Q725 Mr. Dave Anderson: Can I ask you about education work and training that is provided or not provided to a level that it should be. We are advised by the Inspectorate that the quality and the quantity is inadequate and that in Maghaberry, in the most recent inspection - some people spent up to 22 hours a day in the cell because there was not any work or training available for them. Have you got any plans to address this?

Paul Goggins: We currently spend £1.8 million on the workshops and £1.7 million on education and training in prisons, but I do not deny for a minute that the workshop facilities at Maghaberry are less than we need in order to satisfy the demands of the prison population there, but that is because there are many more prisoners being looked at in there than originally envisaged. I think we do have limitations. I do want to see improvements made and more prisoners gaining qualifications. I want a more joined-up approach to resettlement in general, not just for the Prison Service, but for the Prison Service to connect with the Probation Service, with further education providers, with skills providers and indeed with employers and other public agencies, so we get a more effective outcome in terms of what happens when a prisoner is released. We need to do more, I am sure of that. The facilities we have are limited at the moment, and we will need to do what we can with them. In the end we need to bring into the prisons far more perhaps than we have in the past the expertise that lies out within the further education sector. I think you have seen some good examples at Magilligan where they have moved in this direction perhaps more rapidly than in the other two establishments. I think the benefits will come with that. I do not deny the limitations of the present system in terms of the workshops.

Q726 Mr. Dave Anderson: You have told us what you want and what you need, but you have not told us what you are doing, with respect.

Paul Goggins: Robin may want to answer this but there are no specific plans for a large-scale redevelopment of the workshops. Obviously we will do what we can within the budgets that we have, but there are no large-scale plans to redevelop the workshops at the moment.

Mr Masefield: We are committed to gearing up and getting better bang for our bucks, if you like, out of the existing services we have got, and in particular simple issues like timetabling, like addressing why we fail to get prisoners sometimes off the landings to the workshops or to the education classes. Magilligan in particular has been taking a lead on that, which is excellent, and now I want to turn my attention to Maghaberry and work with the Governor there and his senior management to deliver that. I always wanted to pick up on a theme. There is quite a potential theme for the Committee, if I may make so bold, of working not just within the Northern Ireland Prison Service or the criminal justice silo but across the devolved administration. On Monday this week, I and two of my senior colleagues had a very good meeting with the Permanent Secretary for the Department of Employment and Learning, DEL, and four top officials, and we were discussing this very issue, how we could work together better, potentially with a view to outsourcing, although that would be some years down the road, and go down the English route you know, the learning and skills centre and education route. In the shorter term there is merit in doing that. You are bringing together, Minister, a ministerial group on reducing offending early in the New Year, to bring together a number of devolved administration ministers to look at this. They are societal issues and they are with us for a period, and then they are back in the community. If we can make those linkages, get them jobs, get them training and placements on the outside, it has to be in everybody's interests.

Q727 Chairman: Of course it does. I would like to back up Mr Anderson. From all that we have seen it is very clear that an adequate Prison Service has obviously got to have decent - not palatial - accommodation, but it has also got to have really adequate educational and training and recreational facilities. If you bang up young people for hours at a time and they are not allowed to use their energy in a constructive and sensible way, whether by playing disciplined and organised games or making things in the workshop or learning bricklaying, as we saw in Belmarsh last week and we have seen in Northern Ireland too, this has got to be part of it. Can you assure us that in your plans for the Prison Service over the next decade this is an important ingredient?

Paul Goggins: It certainly will be. I will give you an example of a recent initiative where 80 employers came into the prisons to work with the staff in the Prison Service. I think, as we try and join up the real economy with the need to train inmates in prison, we have a huge opportunity, especially with Northern Ireland developing and regenerating in the way that it is; the skills that we are helping to give people relate to the real economy and provide a bridge back into a proper well-paid job when they come out. The bricklaying you have seen is one example of that where people can be very well paid, but it is a skill they can learn whilst they are in prison. The more we can do of that the better. We need more adequate workshops - I do not deny that - and more of them - but we need to make sure that what is learnt in the workshops relates to the real world of work, and provides hopefully with employers like the agencies that came in an opening and a connecting point of people getting into work after they have been released.

Q728 Mr. Dave Anderson: The Criminal Justice Order is going to bring in indeterminate sentences. You will be aware there has been a challenge on this side of the Irish Sea. Do you see that as being an issue because people have said they cannot fulfil the terms of the Criminal Justice Order because they do not get perhaps the option of training, which is part and parcel of the Order?

Paul Goggins: I said before that we were committing 4.7 million over the next three years to provide within the prisons the facilities, the offending behaviour programmes, the professional people who can run those programmes, so that we meet our obligations under the new proposed indeterminate sentences. You are quite right, and I am aware of the legal challenges in England, but if we say to somebody, "You pose such a risk that we are going to send you to prison for a minimum number of years and then we will not allow you out until you prove that you have reduced your risk" then we have a responsibility to ensure that we provide the means by which they do reduce that risk. We understand that responsibility and are committed to fulfilling it.

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee. Neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

The full transcript may be read at: http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200708/cmselect/cmniaf/uc118-i/uc11802.htm

Promoted by Paul Foy on behalf of Dave Anderson, both of St Cuthbert's Church Hall, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5PT