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Prisons Competition

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, because I was interested to see whether the Labour party was in the position that I thought it was going to be in, and I am reassured by what he said. As he said, putting competition into the system in order to ensure the best standards at the lowest cost to the taxpayer is a continuous policy, and things have moved on an awful long way since I was Home Secretary 20 years ago, when privately managed prisons were a highly controversial subject. We got the first one under way at Wolds, but under Blairism the policy was taken a whole lot further, with all the private finance initiative prisons. As I readily acknowledge, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) started this tendering process, which we have taken to what I believe to be this successful conclusion. It must be in the public interest and it must be right—I readily acknowledge what the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) just said—that we leave aside stale ideology and dogma, and instead look at what works and what produces the right solutions for the public. We have problems with the building at HMP Wellingborough. It is not a terribly old building—as I recall, it is largely a 1960s construction—but we are under notice that something has to be done about it and it cannot just carry on as it is. The building is not going to be adequate for very much longer. We are considering what to do about HMP Wellingborough. Its staff are responding very well to the problems that they face, but I hope to be able to come back soon to announce what will happen at Wellingborough. The contract for Birmingham prison is now going to G4S. I acknowledge that the staff at Birmingham have made considerable efforts and that they put in a good public sector bid as part of the tendering process, but the fact is that that process is objective and the private sector bid was just better, and somewhat less costly. On the right hon. Gentleman's later comments, the National Offender Management Service will, of course, have high regard to the interests of the staff at Birmingham. A new prison is opening not far away, which may offer some opportunities, but we will give all the appropriate support and hope to avoid an unnecessary number of redundancies. Payment by results was indeed initiated at Peterborough by the previous Government, and we strongly support that worthwhile experiment. The only political claim that I would make is that I believe the previous Government responded to the policies suggested by the then Conservative Opposition in advocating payment by results. We suffered the fate that often happens to Opposition parties—I hope that this will happen to the right hon. Gentleman, too—of putting forward good ideas which then get stolen by the Ministers in power. However, at least we are at one on this policy. The Doncaster scheme is another pilot. For the first time, the prison operator is entering into having a payment by results element in the contract; the operator will get extra reward if it succeeds, but it will share the risk with the Government, and will lose if it does not succeed. Five percentage points is what has been negotiated—a somewhat impenetrable figure. It means five percentage points down from the current percentage, so an 8.3% reduction from the current reoffending rate would be required for the operator to be paid. It is indeed true that we have undertaken contingency planning in case we get the wrong sort of reaction to today's announcement, although of course we very much hope that we shall not, because industrial action will be no more in the interests of prison officers than it is in the interests of anyone else. Contingency planning for disorder in prisons has always been done, as it has to be. It has been done for as long as I can remember, although I think the previous Government suspended it when they reintroduced the criminal law making it illegal to strike in prisons. They carried out an experiment when they lifted the legal ban, but they had a very bad strike in 2007, and put it back again. We have been bringing the contingency planning up to date, but we very much hope that that is a mere precaution. In the interests of public order, we have to ensure that we are prepared in case anything goes wrong in a major prison, but we very much hope not to have to put any of this into effect. We have had discussions with the Prison Officers Association and we are open to further such discussions, and we hope to be able to answer its legitimate queries in any way that we can.