Prison Officers: Pension Age

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the pension age of prison officers.

Police offers, firefighters and prison officers are all classified as emergency workers. They all do an extremely important job, and their work is physically demanding and often involves an element of risk and danger. Because of that, police officers and firefighters, quite rightly, are allowed to retire at 60 years of age. However, prison officers, who work in an equally stressful operational environment, have been told that they must wait until they are 68. That is not right. In fact, it is patently unfair and deeply resented by the hard-working prison officers in the three prisons in my constituency. I am not surprised by that, because the prospect of having to work until almost 70 years of age adds to the stress of what is already a stressful job.

From the point of view of health and safety at work, there is a clear argument for reducing the retirement age of prison officers, but I believe there is another equally good reason to bring their pensions into line with those of their colleagues in the police and fire and rescue services. Last week, at the Conservative party conference, the Home Secretary made an excellent speech in which she made it clear that Government would crack down on serious crime. That commitment resonates with the public, particularly those who have been victims of such crime, because they want tough action. However, inevitably, such a crackdown will lead to more criminals being sent to prison.

Also last week, the Justice Secretary made a speech in which he made clear his determination to ensure that those who have been convicted of serious crimes will have to serve two thirds of their sentence, rather than the half that they currently serve. Although both initiatives are highly commendable, they will put pressure on already-stretched prison places. That is likely to mean that more prisons will have to be built. If that happens, I have a couple of suggestions. First, finding a suitable location for a new prison is always difficult, because few communities like the idea of having a prison in their backyard. Those of us who live on the beautiful Isle of Sheppey understand the benefits of having a prison, and particularly the work involved. As I mentioned, we have three prisons and plenty of room for more, so we will have another prison if the Government want to build one on the island, subject to improvements to the road that leads to them.

My second suggestion is offered more in hope than with any great expectation that it will be taken up. The Government should abandon their support for private prisons and ensure that any new prisons be run by the public sector. Do not get me wrong—I am a free-market Tory who believes that there is a place for the private sector in the prison service, for instance in catering, education, training and rehabilitation.

I have a couple of examples of the positive involvement of the private sector in the latter of those fields. A private construction company has set up a workshop in HMP Elmley, in my constituency, to train inmates how to install drywalls in buildings. The company guarantees that everyone who completes the course will be offered an interview when they leave prison. Obviously, that does not automatically mean a job, but an interview is the first step. I visited the workshop as part of the Prison Service parliamentary scheme, of which I am a member. I was impressed by the positive attitude of the inmates who were being trained. One of them told me that the training had turned his life around. Also in my constituency is HMP Standford Hill, an open prison where more than 250 inmates are allowed out every day, to do either voluntary work in the community with charities or paid work in one of the local companies that have agreed to employ them.

Those are just two ways in which the private and third sectors can help to rehabilitate prisoners. There are many other examples, but I do not have time to mention them all. Despite those excellent examples of involvement by the private sector, the supervision and care of prisoners should be the sole responsibility of the public sector, for two reasons.

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. I also have a prison in my constituency, since Deerbolt was upgraded from a young offenders institution to a prison. I agree that a lot of positive work goes on in prisons, but is he not concerned by the increase in violent attacks against prison officers in recent years? Does he not agree that that is another reason why 68 is too late?

The hon. Lady must have been listening to Justice questions this morning, when I said exactly that. Since she has a prison in her constituency, I urge her to join the Prison Service parliamentary scheme. If she will bear with me, I will come to the issue of violence in prisons later.

My first reason is that the state has a duty to protect the public. That is why it is the state that prosecutes those suspected of committing a crime, and the state—only the state—that locks up those who are found guilty. That being the case, I do not believe that the state can subcontract the incarceration of those prisoners to the private sector. That leads me to my second reason—

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will just give my second reason, which is that allowing private companies to make a profit out of the incarceration of human beings is simply immoral.

Before the hon. Lady’s intervention, I remind hon. Members that the debate is tightly focused on the pension age of prison officers, and I hope that interventions and contributions will focus just on that.

Thank you, Mr Hanson; I will do a quick swerve. On the point about private prisons and the influence of private companies, does the hon. Gentleman agree that privatising probation—the state’s care for people on probation—was the wrong thing to do?

No, I do not. They are two entirely different issues. When people are on probation, they have either completed their sentence or they have not yet—[Interruption.] We will have to disagree on that.

If new prisons are built, the Government will have to recruit many more prison officers to staff them. In my area, it has often proven difficult to recruit enough prison officers. I am sure that that applies to many other areas, particularly in south-east England. There are a number of reasons for that difficulty, including the relatively poor salary offered to prison officers, their working conditions, their retirement age and the rising level of violence in our prisons.

The average salary of a prison officer is £23,530 per annum. The problem in my constituency is that people can earn more than that working in one or other of the two supermarket regional warehouses that operate there. There are also plenty of other well-paid jobs in the pipeline locally, and people can commute to London. Those available jobs are more attractive because they provide better working conditions than those of a prison officer.

What are those working conditions? For a start, prison staff are almost as much prisoners as the inmates they look after. Day and night, they work inside buildings surrounded by fences and high-security walls. In addition, prison officers spend their days dealing with inmates who do not want to be where they are. Unsurprisingly, that can make them unco-operative, aggressive and sometimes violent. To add to the problem, an increasing number of inmates have mental health problems.

All in all, that does not make for a happy work environment, and the situation in prisons is getting worse, with ever increasing violence. On average, 30 members of prison staff are assaulted every day. Last year, 1,000 of those assaults were classified by the Government as serious. I know what serious means, because I have seen at first hand the results of some of those assaults, including broken bones, dreadful facial injuries and fingers that have been bitten off.

To try to cut out those assaults, the Prison Officers Association has called repeatedly for frontline prison officers to be equipped with PAVA spray and rigid police-style handcuffs to protect themselves. Last year, the Prison Service ran a pilot in which PAVA spray was issued to staff in four prisons. That pilot was successful, and the Government promised to roll out PAVA across the prison estate. However, that promise has not yet been delivered; indeed, the roll-out has come to a juddering halt. I suspect the reason for that is complaints from the usual suspects, including the Prison Reform Trust, which claimed that prison officers would use PAVA indiscriminately and that its use would breach the human rights of prisoners.

I declare an interest as a member of the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group, which includes the Prison Officers Association.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Gordon Henderson) on securing this important debate. Unusually, given the nature of the debate, I agreed with 95% of what he said, and I was very impressed by the way he delivered it. I did a bit of research and noticed some interesting comments by him on KentOnline about being willing to go to prison for Brexit so, come November, he could bring a unique perspective to debates on this subject. I hope it does not come to that.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s strapline: 68 is too late. We should not expect a prison officer approaching 70 to deal with violent and dangerous criminals in their 20s, 30s and 40s. He mentioned some of the challenges prison officers face. Of course, another challenge is the availability of drugs in prisons and their effect.

As my hon. Friend knows, Holme House Prison near my constituency has recently seen a rise in the abuse of Spice. That has caused dangers in itself, but it has also led the local mental health trust to withdraw services from the prison. Does he agree that that shows how dangerous the situation is for prison officers these days?

I completely agree. The conditions in many of our prisons are explosive. Holme House Prison is quite close to my constituency too, and I have visited it on a number of occasions. It is not just prison officers who are subjected to assaults; support staff are, too, and they need to be protected.

The debate is really serious. It is about life and death. Assaults against prison officers have almost quadrupled since 2010. As we heard this morning at Justice questions, there are more than 10,000 assaults a year, 1,000 of which are very serious. That works out at more than 28 a day on average—the same as the number of assaults experienced by the whole of our police service, which is a much bigger force. I am not justifying assaults on any emergency workers, but that is the scale of the problem.

I read through some newspaper headlines, which are really quite disturbing. I will mention a selection of them. One paper reported that a court was told how an inmate used a

“sock filled with pool balls to smash windows”

and injure prison officers. Another reported that a prison officer was stabbed in the head by an inmate in a “savage UK jail attack”. One story read:

“Teenage thugs injure 20 prison officers in riot at young offenders’ institute…One officer suffered a broken nose and another was concussed after being repeatedly punched.”

Other headlines included “Prison officer seriously hurt after being ambushed in cell” and “Prison officer has ‘throat cut’ by inmate at HMP Nottingham”. Conditions are difficult for new prison officers in our violent and dangerous prisons.

Prison officers need to be fit enough to protect not just themselves but prisoners from violence. Someone elderly, who does not have the same reflexes or strength as a younger person, cannot protect themselves or the people they are there to guard.

I completely agree with my hon. Friend’s analysis. We heard the Minister talking this morning about the recruitment of an additional 4,500 prison officers, but from the information provided by the POA it seems that substantial numbers of newly trained prison officers—at least 72 trainee prison officers—are leaving the service each month. That must be due, at least in part, to the terrible conditions they face. Again, that is placing great strain on older officers who are expected to take up the slack.

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case, as did the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Gordon Henderson). Is it not the case that beyond a certain point some jobs are difficult to do? In the past, that could have included construction workers, working on cold, tough building sites in the dead of winter. This is another example of people reaching a point in life when it is no longer tenable for them to be expected to carry out these duties.

It is no longer tenable, Mr Hanson. We have reached tipping point, if I might quote a couple of quiz shows. The fact that prison officers are expected to work until the age of 68 disregards basic health and safety; in the opinion of many, it is a complete failure by the Ministry of Justice in its duty of care, under legislation, to prison officers.

I and many Members of the House believe that our uniformed emergency services deserve pension protection. Police officers and firefighters are able to retire at 60,

“to reflect the unique nature of their work”,

to quote Lord Hutton. A prison officer’s unique nature of work has been recognised as being the same as that of a police officer. Section 8 of the Prison Act 1952 gives prison officers

“all the powers, authority, protection and privileges”

of police officers. So the Hutton pension test—

“to reflect the unique nature of their work”—

applies equally to prison officers, police officers and firefighters. Sixty-eight is too late. How many Members of this House would be able to serve on prison landings at 68? There are few who would be able to serve for a week, or even a day, in such violent and dangerous prisons.

My hon. Friend is being generous with his time. He has talked about staff morale being at rock bottom, the soaring violence and the cuts to prison officer numbers. Does he agree that the prospect of having to work as a prison officer until the age of 68 is fuelling the record number of resignations from the Prison Service? We are in a cycle that we cannot get out of unless the pension age is changed and lowered.

I agree with my hon. Friend. There are many pressures and causes, but the pension age is a significant one. There are a number of remedies that need to be applied, as outlined by the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey.

If it is not presumptuous, I wonder whether the Minister might consider inviting the right hon. Lord Hutton of Furness, who I understand is aged 64, to work in a prison and be part of a team being confronted by inmates with socks filled with pool balls, with razor blades and improvised knives, or surrounded by a group of youths, many of whom seem to have access to Spice and illegal substances, who are only too willing to attack prison officers. Setting prison officers’ pension age at 68 must have been an oversight. If the Government seriously and knowingly took that decision, it is a cruel and callous one, and risks the lives of prison officers working in physically demanding and often violent workplaces.

I urge the Minister to take two actions. First, to acknowledge that 68 is too late to expect a prison officer to work in an unsafe workplace. Secondly, to commit to bringing forward in the next Parliament—next week—the legislation and regulations required to align the pension age of prison officers with their colleagues in other uniformed emergency services.

Prison officers have heard the excuses in parliamentary responses; we heard some of them this morning in Justice questions. The offer that the Government previously made, to reduce the retirement age to 65, is simply a bad deal. Prison officers want pension age parity with their uniformed colleagues. The previous offer was attached to a derisory three-year pay deal and excluded many uniformed staff, who would still have to continue to work until they were 68.

I ask the Minister and everyone listening to the debate to watch the latest videos published by the POA and look at the horrific injuries suffered by prison officers. We should feel ashamed that they are doing a public service, protecting the public, while Parliament stands idle, forcing them to work in terrible conditions that are neither healthy nor safe. We should feel ashamed that we outsource our prison service and system, and that the safety and security of prison officers is left in the hands of companies such as Serco and G4S, whose first and foremost interest is shareholders and profits. We should feel ashamed that we want to put prison officers approaching the age of 70 into such terrible and dangerous situations.