowledge and competency at first line manager. We all recognise that, and it is something the Prison Service is working on.

We have an issue whereby I can go through a job simulation exercise. Having taken an exam I can prove my competence through the exam, I then move to a job simulation exercise, which is in itself an excellent procedure. I then get promoted. The failing, as far as I am concerned – and it is something which I, as a governor, was trying to work on with my senior officers – is that the senior officer rank, which is the rank up from prison officer, who manage the staff and manage the prisoners on a daily basis, have a problem in as much as they do not see themselves as managers.

So on the one hand they are working with officers and are an officer one day; the next day they are promoted and working in the same prison, and it is very difficult for them to actually then say to somebody, "Hey, I told you I want you to be at that place at this time", because that evening they will probably be playing football or in the gym together. There needs to be a professionalism where staff recognise that there is a right, when that person becomes a senior officer, that that person manages.

Lots of people can do it by force of personality, but I believe that we have to actually give them an understanding of what that job is about, and we have to monitor that through our staff appraisal system, and we have to put in place first line manager courses for them to do that.

Miss Weekes: So it is not there at the moment?

Mr Carroll: They are there, coming through, but they have not been there in the past.

Equally so, for managers at the higher level there are job simulation exercises which you have to go through and a suitable to be in charge exercise, which is – I did the very first one, which was sort of six hours of job simulation in a room in Birmingham, and that has now evolved to the fact that there is now an operational exercise, written exercise, involved in that particular evaluation, so that you cannot be in charge of a prison unless you have actually passed this system.

There is a leadership and development course which we have put in place which our training and development group are working on and actually participating in. I believe that we need to move to 360-degree appraisal. I have had a 360-degree appraisal done as part of my leadership and development course, and the most beneficial part of that whole exercise was not about what my seniors thought of me but what the staff perceive me as, my junior governors, and how they felt that I was not able to do this particular aspect, or did not convey that particular aspect, and I tried to address that as part of my development.

So I think that the service is moving along those lines. I also think that we have two strands to the service: one is that we are trying to bring in people who are going to be developed, they are fast-track, they are coming in through the direct entry scheme, they are coming in through the accelerated promotion schemes, and they have reached certain points where they have reached glass ceilings, there is a certain amount of success and a certain amount of failure on those schemes, but certainly it brings a balance to the service.

The Director General of the service recognises that he needs people, possibly like myself and others of our ilk, who have served a long time in the service and know nothing is new in the Prison Service; we may call it something new but we are dealing with the same basic commodity: prisoners. They do not particularly change, they become more sophisticated, the criminality changes in as much as it is much more drug orientated and alcohol orientated than crimes we perhaps had 30 years ago. So there needs to be a transitional period where people like myself are able to respond on the Director General's behalf to deal with some of the incidents that Brian talks about and get our hands dirty. But that does not mean to say that what we should not be doing is developing those people who are coming through fast-track to actually understand those issues and to deal with them.

The tradition of the Prison Service is a huge, huge issue. Brian alludes to it as being very much like a naval ship where the governor is the captain, and we have to get away from that, where the governor becomes the person who basically pulls it all together. But there are other people with professional skills who can manage certain aspects of the prison, and we are moving to that with the creation of the National Offender Management Service, where there will be people who will supply us with our rehabilitation and resettlement work which will be targeted. It will not be the governor having to say, "Well, I think that course would be good here"; it will be looked at, it will be scrutinised.

We have appointed professional personnel people, so you have got to have a CIPD accreditation to be the head of personnel in a prison. We are looking at moving away from having a personnel department in each prison and having just a head of personnel to advise the governor on policy issues, but having a shared call centre for our personnel work. All our financial work and our procurement is going to go to a shared call centre –

Miss Weekes: So you are going through really quite a lot of changes.

Mr Carroll: We are going through huge changes. The Prison Service is – we started yesterday as NOMS; we are now National Offender Management Service. Many of our staff, including senior managers, are still yet to find out what it is that NOMS is actually going to deliver.

It was one of those pieces of legislation – a policy which was introduced very quickly, and we are now putting flesh on the bones of that particular policy. But it will revolutionise the Service.

Brian and I have a different view on it. I believe that if the Prison Officers' Association and prison officers embrace the changes that NOMS is going to bring, that there is going to be a huge creation of interesting work for prison officers in dealing with and working with prisoners, and that there is an opportunity for them to develop educationally, professionally, and to take the service forward with the people who have the expertise, and that is prison officers.

But we need to do things to actually make sure that those prison officers are freed up and we have got effective working practices because we cannot afford to recruit any prison officers outside of the current budget. So we need to be more efficient to actually do that. Those are the changes.

So there are huge changes taking place in the Prison Service that I think are exciting, albeit daunting and challenging. There we go.

Miss Weekes: There is only one more thing I have got to deal with, communication. How good are governors at communicating downwards?

Mr Carroll: Well, I think Brian will say that communication in the Prison Service, like any large organisation, I agree, is very difficult. I can only speak from my own experience of what I tried to do, certainly within our organisation we try to actually use our intranet, which is the Prison Service computer system.

Miss Weekes: Is that good?

Mr Carroll: Yes, it is getting better.

Miss Weekes: I suppose it depends on whether you know how to use a computer and whether you have access to a computer.

Mr Carroll: Yes, everyone has access to a computer, everyone has been trained in getting access to the computer. Many staff in the Prison Service are of our generation and they think that they are going to break the machine if they switch it on, so lots of them do not actually access the computer, albeit we are now moving to a point where we are cutting out a lot of the paper so that they have actually got to access it if they want to find out about things; it is very much a chicken and egg thing.

So we do try to communicate what is going on in the service.

As a governor, I made a point every week, when I was the governor of an establishment – and this is not something which is universally done but it is something which I learned from a previous governor who I served with – I used to write each week a governor's overview, which gave me the opportunity actually say to staff, "This is happening in the prison, this development is something we have got to look at", and it also gave me an opportunity to say, "I heard this happened last week and I am really quite cheesed off about it. I do not intend to do anything about it but if it crops up again bear in mind that I have warned you and please address this issue".

So it was an informal way of me communicating with staff, and the feedback I got from that was that staff used to read that document more than they read what was being put out by the Prison Service because I used to pick up on all the new policy initiatives and put it into words of plain English that they could understand and say, "You need to have a look at this".

Miss Weekes: Do you do much face to face?

Mr Carroll: I used to hold a full staff meeting three times a year –

Miss Weekes: Was that enough?

Mr Carroll: It depends. Obviously I used to walk round the prison on a regular basis and speak to staff individually and do any debriefs following any incidents which took place. But I tried to communicate to staff two or three times a year on things like the business plan that was being produced on any significant issues. I tried to celebrate success.

Certainly when I took over at Lewes – at Lewes we have a weighted score card process, where each prisoner is weighted against performance, and we were 127th out of 129 establishments when I went to Lewes. The staff – not me, the staff – and I think it is fair to say that we underrate, or we do not give staff enough acknowledgment for the success in the work that they do. But the time I left Lewes, we were second on that weighted score card. There are many issues about that, but that was down to the hard work of the staff and me being able to get a group of managers together who had the same ethos and worked as a team.

I think communication, generally staff will say it is poor, but there is so much stuff being pumped out by the Prison Service that lots of staff, including senior managers, I have to say, choose not to read some things because it is just mind boggling.

Mr Caton: I will quickly say two things. I think there are good communicators in the Prison Service and there are some ghastly ones.

There are some good governors who communicate very well with their staff and they do it pretty regularly. I think, in the main, our members would prefer face to face meetings more regularly. If you look at other organisations that have immediate responsibility for human beings when they come on duty, there need to be briefings. It has always disappointed me in the Prison Service that when I worked in the National Health Service in mental health we did a patient by patient check when we came on duty so that anything that happened to that patient – and there was sufficient time given to do that – we would all know about it.

When I went to work at Wakefield Prison I was disappointed, really, that that did not happen, albeit that we had big wings, huge amounts of prisoners there, and there was not a great deal of time, and certainly handover period was virtually non-existent. But I think those kind of things are important.

What I would say is that, if you get the opportunity, read the staff surveys that have happened recently; that will tell you a lot about what prison officers and prison staff think about communication.

In regard to the NOMS, I would ask you to visit some of the publications that have come out explaining to staff what NOMS is. They are the most confusing documents I have ever seen and staff still – as Paul says, there are governors and uniformed staff that have not got a clue what NOMS is, and I think it speaks volumes.

Yesterday in the Home Office is normally accepted as a holiday and that is when they launched NOMS, so I think that says quite a lot about the intent.

Miss Weekes: Thank you both very much.

Sir William Morris: Thanks, Brian and Paul.

Could I invite Sir Anthony to put some questions to you.

Questions by Sir Anthony Burden

Sir Anthony Burden: Can I just clear up, please, one issue that my colleague raised on employment status, because you as a service and the Police Service very much share the issue of physical contact with prisoners, allegations being made, on many occasions false allegations, and the need to rebut those. It has been put to us that to remove that special status of constable would actually expose police officers under the discipline procedures unfairly.

Can I ask how you, with employment status, pre-and post this new agreement, actually address that and how you might put extra, added protection in, if you do, to employment status as it applies to your uniform grades.

Mr Caton: I think that one of the things I would say about the status of a constable – and we were discussing it, actually, on another issue just before we came in, and our views differ dramatically on the status of the powers of a constable – the powers of a constable were used to take away our trade union rights. Because we had the powers of a constable, put us in a court, turned back, whatever it was, something like 50 years of history, and said, "Well, actually, you are constables".

At one stage during the legal proceedings they actually referred to us as very similar to soldiers. We have actually never had huge amounts of status under the fact that we are constables. We can carry out our duties inside a prison; we can use reasonable force to prevent an escape or an assault or damage to prison property; we can arrest an escaping or an absconding prisoner and we can take into custody an absconded or an escaped prisoner; we can hold, pending police presence, anyone who it is believed is trafficking into a prison, bringing items into a prison who is a visitor. For example, I think traffic wardens have actually got more powers of a constable than a prison officer, and that is because of the nature of what work they have to do.

So I think, regardless of how much of the status of being a constable 24 hours of the day – and a constable cannot be expected or ordered by another constable to make a breach of the peace, which we found out when we locked the gates of Preston Prison because it was overcrowded and they said, "You are constables". I said, "Well, that is fine, the governor cannot tell us not to lock these gates and not allow any prisoners in because he is a constable and no constable can..."

There are lots of legal things that we have been through, I have to say, in trying to defend our trade union rights rather than trying to examine the powers of a constable. I actually think it works quite well. How well it would work if we were given what I think we will get, and that is our trade union rights back fully, no different to any other public servant, I am not sure; I just think it is right that we should have trade union rights. But I do not think that stops a prison officer from using those limited rights that they have as constable in a proper way.

I do not think that police officers would behave that differently having employment status, I really do not. I think when we got it, there was not a sudden upsurge by prison officers who say, "Well, now we have got this I am going to look round for some employment tribunal to go running into." I do not think it worked like that. And certainly we probably go to employment tribunals more often now than we did when we got that.

Mr Carroll: I would think the difficulty is that – you have the tradition that the public see the police as having the right of arrest et cetera, and I think the difficulty that you are going to face is that traditional value stuff that I have been talking about.

Brian is quite right, the limitations on our staff with their constabulary powers are really to allow them to shut a cell door, really. That exercised the warrant that is issued by the court. It is interesting that the privatisation of escorts allows custody officers the same powers, and that seems to have been accepted fully by both the public and by the client, i.e. the prisoner.

So I think that any changes would have to be carefully managed, but they are not particularly obstructive, I do not feel.

Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Can I just move to the area of diversity, please, and if I could just try and get a better understanding of your organisation. In addition to the Prison Officers' Association, which equates to the Police Federation and the Police Service, have you any other representative bodies that represent particularly minority groups?

Mr Carroll: Yes. The Prison Service deals with three main groups. There is the POA, clearly, which represents the majority of our staff. We then have the Prison Service trade union side, which is professional groups, as we call them: Prospect, FDA, which is the First Division Association, and PCS, which represent most of our clerical and support staff. We then have another group called the PTSJIC, which is the Prison Service Joint Industrial Council, which is made up of GMB, GGWU, UCAT, and they represent those members of staff who work in our engineering work support teams, some catering organisations, farm hands, agricultural workers.

Outside that structure we then have the PGA, which is the Prison Governors' Association, which represents about 1,000 prison governors. PSJIC, POA and PSTUS organisations actually have an Wheatley council structure, which is a structure which allows us to meet with them on an informal basis through subcommittees, and that then comes up to a quarterly or a half-yearly meeting, depending on which group it is, with either the director of personnel or, in the case of the POA, that would be chaired by the Director General, where issues can be addressed.

So we have a fairly wide ranging number of unions.

Sir Anthony Burden: I think the chairman wants to come back to –

Mr Caton: But we do have the Respect organisation, which is an organisation set up purely for black Asians, although myself and the national executive – many white officers are members of Respect, associate members. We attend their conference; we have a good working relationship with them. I think, in most cases, we work parallel with Respect to look at diversity issues.

The Prison Service fund and give facility time to people to run Respect, and that is quite right. We do not have a difficulty with that. We sometimes have a difficulty where we are unaware that our members have got particular problems because it has gone through Respect. I will give them their due, in the main, Respect will say, "Have you informed the trade union of this?" Sometimes they say, "Well, no, we do not want to because a member of the POA is involved in it", whether it be a racist remark or racist behaviour.

We have, I think, a great deal of respect for the way and the work that Respect does. We think that in the main it is quite good because it is independent from us, but we also have a black section. We have got a group that we pull together from the black and Asian officers, many of whom are jointly members of Respect and active in Respect and are active in the POA.

Diversity is a major issue for us. It is probably one of the biggest issues currently because of various events and various inquiries, and particularly the borough inquiry and the kind of things that are in the press, so it is a big thing for the POA. We muster all the help we can from wherever we can, whether it be the TUC, whether it be the Commission for Racial Equality, who we meet with very regularly. We try, as a trade union, to work predominantly, of course, with the Prison Service and the NHS because they are the primary employers that we have got. We have some meetings with the private sector companies where we have got members, although we are not recognised.

So we do try to embrace all areas of it. Sometimes we fall out with bodies; not often. Sometimes we fall out with the Prison Service on race issues. On both sides we want them to prosecute some cases and they have not. Equally, we have defended people who we think the Prison Service are prosecuting wrongly. We have got a fairly simplistic view.

If someone says to our officials, "I did not do that" and/or, "I did that but not with that intent", we defend that. It sometimes gets us in very, very deep water, particularly with various organisations who are looking after the interests of black and ethnic minorities, but that is what we do. We are a membership union that defends.

Equally, we provide help and support for those who want to try and get things prosecuted because of abuses of people because of the diverse nature of themselves.

We have been very prominent in pushing forward the gay/lesbian/bisexual/cross-gender group in the POA, something that had been ignored for, in my opinion, far too long, and the Prison Service indeed has worked in conjunction with that, so we have got facility time for that.

So we are tackling it, but, again, very much like the police, no matter which corner we turn round, there is somebody willing to say, "Well, you will be abusive, your members will be abusive, because they can be", and I have to say – I have said it on many occasions – I have carried a cell key, as Paul has. If I am put in a position, as a prison officer, or indeed as a prison governor, where, if I want to abuse somebody because they are black or because of their religion or because of their gender or their sexual orientation, let me tell you, I am in a pretty powerful position to do it because nobody would really know. It is because we are in that position that we are able to be, quite wrongly in the vast majority of times, lambasted when things happen like that.

Yes, we can make sure that we put a racist in with an Asian guy. I cannot understand for the life of me why any prison officer would want to do that or should do that, and I would condemn him beyond anything else because that is just absolutely the most awful, unprofessional, immoral, inhumane thing that a human being can do to another human being, but I have no doubt it can happen, and it probably has happened.

Sir William Morris: How do you deal with racist prisoners? What do you do?

Mr Caton: With a great deal of difficulty. It is less of a problem to the POA but a huge problem for prison governors, I think.

Part of the rehabilitative process is that we take this person who is wronging and we try to make them do things right. A hardline racist person is probably the most difficult thing you have got. I have to say this: the vast majority of our people – we have got drug addicts, alcohol and substance abuse, 90-odd per cent of them, and mental health problems, and I would say the latter is probably where most racists lie; they have huge personality and mental health problems, and to try and get them to rehabilitate, try and get them to, if you like, address their offending behaviour, you have got one hell of a jump to go to get through those kind of barriers when, I have to say, you are probably a damn good prison officer but you are not necessarily the best psychiatrist/psychologist, all them things you need to be, mother, father, religious leader, all those things that they expect of you, you might not be good at all those things.

So I think dealing with a racist prisoner is probably one of the most difficult things that prison officers have to deal with. It was a lot easier when I was a prison officer because the way in which prisoners spoke about race, about each other and about prison staff, although you swallowed on it, and it was very bitter to swallow on it, it was, I have to say, more than anything else accepted. You might say to them, "Don't you speak about that prisoner like that", but it was a difficult thing to grapple with, because it was fairly accepted by prisoners that they spoke about each other like that.

Sir Anthony Burden: From what you said, obviously there is an intensity around this issue in the Prison Service, again very similar to the Police Service. We have heard in relation to the Metropolitan Police that there are occasions when dealing with black and minority ethnic prison officers, in your case, is something which is causing difficulty, that managers are not managing those situations and if they do there is less of a tendency to deal with it on the landing, more of a tendency to make it very official very quickly, put it on paper: get it off my shoulders, in case there is an allegation of racism made against me. Is that something you can relate to within your service?

Mr Carroll: Yes. I think there is a feeling amongst staff that the race card will be played, I think is the term which is used frequently.

I think there is that concern, there is an anxiety amongst people who are managers that if they reprimand a member of staff that they could have this allegation leveled at them. However, I think the systems we have got in place are robust enough, if we follow our own systems, that that can be avoided, because you can demonstrate why it is that you are actually pulling that particular member of staff or why it is that you are making this point through their staff report. There is a grievance procedure available to staff to actually raise agreements if they feel that is unfair.

The biggest problem with any organisation – and certainly the Prison Service is not without blame in this area – is that we have the procedures and the people who are empowered to follow them. For whatever reason, whether it be time or whether it be lack of interest or lack of understanding, we do not follow follow our own procedures. The procedures are in place, and I am confident that any member of staff, whether he be black, white, green or yellow, if you treat them as individuals and follow the procedures then you have nothing to fear.

But unfortunately people have got this whole mythology thing over their head which thinks: this man is going to play the race card and I cannot respond to it. I do not think that should be even a starting point in people's considerations; it is whether or not the person has the competence, whether that person has done something wrong, and if they have or they have not, what are the procedures that I should follow.

If you actually pull somebody and say midway through their review period of their annual report, "Look, in my opinion, as your reporting officer, I do not believe you are doing this correctly" or "You are not putting enough effort into your work", then that is perfectly reasonable, provided you record it and give the person the opportunity to say, "I disagree". That is the ebb and flow of management and it does not matter what colour the skin is, the employee you are working with, the procedures are there.

Sir Anthony Burden: Can I ask, have you had to put anything additionally into your processes, such as the ACAS mediation model, third party intervention, to deal with those extreme situations where it is quite apparent that management of black and minority ethnic staff in an establishment is going wrong?

Mr Carroll: No. I think that one of the things the Prison Service has actively taking on board is diversity training and a commitment that all staff will receive diversity training, and our diversity training has been reviewed and amended to reflect the cases that have come out through ET or through experience. We seek help from within the ethnic communities to actually give us a balance as to what we are actually seeking to achieve. We would like to recruit and break down the barriers that we feel are there in many of the ethnic communities, especially, surprisingly, in the north-west, where it is very difficult to recruit anybody from the Asian or black community; we found that very difficult. We are consistently looking at how to respond to the emerging themes.

I think that we are actually probably getting there. There has had to be an element of, I suppose, fear in the initial stages to stop people from continuing with the behaviour that was unacceptable, but I think that the majority of our staff work side by side with their Asian and black colleagues and that we have a very good balance.

There are lots of cultural issues to be learned. I think many of the things that I have learned from our diversity training is that we do not understand a great deal about prisoners' culture – black prisoners, Asian prisoners – and when you take that to its next stage, the colleague who is working next to you, you may not understand what his culture is, because we have officers who come from Nigeria, we have officers who come from a cross-section of the community, you know, across the world, really. It is only when you get to talk in a forum like our diversity training that you suddenly realise that we are very ignorant of anything which is other than the British way of life.

I think that that is changing within the service, and I think that we recognised, and it has been accepted, that we were an institutionally racist organisation. The CRE have done a big investigation. There are still emerging issues, the Feltham issue; we are all aware of the issues and the sensitivity that goes on there. The unfortunate thing about all of these issues, very much, I suspect, as happens within the police force, it does detract from the valuable work that 90 per cent, 95 per cent of the staff are doing on a daily basis to actually harmonise and take forward the issues and to try to meet the needs certainly of our prisoners.

Our kitchen staff are an example. The menus that they produce to meet the wide range of needs across the community, from a vegetarian to somebody who is a vegan or is on a kosher diet or whatever, we have things like – certainly in my last prison we had a week of different types of cooking, where we got prisoners who worked in the kitchen who may have been from a Jamaican background so they did a Jamaican meal. There was a choice. Did you not have to have the Jamaican meal, but there was choice. We had a curry day. We had an Asian prisoner who came and did some specialised cooking in the kitchen for us during Ramadan and produced some food, and at the end of it, you know, we had a meal in the visits where prisoners could actually all come in and have this meal, and it was a sort of around the world gastronomic feast, I suppose. But it was well received and prisoners across the spectrum enjoyed it.

I think that there is a long way to go, but certainly prison staff recognise that there is a need to embrace all cultures.

Sir Anthony Burden: In terms of the ET claims coming through, there is nothing that would cause you alarm that there is disproportionality in a number of claims coming through based on racial grounds?

Mr Carroll: No. I think conversely in some ways. Goi

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	Archive note Important note: This is an archive of the website that was formerly at www.morrisinquiry.gov.uk. It is being hosted on the MPA website for archival purposes only and may contain out-of-date information. Page summary This resource is from the Transcripts section. This section contains a transcript of the public session with HM Prison Service and the Prison Officers’ Association on 2 June 2004. Sections available here: Transcript of public session: Mr P Carroll, HM Prison Service and Mr B Caton, Prison Officers’ Association Questions by Sir William Morris Questions by Miss Weekes Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Further questions by Sir William Morris Closing comments by Mr Caton Closing comments by Mr Carroll Alternative versions This transcript is also available with original line and page numbering. Content Transcript of public session: Mr P Carroll, HM Prison Service and Mr B Caton, Prison Officers’ Association Wednesday, 2 June 2004 10.30 am Sir William Morris: Good morning everyone, and a special welcome to you, Mr Carroll, and indeed Mr Caton. Can I first of all start by saying thanks to both of you for accepting our invitation to attend the Inquiry this morning and indeed to give evidence. Let me say that we feel somewhat honoured to have the unique experience of being addressed by a representative of the two principle interests for industrial relations in a very important public service, the Prison Service. I appreciate that for some of our witnesses the process may seem daunting so I thought it would be helpful if I set out very briefly how we propose to conduct the hearing this morning. First let me introduce myself and the members of the panel. I am Sir Bill Morris, recently retired general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and I have been asked to chair the Inquiry. As you can see, there are two other members of the panel. On my right is Sir Anthony Burden who recently retired as Chief Constable of the South Wales Constabulary after a very long and distinguished career in the Police Service. On my left is Miss Anesta Weekes QC. Anesta is an eminent barrister who sits as a recorder and part-time chairperson of employment tribunals. She was also counsel to the Lawrence Inquiry. Gentlemen, as you know, we have been asked by the Metropolitan Police Authority to conduct an independent Inquiry into professional standards and employment matters in the Metropolitan Police Service. The Inquiry that we are conducting is inquisitorial and not adversarial in nature or character. We have taken the deliberate decision that our focus would be on the Metropolitan Police Service itself as an organisation, and not the individuals who make up the MPS. We are very keen to enquire into those issues raised by our terms of reference so that we can make appropriate recommendations for further good practice rather than concentrating on making criticisms of the MPS or individuals. Among other things we are required by our terms of reference to establish whether the policies, the practices, the procedures and conventions, including structure of the MPS, in relation to professional standards in employment matters are good, effective practices. We are keen to take a comparative measure with other public organisations. In that context we are particularly keen to learn from the experience of the Prison Service because we see some elements where both services are common. For example, like the MPS, you both employ large numbers of uniformed officers who have a significant public duty and responsibility. You both have custodial responsibilities and you both share the same sponsoring department in Government, namely the Home Office. At the end of these introductory remarks, I will lead on some questions to you both, followed by the remainder of the panel, my colleagues, who will have additional questions to put to you. When we have completed all our questions, I will offer you the opportunity make a brief closing statement, if you wish. But for the record, let me point out that a transcript of our proceedings is being taken so that we can have a proper record of all the evidence given to us by all our witnesses, and this will be published on our website shortly after this morning's session. Before I begin, for the benefit of the transcript, I wonder if you would mind formally introducing yourselves to the Inquiry. Mr Caton: My name is Brian Caton. I am currently the general secretary of the Prison Officers' Association. I have held this post since 1999. Prior to that I was the assistant secretary of the Association. Prior to that I have served on the National Executive Committee, I have served as the Association's national vice-chairman, and was acting chairman for a period of time in the 1990s. Prior to that I was a serving prison officer of Wakefield Prison for 20 years, during which time I was branch secretary, and also very active in the trade union movement external from the POA, being president of the Trades Council, both in Wakefield and in the county association trades councils in Yorkshire and Humberside. Sir William Morris: Thank you. Mr Carroll: Good morning. I am Paul Carroll, I am the head of employee relations for the Prison Service. I am an operationally-based governor grade, having been in the service for 28 years and having served as a prison officer and all the other uniformed ranks, rising to my last operational post as governor of HMP Lewes. I have been in that post since July of last year. Questions by Sir William Morris Sir William Morris: Thank you both very much. We will let you determine the division of labour between you as to who responds to the questions, but we are keen to hear from you both. I wonder if we could start by inviting you to give us a profile of the employees in the Prison Service, including numbers, and how, if at all, they are divided. By that I mean between, say, prison officers and other staff who support the work of the prison officers, just to give us a picture as to what the service looks like. Mr Carroll: Right, there are approximately 43,000 employees in the Prison Service, of which, I think, we would say 33,000 of them are prison officers or uniformed support grades. So the vast majority of our staff are clearly uniformed grades. Sir William Morris: Have you got any statistics on the gender breakdown in the 43,000? Mr Carroll: We have got statistics. We do have targets for the recruitment of people from across all spectrums of society, both gender based and disability, and clearly we do have that target, which I think is 5.9 per cent. We are just underachieving on that target at the present time, but certainly there is as part of our action plan in relation to the CRE Inquiry which has taken place into the Prison Service over the last 12 or 18 months, we certainly have plans to increase the number of people from across the spectrum. Sir William Morris: Is your target set by your Government body or is it set by the Home Secretary? Mr Carroll: They are Home Office targets. Sir William Morris: Fine. We are very lucky to have been provided with a copy of your voluntary agreement between the Prison Service and the Prison Officers' Association which sets out an approach to the resolution of an industrial relations issue, which we find very interesting, and there is a reference, which we will call up, and it is an ACAS reference – ACAS/3/1. It is on the screen. What we are not clear about is the status of this particular document. Just following popular reporting, we know that negotiations and discussions have been taking place around some sort of an agreement. Could I invite you just to comment on the status, if it is out of date, or if it is a draft, or is it what you are working to. That would be extremely helpful to us. Mr Caton: The voluntary agreement I think was produced following very lengthy discussions between the Prison Officers' Association and the employer, the Prison Service. When I say lengthy, we had, I think, 27 or 28 drafts of this, so it was a lengthy period of time. Sir William Morris: That is not many! Mr Caton: As a T&GWU member I know it is not many! As the POA general secretary, it took a lot of getting together. Unfortunately, it seemed to at times not be fit for purpose in our opinion. We had tried, and were given assurances that we would be able to review the document to make it better, to alter some of the clear problems that were developing in the administration of it, not particularly in the methods that it tried to achieve in industrial relations, but certainly in the way in which they manifested themselves through the administration of the actual agreement. We thought it necessary to give notice to withdraw, and that notice actually runs out in January next year. In the period between our withdrawal, in November I think – January, sorry – they initiated discussions that followed, that we have now got a new document that is going to be presented by ballot to our membership with a recommendation from the National Executive Committee, the POA, that we accepted. The backdrop, actually, I think, is probably something that needs to be said. We do not believe that all the legal issues that are contained within it are right and proper; we do not think they are fair. We had our trade union rights taken off us in 1994 by the then Conservative Government, by use of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 127. The current Home Secretary, and indeed his predecessor, gave us assurances that that would be removed, but only on the basis that we put in place basically the same restrictions on a voluntary basis. We do not believe that is right or proper, and indeed we have a case registered with the International Labour Organisation to try and rectify that through law. We are hoping that the Government will remove those impediments that are currently in that agreement, and indeed in the one that we recently decided to put to our membership for acceptance. What we have been able to achieve is, I think, a good deal of industrial relations stability by use of the voluntary agreement, but we still consider it to be an unsatisfactory method of doing it. We would sooner have more partnership and less legislation. Sir William Morris: Okay. Could you just indicate to us the type of industrial relation issues which the agreement covers and what, if any, are the exclusions? Mr Carroll: Yes. The idea of the agreement was clearly to facilitate the introduction of a pay review body and also to facilitate stabilisation of what was a fairly rocky industrial relations situation. One of the things that we did was to actually ensure that there was a third party arbitration system in place through ACAS, but, of course, one of the documents' founding principles was that we had to put in some form of exclusions from the document because there is a need for an operational service such as the Prison Service to effectively manage itself and to ensure that negotiation and consultation takes place appropriately but that there were decisions that could be made to respond to operational needs. So the exclusions that we put in were in relation to shift patterns, was one of the fundamentals. We have a principal whereby we have people who come into the establishment, or the establishment themselves will establish what work needs to be done within the establishment, which we call profiling. The profiles are agreed and have to be agreed, and are part of the disputes procedure with the trade union side. The actual shift patterns that come from that we excluded from the disputes resolution because there had to be an ending to – once you have agreed the profiles, the shift patterns virtually fall out from the profiles, so That was agreed. The issue of pay, clearly, because there was a pay review body, was excluded from the disputes resolution because an independent body is already deciding upon that. Those were the main two exclusions that we detailed. The difficulty that I think Brian is alluding to in his comments relate really to – in the first document in the voluntary agreement there is a bit about what is in scope and what is not in scope. The difficulty has occurred that any document in its origin is developed by a team of people. Those people in a service such as the Prison Service eventually move on. Therefore, new people come in to take their place, such as myself. The difficulty that Brian has experienced was that what they believed were agreements that would take place were being given a different interpretation by new people who were arriving. The document is a living document, and one of the other problems we found was that in the Prison Service, both on the trade union side and on the management side, staff are replaced, so branch officials would become replaced and governors become replaced. We embarked on a very thorough training process before we implemented the voluntary agreement so that people all understood what the agreement was about, how to implement it – of course those people have moved on – and so we now have establishment governors who have not been trained in the way that perhaps they should have been and branch officials who have taken up posts who equally have not received that training. So I think those are the weaknesses that we identified. One of the issues that took place as well is that the then Director General of the Prison Service, Martin Nerey, had the decision-making power to decide what was in or out of scope, and once he had made that decision, that was then considered to be the end of the matter. That was due to the union's representations agreed to be unfair, and it was then decided that, if we ruled something out of scope, that it was not within the scope of the terms and conditions of the voluntary agreement, then the POA could actually lodge a failure to agree, which would then go to the third party, ACAS arbitration, to decide whether or not the issue should be in scope. We did run into some fundamental differences about the wording that any scope issue – where we were putting something to arbitration on scope, how that wording should be put together, but after, shall we say, a long and somewhat strenuous discussion, we managed with ACAS to find a way through that problem. Our contention is that interestingly enough, prior to the POA giving us notice to withdraw from the agreement, the agreement, which is now two and a half, three years old, has suddenly started to move forward and many of the disputes that were sort of stagnant and not being resolved have now actually moved forward very quickly since our meeting in November. Our contention is that perhaps we have jumped off the cliff a little bit early in abandoning the voluntary agreement. However, we do have a new document which we are working with the POA on. We are hoping that that goes to a ballot of their membership and that that will be introduced shortly. With Brian's permission, obviously this is a restricted document, but I have a copy here for each you have to go alongside the current voluntary agreement, which may be helpful to you. Mr Caton: If I can just say, to be as candid as I can, whilst we will work and try and get constructive operation of industrial relations, we are far too important a service not to do that. When things go wrong in prisons they normally go dramatically wrong, and we do not want our members put at risk in having to put those things right, because despite popular belief we have a good relationship with the police officers that come and circle our walls from time to time, but it is prison officers that go in and face the riots, not police officers. We do not want that to happen. But I have to say, we are a free and independent trade union and we believe that we are a responsible trade union. We also know that we are one of the most shackled public sector trade unions in Europe, by the laws that have been passed against us and the way from time to time those laws are interpreted. For example, we recently had faced a position where the pay review body had recommended a 6.5 per cent pay rise, the Home Secretary and the Prison Service had decided that despite the independent assessment that should be paid and they decided to stage that. This was the first occasion that the pay review body had reported on prison officers' pay, and we found that quite unacceptable. Whilst we were trying to calm our members down – who were very angry indeed at the results that the Prison Service interfered with an independent body – our members decided that they would do basically three things: one, turn up for work on time; secondly, take their meal breaks on time; and thirdly, that they would adhere to the security manual, the security manual that if they do not adhere to normally they would get sacked for not adhering to it. That was classed as industrial action. The Home Secretary authorised the issuing of a judicial notice against the POA, something very unusual is that it had a penal notice in my name listed against it. In fact, they were going to imprison me for actions that I had not either authorised or asked to happen, and in fact I was spending a lot of time going round the country trying to get rid of. For that, I received a writ with a penal notice. Our intent is absolutely certain, that we have got a twin track approach: one, we want good, stable industrial relations because of the nature of our work, but secondly, we want to be treated no differently from any other public servant and certainly no differently from any other prison officers treated under International and European law. And we will continue to do that. That does not mean to say that we are threatening the employer or anything like that, we are trying to work constructively to build up good industrial relations; the idea being that in our opinion, there should be no need to take industrial action rather than it be an option removed by law. Sir William Morris: I need help from both of you, because you have made reference to a voluntary agreement and this is what we called up earlier, and you are now embarking upon a revision of that. When you used the word "voluntary", what comes into my mind is the opposite to that in industrial terms. The proposed agreement which you will be balloting on, Brian, sometime in the next month or so, that is not a statutory agreement, is it? Mr Caton: Yes, it is, Bill. The thing about the word "voluntary", we removed it from the new agreement because it is anything other than voluntary. It is like, "Will you please shout 'ouch' voluntarily. By the way, I am going to shove your arm up your back until it makes you shout 'ouch' and then you are volunteering the word". Sir William Morris: But this will not have the force of law, will it? Mr Carroll: Yes, it does. The annex at the back of the new document incorporates the legally enforceable element of the agreement. The negotiating team, which I was part of, and Brian was part of, what we recognised was the fact that there are issues which Brian has mentioned this morning surrounding the legal imposition of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, section 127, which Brian states shackles prison officers, and it certainly does stop any inducement for industrial action under law. We are in the process of trying to remove that particular element of the – or disapply that element of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, as promised by the Home Secretary. It is slightly more difficult to do than it is to actually set up, as anything in law seems to be. But clearly we recognise that the POA have an issue in relation to anything that is legally enforceable. Sadly – and I have lived through this through my service – in the early 1990s and previous to that, the only disputes resolution was that the Director General would hear the issue and make a decision and that was the end of it, that was the end of it, which was considered to be unfair by the trade union side. But the problem was with that system, we had so many spasmodic disputes taking place across our 130-odd establishments that it was difficult to actually bring any control to bear and to move the Service forward. This document, it is our belief, and I think that without speaking for Brian, I think that they would agree it has brought some control to the way that we do our industrial relations. It is not a partnership agreement in as much as Brian would like to see it, because obviously there is the legally enforceable bit that, if there is an inducement to go on strike or to not work normally or to affect the operation of the Service, the Service would act under law to take out an injunction against the POA to actually stop them from doing that. We think that we would like to see, in the years to come, a position where that would not be necessary. We do not believe that we have reached that stage yet because there are elements of people working within our service who still think that they are able to say to the governor that they are not going to do this, that or the other, and we feel that we need that protection at the present time. The other issue for us is that, to remove section 127 – or disapply section 127, I will have to carefully choose my words on the law – one has to, through the process we are going through, which is the Regulatory Reform Act, one has to ensure that where a Minister is trying to disapply a section, that any protection that is afforded to the Minister already in place is not lost. We can only disapply section 127 through the provision of having the voluntary agreement in place, which is the protection that is afforded to the Minister. So our difficulty is – or was – that the POA offering to withdraw, giving notice to withdraw from the voluntary agreement, placed us in a difficult position in relation to fulfilling the Home Secretary's pledge to remove section 127. That is why there has been this effort to separate the legal issues – and we are quite happy for Brian and the trade union to take us to court in the ILO – I am sure it will be an interesting day out – and for us to actually defend our position within that arena. However, what we have done, and very successfully in partnership, I believe, we have set aside the legal aspects – we will deal with those through the courts – but we have set up systems which address many of the complaints that we were receiving from local branches, from the national branches, in relation to scope and how the system was administered. What we have now got is a situation where we think we have got a better document that gives us a better level of partnership working in the mainstream but the Prison Service is also protected from, shall we say, the wildcat element. Sir William Morris: Can you just enlighten me here. This agreement is the subject of discussions between the Prison Service and indeed the Prison Officers' Association. It will be a document ultimately which has legal force. What is the process of giving it legal force? Is it enabling existing powers by the Home Secretary or has it got to go through some new process? Mr Carroll: The system is that if we felt that a branch, or the national body, was threatening to – Sir William Morris: No, no, sorry, I have not made my question as clear as it needs to be. You have an agreement, it covers all aspects of concerns, it meets the requirement of the Service, the Prison Officers' Association members are satisfied. But it is just a document. How does it get legal force? Does the Home Secretary using enabling powers sign an order or does it have to go through – I just want to understand, if you like, the legal process to give it legal force. Mr Carroll: Because it says in there, in the document itself, it is legally enforceable, and in the annex there are a set of words that will say that the Home Secretary will seek injunctive relief in the event of a breach any of these terms and conditions. And so de facto the Director General of the Prison Service or one of his representatives at director level will decide whether there is a breach and then the Home Secretary will write to the unions and, if necessary, would then go to the High Court to seek an injunction. Sir William Morris: So it is enforceable through common law contract law? Mr Carroll: Yes. Mr Caton: It becomes civil law – currently, 127, if we commit a breach of 127, which I have to say we have breached more since it came in in 1994 than we did between 1939 and 1994, we have broken the law on numerous occasions on issues of Health and Safety, on issues of privatisation, which is why the law were brought in, because we are running a very successful campaign against prison privatisation, so we have done that. The status of the document is that we sign up to say that we will adhere to it, provided, we would say, that the Prison Service do. Of course, in signing that we recognise that we are signing a document that, in our opinion – and we believe in the opinion of those who will scrutinise it at international level – does not meet the terms of ILO conventions in regard to that, first of all, you can take away somebody's trade union rights provided that you replace them with compensatory arrangements. Those compensatory arrangements should be free from interference from the state, well neither the pay review body, nor indeed, we would say, the voluntary agreement are actually in line with that international law. So that is the reason we are taking it. We have got the compensation and we have signed up to it, but we know that we are signing something that actually breaches international law. Sir William Morris: So am I right in assuming that this document, when it has completed its process of discussion, negotiation, consultation, endorsement, fulfils all the operational needs of the Prison Service as the Service sees it, and that becomes an agreement which is legally enforceable? It might not be the utopia but it covers the operational needs of the Prison Service. Mr Carroll: We believe so, yes. Sir William Morris: And that includes arbitration and mediation, all those safeguards in terms of the various steps to ensure that you do not move from 0 to 100 in 10 seconds? Mr Carroll: Yes, we build in lots of control measures which hopefully should actually slow the pace down of any dispute so we can settle it. Sir William Morris: And it forms part and parcel of the contract of employment of the prison officers? Mr Carroll: No, because not every prison officer is a member of the POA, and therefore this is a joint industrial relations procedural agreement between us and the trade union body that is recognised for negotiating purposes within the Prison Service, i.e. the POA. Those people who choose not to be POA members would clearly be bound by that document, although it does not form the terms – it is not a contractual issue. Sir William Morris: Okay. That is extremely helpful, thank you very much indeed. Can I, at this point, invite Miss Weekes to pick up on the questions that we would like to put to you. Questions by Miss Weekes Miss Weekes: Can I turn now to a topic which is really designed to get your views as to how happy your officers and staff are. I thought you would smile. I want to look, first of all, at the historical basis of the conditions of service for uniformed staff, then I would like to turn to the statutory background for dealing with misconduct and workplace issues; a little bit about the balance of lifestyle and work issues; and then finally how you deal with management, good/bad managers, performance. So it will be a little bit of a whistle-stop tour because I know that Sir Anthony would also like to ask some questions. Can I come back to the difference, if there ever was one, between officers and staff in terms of their conditions of employment. Was there historically a difference? Mr Carroll: Yes, there is. Clearly, officers are employed as prison officers and have terms and conditions which relate to working in an antisocial environment, really, and therefore that has grown into a structure that – a pay structure and a terms and conditions structure, that is unique to them. That includes an attempt by the Prison Service to introduce a job evaluation system at the higher grades initially, governor grades, which created an evaluation system and a new grading system. Then, of course, there are those people who work as support staff, such as, I suppose we have got people who are working as electricians, plumbers, we have got people who work as caterers, people who work as form managers, we have got people who work as clerical officers, and they all have their own terms and conditions because of the grades that they are. So whilst they are all embraced as civil servants, there are all different fundamental grades and pay scales. I think the pay scales are the most confusing thing that you can probably pick up and you immediately put them down again. So the answer is yes, really. Mr Caton: There has been, over the years, certainly since myself and Paul joined the Prison Service, there was a very clear distinction between the uniformed prison officer and others, a very clear distinction, even down to the fact that in the main we were managed by uniformed officers only; the governor gave instructions and the uniformed structural grades carried those out. So we had chief officer 1, who was, if you like, to use a military kind of analogy, the regimental sergeant major, maybe a little bit more than that, because many chief officers actually run their prisons, they run them on the orders of the governor, but they were certainly in charge. Principal prison officers who ran, in most prisons, a wing, and a senior officer who would be responsible for the day-to-day running of that wing and the deployment of officers. Officers ran landings, depending on their seniority, and had other officers working with them. So it was a very – people say it was a military kind of thing but it was not actually. It was more based on a naval kind of ratings thing, where you had a captain, a chief petty officer, a petty officer, then you had leading hands and hands, who were very similar, to a certain degree, as is the fire service. There was a document done in the mid-1970s called MR3 Report, which was never to be seen again because it was too radical, it spoke about doing away with chief officers, doing away with principle officers, having more professional managers in and bringing the Service together. Well, they did shelve it but not for very long because that is what we have got now. Rather than the governor and his governor grades being purely administrators, they are operational managers, they are very much operational managers now, very directly involved in the day-to-day management of not only officers but prisoners. So there has been a change, and indeed the Prison Service within the last ten years has brought out a staff handbook that covers all Prison Service employees. So they are bringing it in, although it is very difficult, as Paul quite rightly says, because the terms and conditions – and the work that they do is very different. Lots of equal pay claims from workers in prisons because they are now on lower pay, and I understand their concern and their frustration at their pay being less than what a prison officer gets. Because there has been constant change in the Prison Service, there has never been a period of stability for us to settle down and really examine and steady all these kind of things out. We went years without change and now we have gone probably as long constantly changing the Prison Service. Miss Weekes: The Metropolitan Police Service, as you probably know, the uniformed officers are not employees, Crown servants. Administrative staff, staff officers, officer staff – they are really called police staff – have contracts of employment and they have full access to employment tribunals. Police officers have to access employment tribunals for discrimination matters, so there is that quite big distinction. Some have said to us that the time has come to have both uniform and non-uniform on employee status pretty much at the level you are at. Are there any drawbacks to that, do you think, bearing in mind you mirror the distinctive difference between the officer role and the support staff? Mr Caton: We did a very important court case many years ago to achieve our ability to go to employment tribunals, as they were then – sorry, industrial tribunals as they were then, employment tribunals as they are now. We think that was a major step forward with regard to dealing with the problems that prison officers face from time to time. What I would say is we have seen a rise in, through our association, a huge rise in legal costs to the association because of that, and most people, the day that you sit them in front of a lawyer, be it one of our lawyers or anybody else, the lawyer says, "I cannot turn the clock back. What I can do is send you on three continental holidays. You will get compensation. We cannot alter what was happened to you but we can try to make sure it does not happen to anybody else." But the main thing that seems to be in people's minds is, "Well, I will get this wodge of money". I am never convinced of the rights of that, but that is actually, if you like, an upside of a downside of being able to go to tribunals. We take many tribunal cases, but I have to say that a lot of our difficulties are sorted out because of our access to the Civil Service appeal board, which we have also got a right to go to. So if we go all the way through, we have disciplinary cases or we have a grievance that does not come to an acceptable solution lower down the line, then we would move to a Civil Service appeal board, if it is appropriate, and an employment tribunal. So there is, if you like, a great deal of fairness that prison officers experience. Even at the end of the day when they get nowhere, at least they have had more than a fair crack; whereas without an employment tribunal, if we did not have the Civil Service Appeal Board – I think I can understand the frustration of the bobby on the beat, if you like. My son is a policeman as well, so I understand the frustrations that they experience in not having a case ventilated independently and appropriately. That would frustrate – well, it did frustrate prison officers. Myself and Paul were around at that time when we took the case. Yes, I think we get a fair crack. Miss Weekes: Okay. Before turning to disciplinary measures, which I would like to come back to, because that is quite important for us here, can I just touch on the balance of lifestyle and operational duties, not an easy topic for any prison governor or anybody else. How well do you think the Prison Service balances lifestyle demands and workplace duties? Mr Carroll: Well, I think there are several issues surrounding that question, to be honest. I think that we are very responsive, as an employer, to working flexibly. There are some operational constraints. You could not afford to have everybody saying "I want to work 20 hours a week", so we do have to, as an establishment, put some control measures on that and say, "Well, yes, okay, you can work flexibly but it has to meet these conditions". So there has to be some control because you cannot have somebody saying, "I want to work weekends only" or "I will work Tuesday and Wednesday". But by and large we are trying to meet the needs and recognise that there are people who want to work flexibly and want to work part-time, and I think that as we go on it may suit the Service for us to get more people who work part-time. I believe that certainly there are many mothers who may be a good source of employment for prison officers who could return to work as prison officers working something like, you know, the 9 to 3 shift, which is very handy for us. So we are tailoring some of our policies to do that. The other issue for us, of course, is the European working time directive, and the Jaeger ruling in relation to the European working time directive, which we believe is unbalanced and unworkable. The working time directive affects us very much in relation to the fact that many prison officers may, because of the operational needs of the job, not get the 11-hour rest between shifts. Most of our shift patterns across the estate have been designed to meet a profile and then the shift patterns have been designed to meet the needs of the work, but also to recognise the needs of the staff, so that we give staff a shift pattern that they are happy with. That is what we strive to do. Sometimes we do not achieve that. Unfortunately with the working time directive, we now are in a position where we are going to have to, because of legal challenges from some of Brian's members, independently, I have to say, on their own volition, they have taken to us court and are winning some of those cases, or are winning some of the arguments, so we will have to introduce working time directive shift patterns. But we are trying to temper that with a system called self rostering, which seems to work successfully in some of our jails, where staff can choose what hours they wish to work. We have to control that, obviously, but, for example, somebody may wish to work every weekend or every Saturday, or every Sunday because they want to play football on a Saturday, and that seems to work very well. Lots of people car share, so if they can all work their shift together, then fine. So we are looking at all those options. So I think that the Prison Service is coming up to meeting those challenges and I think there are some considerable challenges ahead as well. Miss Weekes: Can I just pick you up on one aspect, and it is something that gives all public organisations a difficulty, and it is whether or not certain sectors of your employees suffer more than others in not being able to have that lifestyle balance. For example – it is only an example – young mothers who naturally want to take time off to have a child or two but desperately want their job; they still want to be considered valuable to their employer, but they realise that they have to go back home at 4 o'clock to pick up the child. It does not always work well operationally. How do you think you have dealt so far with, particularly, young women with children? Mr Carroll: I think that certainly where there are requests to work flexibly in that way, that we are able to meet that need. I can only speak from my own perception of the way the Prison Service is moving, and I think that mothers and women in particular in the Prison Service have forced their way into a position whereby their needs are very much recognised. I think that, if you looked at the senior management posts within the Prison Service, as against other government bodies, you would find that many of our governing governors in establishments now are ladies with families who manage to balance both needs, and we are very proud of the fact that we are very gender neutral, if you like, in as much as the opportunities are there for all, and those opportunities are given to those people with the abilities to do the job, irrespective of gender. Mr Caton: The Prison Service that I joined as a prison officer, and Paul joined as a prison officer, we had very few women working in male establishments and vice versa; it was basically two services. Because of the nature of the work as well, it was very difficult to see a time, for many people, including myself, where that would change. Well, it has changed, and it has changed dramatically, and it has changed, I think, for the better for all. Not only are our colleagues female colleagues with young children, but many of our male colleagues are now part-time, they work part-time successfully, they job share, there is flexible work, there is a great deal of sabbaticals given out; far, far better than it ever was in the Prison Service. The difficulty, I think, with work life balance issues is that at the end of the day someone has got to work unsociable hours in the Prison Service. Someone has got to work nights. We cannot just leave prisons and come back in the morning. Somebody has got to work those horrible shifts that coincide with when everybody else is having a good time. Somebody has got to work New Year's Day and Christmas Eve. Somebody has got to work evenings. Somebody has got to work weekends. The difficulties I think we have as an association, apart from our difficulties with the Equal Opportunities Commission which flare up every now and then, and we do try to meet with them fairly regularly, because there is this belief that we do not care about gender issues which is absolutely wrong. Both as a trade union and as a service we try and get them right. But I have a deal of sympathy with some prison officers who, because we have got flexible working and because we are trying to ensure that people get a fair deal, always seem to get the rough end of the stick. In other words, when you look at the detail, and it is all laid out, the person who is left to move their shift is the person who is male, single and available. And I think sometimes we have to say, "Just hang on, you cannot continually make this person work all the bad parts in order to create the good". We have to share some of the unsociable work. Some of the ways in which governors, and indeed POA committees working together up and down the country have challenged that have been very good indeed. They have gone out to say, "Yes, there are red periods in each shift system and you will have to work some of them. It is up to you how you do it, but you will have to because not to do so makes it terribly unfair". Miss Weekes: What guidance does the Equal Opportunities Commission give to you? Mr Caton: We are still meeting with them. The Equal Opportunities Commission are quite anxious to see what the trade union is doing as a trade union on gender issues, and I think it is right that they should be concerned about that, if, for nothing else, as traditionally we are seen as white, middle aged men working in a male-dominated environment. I think that, to be honest, I think the EOC at times look at things through very strange-coloured kind of spectacles, because that is not the case, and if there is anything we can do to make things better. We have a women's committee and our agenda is guided by that. They attend the TUC Congress, the women's conference. We meet with our women member representatives regularly. We do not have reserved seats for women, something that I personally think we should have on the National Executive Committee, but we try very hard to do it. We have got, I think, about 6,000 female members, a lot of them NHS employees actually, but a lot of prison officers, uniformed prison officers. We would be a very foolish union not to recognise their needs. The difficulty that we have is getting them to come forward, a real, real difficulty. I will give you two examples: we have two very large female branches, both of whom have got, out of the seven officials, both of whom have only got one female on each, yet they are female branches with huge female membership, with lots of female problems, and yet they elect males to deal with them. I do not know why that is, and I do not know whether our training is hitting the right mark, or whether the Prison Service training is pulling these people forward to be representatives, I do not know, but it is something that we want to put right. The same at senior levels in the Prison Service. I think they are slightly unrepresented. I think that needs to be addressed, but I think it is more a perception – I go back to my EOC – I think it is more the perception of the EOC than a reality but we need help to do that. Miss Weekes: But it is quite clear that you are working through those issues and it is quite clear you have identified them. Can I deal now with the disciplinary regime, because of course the way a public body treats its own sends a message to everybody else that deals with them, particularly if you are a very important public sector service, which you are. I imagine you conduct staff surveys. Are your staff confident that the system of discipline, how they are dealt with on issues of misconduct or performance at work, is a fair one? Do they trust it? Do they have confidence in it? Mr Carroll: I think there will be an element of agreement and disagreement on this between us. Certainly the conduct and performance policy and the policy in relation to attendance, i.e. for persistent sickness or lateness, has been an agreed document between us through our written council meetings. Whether staff perceive them as being fair, clearly, I suppose it depends whether or not you are the subject of one. I have been both the investigator and the governor who has actually sat and heard many of the end cases. I think the system is fair because it is transparent, it is set out procedurally, and of course everyone knows where it can go, they all know what representation and what they are able to have in relation to defence, or somebody to accompany them at the interviews. So it is a transparent document, it is a fair process. The difficulty comes, of course, in as much as any investigation ultimately will depend upon the view of the investigating officer as to whether or not there is a bona fide case to actually be presented, and of course that is where the contention, I think, comes in. The other issue is that when you get to the hearing it does not have to be as it would be in a court of law, beyond reasonable doubt; it has to be a balance of probabilities. So if I, as governor hearing a case, believe that Officer Bloggs had punched Prisoner Jones, I could dismiss that person on the balance of probabilities, and in fact I have dismissed people on the balance of probabilities. I think that – and I will not put words in Brian's mouth – I think the issues that staff would say are that the management – and I have heard this said – that the management will use the code of discipline to actually effectively remove somebody from a post who has been ineffective or is constantly being investigated, and will move to any measure to get rid of that person. I disagree. Having done the hearings and sat there, there is a huge responsibility on you, as the hearing governor, because you are deciding someone's fate, their career fate and their financial future. However, there are certain principles that the Prison Service cannot allow staff to ignore; that is the fair treatment and decent treatment of prisoners, the recognition of the Prison Service and national guidelines on race relations. We cannot ignore sexual harassment or any of those type of issues, which are many of the issues that we get faced with and many of the cases that come into our province. I, regrettably, had to dismiss a governor grade at an establishment some 12 or 18 months ago, basically on the grounds that if he had come into the hearing and admitted what he had done, then there would not really have been an issue to dismiss him. But because of the fact that for two and a half days he persistently lied and placed somebody else's job in jeopardy, the man held a senior position within the Prison Service and you cannot tolerate that. I think personally, and watching other colleagues, that this system is equitable and applied fairly; staff are fully aware of what the system is, and I think that the majority of managers try to find other solutions through informal advice prior to going to the disciplinary. Miss Weekes: Just to follow up on that very helpful description, you, of course, because your staff are Civil Service grade, they have a final appeal, as it were, to an employment tribunal if they think you have unfairly dismissed them. I think it is quite important to emphasise that. Mr Carroll: Absolutely, yes. Miss Weekes: You might have a different point of view. Mr Caton: Yes, I have. Not that different: I think many prison governors are very fair and equably-minded people, until they get a pen in their hand and then they tick the dismissal box in some of the most strange cases I have ever seen. It seems to be a constant theme: I am going to make him stand on his toes or her stand on her toes, but I will tick dismissal anyway. That is the first thing and I think that is wrong. I am not, by the way, a punitive minded person. I brought mediation into the trade union's rule book before the Prison Service brought it into being an option in the disciplinary field, or indeed in dealing with things. So I am a firm believer in mediation, I think mediation is a better option than any kind of punitive effect, provided it is carried out correctly and appropriately and timely. The disciplinary code again, when I joined the Prison Service, was that you had a disciplinary hearing. Your appeal process, should you have been found guilty, was to the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State would appoint normally an ex-regional director, or as we colloquially call them, an ex-cricket playing gentleman who would arrive from the Oval – Miss Weekes: Was it a British gentleman or a West Indian one? Mr Caton: Absolutely all the time British, white British. They would arrive, talk to you for a while, and then normally say, "Well, I do not think there is sufficient evidence to pursue this, and therefore take this as a warning. Go back to work". I do not think that was right either, because I do not think they examined things correctly. The issue of the balance of probabilities, or the criminal standard of proof – and the police, I think, are still hanging on to the criminal standard of proof. Miss Weekes: The most recent statute does in fact say balance of probabilities. Mr Caton: Right. I think it is absolutely right under the civil standard of proof on most cases to be correct. I think where there are serious cases, and particularly those involving prisoners, serious cases involving prisoners, it should be the criminal standard of proof, the reason I say that is that quite often courts will refer things back because they do not want to pursue them for a governor to deal with, and the governor will deal with them and find the person guilty, even though courts have found them not guilty of the same charge, assault or whatever, and I think that that double bite cherry is wrong. There is a third bite of the cherry that the prison service have if you are a qualified nurse, which a lot of our members are, because when they get through all that, having been through an internal investigation then a police investigation and a court case, they come out of the court case and they are still not guilty, they will then refer them to the professional body. Miss Weekes: That is right, is it not? Mr Caton: I do not think it is, no, because – Miss Weekes: There is a difference between what a court of law does in crime to what your organisation says is the acceptable behaviour and professional standards that you want in your organisation. Mr Caton: Yes, I understand that, but it seems that it is not done for that purpose. It appears that it is done: well, we failed in the court, we will have a go in the disciplinary. And if you fail in the disciplinary then let us see if we can get the pin number off them and stop them practising. I can understand why it is done; in a lot of cases I would probably support that somebody should be reported to the professional body. Some people when they come out of court clearly have brought the good name of the Prison Service into disrepute and I think this is right and proper, but at times I do think that discipline seems to be in the Prison Service, from some people, not all, a big stick rather than anything else. Sir William Morris: What about the principle of that, though? Forget whether there has been bias, prejudice or whatever. What about the fundamental principle that you have two separate tracks which can either run concurrently or separately? Basically what you are saying is, if you are cleared in court then the discipline should not apply. Mr Caton: If it is exactly the same case, no, I do not think it should. Sir William Morris: I just want to be very clear about the principle. Mr Caton: My view is – Sir William Morris: Why should it not? Mr Caton: Well, I think that people have been proved not to have committed an offence. Having gone through the most recent ones, we had a fraud case including 30-odd instructional senior officers of the Prison Service who were instructed at Wakefield, they went through a very lengthy period of suspension, three years of suspension, a very high profile court case, and were found not guilty. They came back and went through a Prison Service investigation and eventually the Director General, on our representations, decided he would not continue the disciplinary hearings. My view was that, having been found not guilty within a court, no case to answer, to then pursue it through a disciplinary hearing was unfair and unwise. So unfair and unwise that they ended up retiring on medical grounds. I thought that was wrong and cruel. The police never wanted to prosecute anyway; it was the Prison Service that insisted these people were prosecuted, and then when the prosecution collapsed they then said, "Okay, we are going to put you through an internal investigation". I think it is the way in which discipline at work is perceived at times by some members of the Prison Service – some, I have to say, quite senior members of the Prison Service – and constantly the excuse given, as it is in many other things, we are a uniformed discipline service, and that gives you the right to be treated differently than another worker. I do not agree with that. I do not think the fact that you wear a uniform, and the fact that you are a public servant should give people the opportunity to punish you and penalise you twice, or three times in some cases. A lot of the times that it happens, when you sit down with people at the end of it, they will admit that they perhaps should not have gone down the certain routes they have gone down. Unofficially, certainly the Director General did on a number of occasions with those people. Mr Carroll: Can I just add, I think one of the things which is lost here is that one of the purposes of investigating is that the Prison Service is clearly a very high profile organisation. We are responsible for some very public figures who are prisoners who are household names, and irrespective of who they are, whether it is somebody who is a gas meter bandit or Jack the Ripper, if there is something which occurs which is a public concern, we have a duty to investigate, as far as we are concerned. That investigation – and I tried to make this clear just now – that investigation process is not about, at the commencement of that process, trying to apportion guilt or blame, it is about establishing the facts. For me, the investigative process, in many cases where a complaint is received by a prisoner, and many of the people who are in our prisons are actually in there because they are not actually honest, we have to actually try to do that investigative process to try to exonerate staff in some cases, because a prisoner will make a complaint and if you do not actually investigate it then the next thing you are faced with is a civil case and you cannot defend yourself. So I think the investigative process helps that. The point that Brian is making about the criminal cases where we have referred matters to the police and then they come back, on many occasions, yes, they have been deemed to be so serious to the governor that it is a matter that prima facie, at first looking at it, we do not want to get involved in it, we have not got the expertise to actually look at that element of the criminality, and the CPS will then make a decision that it is not a case that can go to court and refers it back. The issue for us is that we then need to investigate to see whether that member of staff has actually fulfilled the basic requirements of their job. We may not be looking to actually establish criminal proof – Miss Weekes: Well, it may have nothing to do with crime at all, that is the point. Mr Carroll: Yes. Miss Weekes: I know the Chairman would like a short break, but I am very anxious just to deal with three other points, which is delays and informal resolution and management skills, if I may. Sir William Morris: Can I suggest that we have the short break and then you can pick up. 11.45 am (A short break) 12.00 pm Sir William Morris: Miss Weekes. Miss Weekes: Thank you very much. Two things really, arising out of our discussions in relation to how discipline and the process is dealt with. What is your average time from the service of notice upon an officer that he will be investigated with the potential that you will bring disciplinary proceedings, and the end of the process? What is the average? Mr Carroll: There are timescales set that the investigating officer will have a deadline to meet, and he has an interim report to put in and then a final report. The issue and the difficulty with any investigation is the availability of all the witnesses, because you cannot put your final report together until you have got those people. I would say that on average we are talking about somewhere between two and four months to actually complete a report. Some will be at the extreme end of the range because a key member of staff may be off sick and the doctor says he cannot be interviewed or whatever – Miss Weekes: What is the extreme? Mr Carroll: I did a hearing on an investigation which dragged on for 18 months, purely for the fact that there had been an investigation in relation to a theft, the police had actually issued a police caution and then that person had appealed against the police caution and the police removed the caution, so there then had to start a second investigation to find out whether or not there was a shift which took place in the prison. So that whole thing, from start to finish, took about two years. Miss Weekes: And you call two years/18 months extreme? Mr Carroll: I would say two years is extreme for the type of things that we are investigating. I mean, I think that in the context of your Inquiry in relation to the police – Miss Weekes: There are bigger issues? Mr Carroll: There are perhaps more complex issues and bigger issues rather than the issues that we are dealing with, which are going to be: did Mr X say so and so? Did he treat this prisoner like this? Miss Weekes: Was there an assault? Mr Carroll: Yes, was there an assault? Is this sexual harassment? Were the handcuffs applied correctly when this escape took place? Those are the issues that we investigate, so we are able to investigate them much quicker. Once the inquiry is finished and the report is given to the commissioning authority, then we have very, very firm deadlines in relation to when we move to a hearing. Miss Weekes: Do your deadlines work? Mr Carroll: By and large, yes. The problem once again, of course, is getting all the witnesses available. But I would say one of the fundamental principles that we recognised is that when a member of staff is facing disciplinary hearings, the important thing is that that member of staff gets the matter dealt with as quickly as possible, because we recognise that it is a stressful environment, and many of the disciplinary things that we deal with are: we had to investigate this, it has been found that you have been in breach of the Prison Service rules, and this is our award, which is a verbal or a written warning, and they are very small things, which are a slap across the wrist really and they lie on the person's record and 12 months later you take them off. They are not serious serious, but that person has not given due care and attention to their job. But it is still a stressful environment for them to be in so we are all very conscious of that. But I think that we have very few investigations which drag on for a long period of time because we do not have the complexity. Miss Weekes: Okay. Can I ask about management and the role that both of you would play in ensuring that there are good managers and that they manage. Mr Carroll: Brian, perhaps you would like to go first on that. Mr Caton: Yes, I will. I think at times I am a little bit critical of managers at all level of the Prison Service. I think there is – I think the Prison Service itself, as I said earlier, never seems to be in a stable enough state at any one time to say, "Well, okay, what we really need to do is to ensure that these things now happen". Everything is in post change that we have got very little control over, and when I say "we", I mean the Prison Service as a body. Things dramatically change all the time, and therefore we never get, if you like, a good handle on things. I think that is the same with management; we suffer as well. I think the similarities with ourself and the police forces are similar in that regard. We basically need two different approaches depending on what is happening. If we have got the day-to-day administration of a prison, lots of human beings confined, lots of at times very dangerous and damaged, difficult people at times, and we have to manage that, that needs good management skills; I would say unique management skills because it is a custodial environment, and you have to manage the staff and you have to manage the sentence, make sure the sentence is carried out, make sure we try to rehabilitate. All of those things coming together are very difficult for managers to do at all levels, predominantly, at the end of the day, the governing governor, particularly because they pick up when things go wrong. The other thing that we need from managers is that when things have gone wrong dramatically we need leadership. Prison officers go looking for leadership and a lot of the times they do not find it. Unlike the police, the recognition of prison staff more generally – prison officers particularly – for the way in which they deal with serious disturbances, serious events, and quash them very quickly, it goes in the main unrecognised because behind the prison wall we have got no method of them being rewarded or recognised for that. And neither have we got any kind of mechanism for awarding people bravery awards or long service or good conduct awards. We have none of that in the Prison Service like the police have. If you like, when things go wrong people look round and say, "Well, that person was a bad leader", but it could be that she could be a brilliant manager, brilliant at administration of the prison, brilliant at making sure that prisoners arrive at correct courses, making sure she or he has the right resources to deal with the rehabilitation of the offenders or the security of the prison and is very, very good at it. On the other hand, someone who is very bad, quite wasteful, seen by the Prison Service as being not very 51 good at managing the day-to-day business of a prison, when things go wrong, they are absolute heroes; they express brilliant leadership qualities. Prison officers would crawl over glass for them in those kind of situations but they are not very good. Now, to get the hybrid of those two is very rare indeed, and I would put that down not to selection but more to training, to try and bring out the best that people can, and having the right people available at the right time. It is easy to sit somebody in an office who is a brilliant administrator, but if that person happens to be stood on the centre when the prison is on fire and they are no good at dealing with that – and I think the police suffer a similar kind of thing. Miss Weekes: You are right, the debate is something that has come before us. Operationally, most certainly, the Metropolitan Police have a very good reputation in and outside of the UK. We have received some evidence which suggests that they may not always manage internally staff issues as well as they do operational issues. It is not across the board, but there is sufficient evidence for me to say cautiously that they may not always manage the internal issues. What are your suggestions or pointers to getting that balance better, because it is clear you have that debate yourself. Mr Caton: I think we have it silently behind doors, where people say, "Well, that person is a very, very good governor", I might say that some of the people who have climbed to the very top of the Prison Service. I have worked in riots of which in my career as a prison officer we had quite a number. In a riot situation they were a liability, an absolute liability. Good people, but better sat away from that. In regard to leadership, they are not very good at all. I believe that with early training, proper methods of testing people before you put them in a position where they would have to use those skills, and accepting that it exists I think would be a good thing; accepting that some people can sit in-house and do lots of good work at the Prison Service headquarters, but they are not very good at dealing with literally hands-on work that the Prison Service unfortunately has to do from time to time. Although we are probably better now, I do not think we have quite measured up to what managers need to be able to do. Miss Weekes: Why do you think you have not? This is not critical, but the Prison Service has been running for some time, you are going through changes. It would be surprising if you could not put your finger on: what is required of a good manager for my organisation and why am I not getting them? Mr Caton: I should really let Paul speak, but my view has always been that we moved from having a uniformed service that was led predominantly by chief officers to the amalgamation of governor grades into that, and in the process of that we just accepted that anybody who would rise through the ranks of governor, many of whom would have probably been chief officers, would necessarily have the skills to deal with things when they go wrong. I think the other thing is that we like to think that things are not going to go wrong, and we train people to be, I would suggest, more administrative nowadays than how we used to train uniformed prison officers in leadership skills. We are a different Prison Service now, we do not have as many disturbances, but when we do have them we still need those leaders and we still need people to be able to respect those who are going to tell them to go into dangerous situations. Miss Weekes: Is that your view? Mr Carroll: No. I have to say that I think there is a tradition within the Prison Service which has to change. The governor of an establishment is considered to know everything about everything, and it is impossible to do that. Therefore, what Brian talks about – staff will come and ask you questions, or expect you to deal with problems and to give them a solution, in many cases to their own particular personal problems, or you are supposed to be able to answer a question on accountancy, and there has been this tradition that governors are the all-knowing person about everything. I think that the Prison Service has recognised this and is now trying to professionalise the service. Brian, I think, has referred more to the operational side of the service in the case of violent conduct by prisoners. Miss Weekes: But what about people management? Mr Carroll: People management is the essence, and it is, I think, something which is recognised by the Prison Service. My view is that because the Prison Service is now subject very much to local recruitment, local promotion, there is this gap in knowledge and competency at first line manager. We all recognise that, and it is something the Prison Service is working on. We have an issue whereby I can go through a job simulation exercise. Having taken an exam I can prove my competence through the exam, I then move to a job simulation exercise, which is in itself an excellent procedure. I then get promoted. The failing, as far as I am concerned – and it is something which I, as a governor, was trying to work on with my senior officers – is that the senior officer rank, which is the rank up from prison officer, who manage the staff and manage the prisoners on a daily basis, have a problem in as much as they do not see themselves as managers. So on the one hand they are working with officers and are an officer one day; the next day they are promoted and working in the same prison, and it is very difficult for them to actually then say to somebody, "Hey, I told you I want you to be at that place at this time", because that evening they will probably be playing football or in the gym together. There needs to be a professionalism where staff recognise that there is a right, when that person becomes a senior officer, that that person manages. Lots of people can do it by force of personality, but I believe that we have to actually give them an understanding of what that job is about, and we have to monitor that through our staff appraisal system, and we have to put in place first line manager courses for them to do that. Miss Weekes: So it is not there at the moment? Mr Carroll: They are there, coming through, but they have not been there in the past. Equally so, for managers at the higher level there are job simulation exercises which you have to go through and a suitable to be in charge exercise, which is – I did the very first one, which was sort of six hours of job simulation in a room in Birmingham, and that has now evolved to the fact that there is now an operational exercise, written exercise, involved in that particular evaluation, so that you cannot be in charge of a prison unless you have actually passed this system. There is a leadership and development course which we have put in place which our training and development group are working on and actually participating in. I believe that we need to move to 360-degree appraisal. I have had a 360-degree appraisal done as part of my leadership and development course, and the most beneficial part of that whole exercise was not about what my seniors thought of me but what the staff perceive me as, my junior governors, and how they felt that I was not able to do this particular aspect, or did not convey that particular aspect, and I tried to address that as part of my development. So I think that the service is moving along those lines. I also think that we have two strands to the service: one is that we are trying to bring in people who are going to be developed, they are fast-track, they are coming in through the direct entry scheme, they are coming in through the accelerated promotion schemes, and they have reached certain points where they have reached glass ceilings, there is a certain amount of success and a certain amount of failure on those schemes, but certainly it brings a balance to the service. The Director General of the service recognises that he needs people, possibly like myself and others of our ilk, who have served a long time in the service and know nothing is new in the Prison Service; we may call it something new but we are dealing with the same basic commodity: prisoners. They do not particularly change, they become more sophisticated, the criminality changes in as much as it is much more drug orientated and alcohol orientated than crimes we perhaps had 30 years ago. So there needs to be a transitional period where people like myself are able to respond on the Director General's behalf to deal with some of the incidents that Brian talks about and get our hands dirty. But that does not mean to say that what we should not be doing is developing those people who are coming through fast-track to actually understand those issues and to deal with them. The tradition of the Prison Service is a huge, huge issue. Brian alludes to it as being very much like a naval ship where the governor is the captain, and we have to get away from that, where the governor becomes the person who basically pulls it all together. But there are other people with professional skills who can manage certain aspects of the prison, and we are moving to that with the creation of the National Offender Management Service, where there will be people who will supply us with our rehabilitation and resettlement work which will be targeted. It will not be the governor having to say, "Well, I think that course would be good here"; it will be looked at, it will be scrutinised. We have appointed professional personnel people, so you have got to have a CIPD accreditation to be the head of personnel in a prison. We are looking at moving away from having a personnel department in each prison and having just a head of personnel to advise the governor on policy issues, but having a shared call centre for our personnel work. All our financial work and our procurement is going to go to a shared call centre – Miss Weekes: So you are going through really quite a lot of changes. Mr Carroll: We are going through huge changes. The Prison Service is – we started yesterday as NOMS; we are now National Offender Management Service. Many of our staff, including senior managers, are still yet to find out what it is that NOMS is actually going to deliver. It was one of those pieces of legislation – a policy which was introduced very quickly, and we are now putting flesh on the bones of that particular policy. But it will revolutionise the Service. Brian and I have a different view on it. I believe that if the Prison Officers' Association and prison officers embrace the changes that NOMS is going to bring, that there is going to be a huge creation of interesting work for prison officers in dealing with and working with prisoners, and that there is an opportunity for them to develop educationally, professionally, and to take the service forward with the people who have the expertise, and that is prison officers. But we need to do things to actually make sure that those prison officers are freed up and we have got effective working practices because we cannot afford to recruit any prison officers outside of the current budget. So we need to be more efficient to actually do that. Those are the changes. So there are huge changes taking place in the Prison Service that I think are exciting, albeit daunting and challenging. There we go. Miss Weekes: There is only one more thing I have got to deal with, communication. How good are governors at communicating downwards? Mr Carroll: Well, I think Brian will say that communication in the Prison Service, like any large organisation, I agree, is very difficult. I can only speak from my own experience of what I tried to do, certainly within our organisation we try to actually use our intranet, which is the Prison Service computer system. Miss Weekes: Is that good? Mr Carroll: Yes, it is getting better. Miss Weekes: I suppose it depends on whether you know how to use a computer and whether you have access to a computer. Mr Carroll: Yes, everyone has access to a computer, everyone has been trained in getting access to the computer. Many staff in the Prison Service are of our generation and they think that they are going to break the machine if they switch it on, so lots of them do not actually access the computer, albeit we are now moving to a point where we are cutting out a lot of the paper so that they have actually got to access it if they want to find out about things; it is very much a chicken and egg thing. So we do try to communicate what is going on in the service. As a governor, I made a point every week, when I was the governor of an establishment – and this is not something which is universally done but it is something which I learned from a previous governor who I served with – I used to write each week a governor's overview, which gave me the opportunity actually say to staff, "This is happening in the prison, this development is something we have got to look at", and it also gave me an opportunity to say, "I heard this happened last week and I am really quite cheesed off about it. I do not intend to do anything about it but if it crops up again bear in mind that I have warned you and please address this issue". So it was an informal way of me communicating with staff, and the feedback I got from that was that staff used to read that document more than they read what was being put out by the Prison Service because I used to pick up on all the new policy initiatives and put it into words of plain English that they could understand and say, "You need to have a look at this". Miss Weekes: Do you do much face to face? Mr Carroll: I used to hold a full staff meeting three times a year – Miss Weekes: Was that enough? Mr Carroll: It depends. Obviously I used to walk round the prison on a regular basis and speak to staff individually and do any debriefs following any incidents which took place. But I tried to communicate to staff two or three times a year on things like the business plan that was being produced on any significant issues. I tried to celebrate success. Certainly when I took over at Lewes – at Lewes we have a weighted score card process, where each prisoner is weighted against performance, and we were 127th out of 129 establishments when I went to Lewes. The staff – not me, the staff – and I think it is fair to say that we underrate, or we do not give staff enough acknowledgment for the success in the work that they do. But the time I left Lewes, we were second on that weighted score card. There are many issues about that, but that was down to the hard work of the staff and me being able to get a group of managers together who had the same ethos and worked as a team. I think communication, generally staff will say it is poor, but there is so much stuff being pumped out by the Prison Service that lots of staff, including senior managers, I have to say, choose not to read some things because it is just mind boggling. Mr Caton: I will quickly say two things. I think there are good communicators in the Prison Service and there are some ghastly ones. There are some good governors who communicate very well with their staff and they do it pretty regularly. I think, in the main, our members would prefer face to face meetings more regularly. If you look at other organisations that have immediate responsibility for human beings when they come on duty, there need to be briefings. It has always disappointed me in the Prison Service that when I worked in the National Health Service in mental health we did a patient by patient check when we came on duty so that anything that happened to that patient – and there was sufficient time given to do that – we would all know about it. When I went to work at Wakefield Prison I was disappointed, really, that that did not happen, albeit that we had big wings, huge amounts of prisoners there, and there was not a great deal of time, and certainly handover period was virtually non-existent. But I think those kind of things are important. What I would say is that, if you get the opportunity, read the staff surveys that have happened recently; that will tell you a lot about what prison officers and prison staff think about communication. In regard to the NOMS, I would ask you to visit some of the publications that have come out explaining to staff what NOMS is. They are the most confusing documents I have ever seen and staff still – as Paul says, there are governors and uniformed staff that have not got a clue what NOMS is, and I think it speaks volumes. Yesterday in the Home Office is normally accepted as a holiday and that is when they launched NOMS, so I think that says quite a lot about the intent. Miss Weekes: Thank you both very much. Sir William Morris: Thanks, Brian and Paul. Could I invite Sir Anthony to put some questions to you. Questions by Sir Anthony Burden Sir Anthony Burden: Can I just clear up, please, one issue that my colleague raised on employment status, because you as a service and the Police Service very much share the issue of physical contact with prisoners, allegations being made, on many occasions false allegations, and the need to rebut those. It has been put to us that to remove that special status of constable would actually expose police officers under the discipline procedures unfairly. Can I ask how you, with employment status, pre-and post this new agreement, actually address that and how you might put extra, added protection in, if you do, to employment status as it applies to your uniform grades. Mr Caton: I think that one of the things I would say about the status of a constable – and we were discussing it, actually, on another issue just before we came in, and our views differ dramatically on the status of the powers of a constable – the powers of a constable were used to take away our trade union rights. Because we had the powers of a constable, put us in a court, turned back, whatever it was, something like 50 years of history, and said, "Well, actually, you are constables". At one stage during the legal proceedings they actually referred to us as very similar to soldiers. We have actually never had huge amounts of status under the fact that we are constables. We can carry out our duties inside a prison; we can use reasonable force to prevent an escape or an assault or damage to prison property; we can arrest an escaping or an absconding prisoner and we can take into custody an absconded or an escaped prisoner; we can hold, pending police presence, anyone who it is believed is trafficking into a prison, bringing items into a prison who is a visitor. For example, I think traffic wardens have actually got more powers of a constable than a prison officer, and that is because of the nature of what work they have to do. So I think, regardless of how much of the status of being a constable 24 hours of the day – and a constable cannot be expected or ordered by another constable to make a breach of the peace, which we found out when we locked the gates of Preston Prison because it was overcrowded and they said, "You are constables". I said, "Well, that is fine, the governor cannot tell us not to lock these gates and not allow any prisoners in because he is a constable and no constable can..." There are lots of legal things that we have been through, I have to say, in trying to defend our trade union rights rather than trying to examine the powers of a constable. I actually think it works quite well. How well it would work if we were given what I think we will get, and that is our trade union rights back fully, no different to any other public servant, I am not sure; I just think it is right that we should have trade union rights. But I do not think that stops a prison officer from using those limited rights that they have as constable in a proper way. I do not think that police officers would behave that differently having employment status, I really do not. I think when we got it, there was not a sudden upsurge by prison officers who say, "Well, now we have got this I am going to look round for some employment tribunal to go running into." I do not think it worked like that. And certainly we probably go to employment tribunals more often now than we did when we got that. Mr Carroll: I would think the difficulty is that – you have the tradition that the public see the police as having the right of arrest et cetera, and I think the difficulty that you are going to face is that traditional value stuff that I have been talking about. Brian is quite right, the limitations on our staff with their constabulary powers are really to allow them to shut a cell door, really. That exercised the warrant that is issued by the court. It is interesting that the privatisation of escorts allows custody officers the same powers, and that seems to have been accepted fully by both the public and by the client, i.e. the prisoner. So I think that any changes would have to be carefully managed, but they are not particularly obstructive, I do not feel. Sir Anthony Burden: Thank you. Can I just move to the area of diversity, please, and if I could just try and get a better understanding of your organisation. In addition to the Prison Officers' Association, which equates to the Police Federation and the Police Service, have you any other representative bodies that represent particularly minority groups? Mr Carroll: Yes. The Prison Service deals with three main groups. There is the POA, clearly, which represents the majority of our staff. We then have the Prison Service trade union side, which is professional groups, as we call them: Prospect, FDA, which is the First Division Association, and PCS, which represent most of our clerical and support staff. We then have another group called the PTSJIC, which is the Prison Service Joint Industrial Council, which is made up of GMB, GGWU, UCAT, and they represent those members of staff who work in our engineering work support teams, some catering organisations, farm hands, agricultural workers. Outside that structure we then have the PGA, which is the Prison Governors' Association, which represents about 1,000 prison governors. PSJIC, POA and PSTUS organisations actually have an Wheatley council structure, which is a structure which allows us to meet with them on an informal basis through subcommittees, and that then comes up to a quarterly or a half-yearly meeting, depending on which group it is, with either the director of personnel or, in the case of the POA, that would be chaired by the Director General, where issues can be addressed. So we have a fairly wide ranging number of unions. Sir Anthony Burden: I think the chairman wants to come back to – Mr Caton: But we do have the Respect organisation, which is an organisation set up purely for black Asians, although myself and the national executive – many white officers are members of Respect, associate members. We attend their conference; we have a good working relationship with them. I think, in most cases, we work parallel with Respect to look at diversity issues. The Prison Service fund and give facility time to people to run Respect, and that is quite right. We do not have a difficulty with that. We sometimes have a difficulty where we are unaware that our members have got particular problems because it has gone through Respect. I will give them their due, in the main, Respect will say, "Have you informed the trade union of this?" Sometimes they say, "Well, no, we do not want to because a member of the POA is involved in it", whether it be a racist remark or racist behaviour. We have, I think, a great deal of respect for the way and the work that Respect does. We think that in the main it is quite good because it is independent from us, but we also have a black section. We have got a group that we pull together from the black and Asian officers, many of whom are jointly members of Respect and active in Respect and are active in the POA. Diversity is a major issue for us. It is probably one of the biggest issues currently because of various events and various inquiries, and particularly the borough inquiry and the kind of things that are in the press, so it is a big thing for the POA. We muster all the help we can from wherever we can, whether it be the TUC, whether it be the Commission for Racial Equality, who we meet with very regularly. We try, as a trade union, to work predominantly, of course, with the Prison Service and the NHS because they are the primary employers that we have got. We have some meetings with the private sector companies where we have got members, although we are not recognised. So we do try to embrace all areas of it. Sometimes we fall out with bodies; not often. Sometimes we fall out with the Prison Service on race issues. On both sides we want them to prosecute some cases and they have not. Equally, we have defended people who we think the Prison Service are prosecuting wrongly. We have got a fairly simplistic view. If someone says to our officials, "I did not do that" and/or, "I did that but not with that intent", we defend that. It sometimes gets us in very, very deep water, particularly with various organisations who are looking after the interests of black and ethnic minorities, but that is what we do. We are a membership union that defends. Equally, we provide help and support for those who want to try and get things prosecuted because of abuses of people because of the diverse nature of themselves. We have been very prominent in pushing forward the gay/lesbian/bisexual/cross-gender group in the POA, something that had been ignored for, in my opinion, far too long, and the Prison Service indeed has worked in conjunction with that, so we have got facility time for that. So we are tackling it, but, again, very much like the police, no matter which corner we turn round, there is somebody willing to say, "Well, you will be abusive, your members will be abusive, because they can be", and I have to say – I have said it on many occasions – I have carried a cell key, as Paul has. If I am put in a position, as a prison officer, or indeed as a prison governor, where, if I want to abuse somebody because they are black or because of their religion or because of their gender or their sexual orientation, let me tell you, I am in a pretty powerful position to do it because nobody would really know. It is because we are in that position that we are able to be, quite wrongly in the vast majority of times, lambasted when things happen like that. Yes, we can make sure that we put a racist in with an Asian guy. I cannot understand for the life of me why any prison officer would want to do that or should do that, and I would condemn him beyond anything else because that is just absolutely the most awful, unprofessional, immoral, inhumane thing that a human being can do to another human being, but I have no doubt it can happen, and it probably has happened. Sir William Morris: How do you deal with racist prisoners? What do you do? Mr Caton: With a great deal of difficulty. It is less of a problem to the POA but a huge problem for prison governors, I think. Part of the rehabilitative process is that we take this person who is wronging and we try to make them do things right. A hardline racist person is probably the most difficult thing you have got. I have to say this: the vast majority of our people – we have got drug addicts, alcohol and substance abuse, 90-odd per cent of them, and mental health problems, and I would say the latter is probably where most racists lie; they have huge personality and mental health problems, and to try and get them to rehabilitate, try and get them to, if you like, address their offending behaviour, you have got one hell of a jump to go to get through those kind of barriers when, I have to say, you are probably a damn good prison officer but you are not necessarily the best psychiatrist/psychologist, all them things you need to be, mother, father, religious leader, all those things that they expect of you, you might not be good at all those things. So I think dealing with a racist prisoner is probably one of the most difficult things that prison officers have to deal with. It was a lot easier when I was a prison officer because the way in which prisoners spoke about race, about each other and about prison staff, although you swallowed on it, and it was very bitter to swallow on it, it was, I have to say, more than anything else accepted. You might say to them, "Don't you speak about that prisoner like that", but it was a difficult thing to grapple with, because it was fairly accepted by prisoners that they spoke about each other like that. Sir Anthony Burden: From what you said, obviously there is an intensity around this issue in the Prison Service, again very similar to the Police Service. We have heard in relation to the Metropolitan Police that there are occasions when dealing with black and minority ethnic prison officers, in your case, is something which is causing difficulty, that managers are not managing those situations and if they do there is less of a tendency to deal with it on the landing, more of a tendency to make it very official very quickly, put it on paper: get it off my shoulders, in case there is an allegation of racism made against me. Is that something you can relate to within your service? Mr Carroll: Yes. I think there is a feeling amongst staff that the race card will be played, I think is the term which is used frequently. I think there is that concern, there is an anxiety amongst people who are managers that if they reprimand a member of staff that they could have this allegation leveled at them. However, I think the systems we have got in place are robust enough, if we follow our own systems, that that can be avoided, because you can demonstrate why it is that you are actually pulling that particular member of staff or why it is that you are making this point through their staff report. There is a grievance procedure available to staff to actually raise agreements if they feel that is unfair. The biggest problem with any organisation – and certainly the Prison Service is not without blame in this area – is that we have the procedures and the people who are empowered to follow them. For whatever reason, whether it be time or whether it be lack of interest or lack of understanding, we do not follow follow our own procedures. The procedures are in place, and I am confident that any member of staff, whether he be black, white, green or yellow, if you treat them as individuals and follow the procedures then you have nothing to fear. But unfortunately people have got this whole mythology thing over their head which thinks: this man is going to play the race card and I cannot respond to it. I do not think that should be even a starting point in people's considerations; it is whether or not the person has the competence, whether that person has done something wrong, and if they have or they have not, what are the procedures that I should follow. If you actually pull somebody and say midway through their review period of their annual report, "Look, in my opinion, as your reporting officer, I do not believe you are doing this correctly" or "You are not putting enough effort into your work", then that is perfectly reasonable, provided you record it and give the person the opportunity to say, "I disagree". That is the ebb and flow of management and it does not matter what colour the skin is, the employee you are working with, the procedures are there. Sir Anthony Burden: Can I ask, have you had to put anything additionally into your processes, such as the ACAS mediation model, third party intervention, to deal with those extreme situations where it is quite apparent that management of black and minority ethnic staff in an establishment is going wrong? Mr Carroll: No. I think that one of the things the Prison Service has actively taking on board is diversity training and a commitment that all staff will receive diversity training, and our diversity training has been reviewed and amended to reflect the cases that have come out through ET or through experience. We seek help from within the ethnic communities to actually give us a balance as to what we are actually seeking to achieve. We would like to recruit and break down the barriers that we feel are there in many of the ethnic communities, especially, surprisingly, in the north-west, where it is very difficult to recruit anybody from the Asian or black community; we found that very difficult. We are consistently looking at how to respond to the emerging themes. I think that we are actually probably getting there. There has had to be an element of, I suppose, fear in the initial stages to stop people from continuing with the behaviour that was unacceptable, but I think that the majority of our staff work side by side with their Asian and black colleagues and that we have a very good balance. There are lots of cultural issues to be learned. I think many of the things that I have learned from our diversity training is that we do not understand a great deal about prisoners' culture – black prisoners, Asian prisoners – and when you take that to its next stage, the colleague who is working next to you, you may not understand what his culture is, because we have officers who come from Nigeria, we have officers who come from a cross-section of the community, you know, across the world, really. It is only when you get to talk in a forum like our diversity training that you suddenly realise that we are very ignorant of anything which is other than the British way of life. I think that that is changing within the service, and I think that we recognised, and it has been accepted, that we were an institutionally racist organisation. The CRE have done a big investigation. There are still emerging issues, the Feltham issue; we are all aware of the issues and the sensitivity that goes on there. The unfortunate thing about all of these issues, very much, I suspect, as happens within the police force, it does detract from the valuable work that 90 per cent, 95 per cent of the staff are doing on a daily basis to actually harmonise and take forward the issues and to try to meet the needs certainly of our prisoners. Our kitchen staff are an example. The menus that they produce to meet the wide range of needs across the community, from a vegetarian to somebody who is a vegan or is on a kosher diet or whatever, we have things like – certainly in my last prison we had a week of different types of cooking, where we got prisoners who worked in the kitchen who may have been from a Jamaican background so they did a Jamaican meal. There was a choice. Did you not have to have the Jamaican meal, but there was choice. We had a curry day. We had an Asian prisoner who came and did some specialised cooking in the kitchen for us during Ramadan and produced some food, and at the end of it, you know, we had a meal in the visits where prisoners could actually all come in and have this meal, and it was a sort of around the world gastronomic feast, I suppose. But it was well received and prisoners across the spectrum enjoyed it. I think that there is a long way to go, but certainly prison staff recognise that there is a need to embrace all cultures. Sir Anthony Burden: In terms of the ET claims coming through, there is nothing that would cause you alarm that there is disproportionality in a number of claims coming through based on racial grounds? Mr Carroll: No. I think conversely in some ways. Goi