Sloppy Management

The Justice portfolio in the Scottish Executive has not been a comfortable one for Minister Cathy Jamieson.

The “missing prisoners” fiasco brought to her desk courtesy of Reliance. And the “slopping out” case brought by remand prisoner Robert Napier.

With tabloid headlines inches high, recent events have not been the foundations upon which ministerial careers are built.

But perhaps there is a deeper and wider malaise than even recent events have shown.
A problem touching not just ministerial incompetence but illuminating a failure of management within the civil service. A failure of some to adapt to the existence of the Scottish Parliament and an unwillingness to accept political decision-making.

And a long-term failure of certain civil service managers which has been allowed to continue for the five years since this government came to power is also a failure for that Executive team. Because just as Parliament must hold the government to account, the government must hold our civil servants to account.

We can explore civil service performance through the justice portfolio because of recent manifest failures but also because of other less publicised incompetencies in the last five years.

The activities of the Scottish Prison Service in particular provide a fruitful area to study. As an agency rather than a government department, its activities are a little, just a little, more visible. And the civil service personalities more visible.

It is no surprise to observers that the SPS has been at the heart of recent embarrassments for the Justice Minister.

In 1999, the SPS was already working on plans for replacing outdated prison buildings. With large numbers incarcerated in Victorian buildings and without access to overnight sanitation it was already clear that something had to be done if the government was to avoid legal challenge.

Previous Chief Inspector of Prisons, Clive Fairweather had already commented adversely and recent weeks have seen a fierce critique from his successor, Andrew McLennan of the long-term failure to tackle slopping out.

We now hear some briefing that the £13 claw-back from Prison Service spending in 2000 undermined the SPS's ability to deal with the problem.

But senior insiders suggest that Chief Executive, Tony Cameron, may have volunteered the return of these funds soon after his appointment. He wanted to “look good” with his newly-elected masters and mistresses and hang the future. So it may not have been a claw-back but a gift.

However, Ministers share some of the blame in not looking too closely at the implications of the cash windfall delivered to their budget. Jack McConnell, the then Finance Minister, may be a mathematician but his credibility as an effective manager is less clear. Perhaps this was an early sign of his inability to think strategically.

The Scottish Parliament is a comparatively small body, one where I was able to personally speak to four fifths of the members within 6 working days of my becoming a member in 2001. It is therefore not surprising that opposition members can build useful and direct relationships with government ministers.

Within a short period of my taking my seat in Edinburgh it was evident that the potential closure of Peterhead prison had to be top of my in-tray.

Having cancelled a significant investment in gatehouse facilities at the prison within weeks of taking office, prison chief Cameron was already determined to close an inconveniently successful institution. Peterhead was planned as one of the sacrifices to promote his career.

But when the SPS Prison Estates Review was published, with the plan for closure, the fear took concrete form and the Peterhead community started mobilisation to save a valued and valuable local employer.

In Parliament both SNP and Tories took early positions in support of Peterhead. With Liberal Democrat Jim Wallace as Prisons Minister taking a publicly neutral position and his political colleagues initially unwilling to retain a old prison without modern toilet facilities in the cell, their support was harder to earn.

But the local Prisoner Officers Association committee had told me of a proposal to solve the slopping out issue at Peterhead. In 2000 they had put forward a plan to change the deployment of the existing staff complement to enable higher supervision levels at night. This would enable the safe opening of cells on request to allow prisoners toilet access.

Their proposal met with a brick wall and they were told that this was not acceptable to ministers.

So it came as a surprise when I probed Labour attitudes to Peterhead with the then Deputy Justice Minister, Richard Simpson. Ministers had heard nothing of the proposal.

Now one could dismiss the SPS response to the local POA as their expressing an opinion as to what ministers' attitude to their suggestion would be rather than reporting ministers' actual views were it not for a further incident.

The SPS proposals for the prison estate were complex. In particular the SPS wanted to build two private prisons. This would have ruled out a re-build at Peterhead for sex offenders as no one in government, or opposition, wanted to hand over this category of prisoners to the private sector.

So I sought other options which might be acceptable to the Scottish government. The French approach to involving private finance in the public sector had been established since Napoleonic times - “La Concession” - and looked of possible interest.

Adoption of their approach would avoid having to force the government into accepting the SNP's policy of using a financial trust to get public investment “off balance sheet” while delivering that same benefit with public sector staff providing the service.

My Parliamentary assistant quickly established that getting permission to visit a prison, provided through this hybrid model, would not be easy.

So I approached Richard Simpson again. He was relatively keen on any idea that would remove the government from the SPS cul-de-sac. He promised that he would have his staff approach the French authorities and offered me a place on the resulting visit. I would have to pay my own way but I thought that worthwhile.

I jokingly said that we would continue to pursue our own attempts to set up a trip and that he could come with me if I was successful.

A week later I had the agreement of Madame Martine Birling of the Minstère de la Justice to visit La Bapaume prison north of Paris. A request to extend my group to include a government minister clearly amused them but was agreed.

I was therefore surprised to be told by the Deputy Justice Minister a few days later that his officials had found it impossible to obtain permission to visit a French prison.

To his very great credit Richard Simpson accepted my offer to accompany me. But it was little surprise to me that he was told that his diary was full for the agreed date.

My visit to La Bapaume was useful and I filed my report with SPICe, the Parliament's Information Centre.

I think the obvious tactics to prevent ministers having meaningful access to sources of information other than the SPS were sufficiently blatant to contribute to Labour's support for Peterhead prison at senior levels.

For the Liberal Democrats I had to bypass the SPS and ensure that the Peterhead POA's offer was seen by ministers. That proposed way of dealing with quite creditable Liberal concerns about slopping out was sufficient to gain their support.
But as we now know, the slopping out story had much further to go.

Despite the ticking time-bomb that the Robert Napier case represented, the SPS have continued to stonewall any implementation of the plan to address slopping out for 300 or so prisoners at Peterhead.

The local staff proposals, first tabled about four years ago, have been rigorously, and successfully, risk assessed. Indeed in Cornton Vale, a system similar to that proposed for Peterhead is already in operation.

But an SPS paper of 11th March this year, shows a determination to reject staff proposals. This despite the risk profile of almost all sex offenders at Peterhead being compliant and low-risk while in prison.

In advance of the results of the Napier case being known, the paper shows prescience when it says, “Its findings could have enormous implications”. And yet by 19th May, after the case result is known, the SPS Chief Executive is still writing to me to say, “No final decision has been reached”.

The ultimate culmination of four years consideration is drift, delay and indecision.
With the blunder over processing the government's appeal of the Napier decision and a history of, at the very least, incompetence in the SPS, patience must surely be at an end.

Those with an operational response for the many failures of the prison service must be dealt with. But the Minister is there to take political accountability. Failure to spot the operational weaknesses and dissembling are her problems.
It is time the price for failure was paid.