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HM Prison Bullingdon

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this issue, which is really about what we think prisons are for. In an answer to a recent parliamentary question, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle), said:""The National Offender Management Service is undertaking a budget review process… to determine the budget for prisons in 2010-11."" She added that""prisons are using indicative guidelines of a 5 per cent. budget reduction but their final budgets will not be determined until the review process is complete, later this year."—[Official Report, 30 November 2009; Vol. 501, c. 448W.]" Let me make it clear to the House that I readily acknowledge that, given both main parties have said that they will ring-fence spending on health and international development, consequential spending reductions in other Departments are inevitable whoever wins the general election next year. We all have to be sufficiently grown up to acknowledge that. We certainly need to acknowledge it in the presence of my colleague, the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), who is a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The thrust of what I want to get across to the House this afternoon is that cutting prison budgets per se is the wrong approach. We send people to prison because society believes it an appropriate punishment and to deter others from committing similar offences. However, the punishment is the deprivation of liberty for a period of time. We should be using prison and the time that people spend there to ensure that when they leave they have the skills, competences and qualifications to ensure that they do not reoffend. There are two truly depressing things in this. First, when I visit HM prison Bullingdon, which is a local prison for Oxfordshire and the Thames valley, I meet a large number of men—a huge proportion—who are involved in some form of substance abuse, which means alcohol, drugs or both, as well as a huge number who are functionally illiterate. That is fundamentally depressing. The second depressing thing is the number of people in prison who have reoffended. Reducing reoffending rates would be not only be beneficial for society, because there would be fewer victims of crime, but cost-effective, as there would be fewer people in prison. The official parliamentary answer is that the 5 per cent. cut is just for this coming year and one does not know what will happen in future, but it presents governors with the prospect of 5 per cent. year-on-year reductions in prison budgets. I understand that most governors are working on the basis that they will have rolling cuts of 5 per cent. a year for the next three years. Where in a prison does one make those cuts? There seem to be only two areas: one cuts either opportunities for training, education or access to substance and drug abuse programmes, or the number of prison officers. A 5 per cent. reduction in Bullingdon's budget is about £1.3 million on a budget of £17 million. Some £1.3 million is the equivalent of having to make 120 prison officers at Bullingdon redundant. As prison officers have explained, all they will be able to do is keep prisoners locked up longer—for more hours—because officers will not be available to escort prisoners or supervise them in education and training. They will be warehousing men and doing little else. Bullingdon has been built since I have been the Member of Parliament for north Oxfordshire. Before that, the local prison was Oxford jail in the heart of Oxford. That status came to Bullingdon in the early 1990s. I hope the Prison Officers Association will excuse my saying so, but at that time it was a pretty neanderthal trade union. On one occasion way back in the 1990s—some 15 or so years ago—it refused to allow me to attend a meeting because I might influence what its members thought, and that was that. Over the past 15 years, from my perspective the POA has moved phenomenally from being truculent and difficult to wanting to engage in training programmes and education programmes and wanting to help with substance abuse programmes. The POA branch at Bullingdon has built a training facility outside the prison walls for prison officers, which it is sharing with the rest of the community because the officers want to encourage the community to engage more with them and their work at Bullingdon. The prison officers now find fundamentally depressing the thought that they will simply be engaged in keeping people under lock and key for longer periods. That would be a great pity, given that we have started to get a culture moving in the prison with people involved in the Prison Service. We are seeing that officers have a role in ensuring that people who leave prison are better equipped to deal with the outside world and have more skills than when they came in, but things might just go back to the rather Victorian notion of prison. I hear it said on the grapevine that the Secretary of State for Justice believes that layers of middle management in the Prison Service can be stripped out and that the 5 per cent. can be achieved there. If he genuinely believes that prisons are over-managed or that there are too many layers of management, I suggest that he make that clear. I am sure that, if he believes prisons are over-managed in some way, he can strip out the over-management. However, even if we took out all the managers, apart from the governor, I doubt whether we could meet the 5 per cent. target at Bullingdon. A lot of work is being done in Oxfordshire with charities such as SMART and in trying to get people who leave prison to integrate into the community more speedily and ensure that they do not go back on drugs, all of which requires work being done inside and outside the prison.