Speeches by Dixon.

“I only say that because, before I came to this place, I did a lot of work on age-friendly employers and how we enable people to work for longer. Some of those suggestions would be very welcome, I am sure. Those were the main points I wanted to ask on workforce. The only thing is your assumptions about the workforce you…”

“Is there any chance of getting any returners, given these experienced people have left you?”

“Do you have targeted support for any staff who are victims themselves of assault?”

“Earlier, we were talking about the impact on prisoners and you did raise the impact on staff themselves. The Committee would also like to recognise the work that the staff are doing under very difficult conditions. You raised the issue of recruitment and that you feel you have done very well on that, but you recognised…”

“The bottom line on all of this is that the current crisis in capacity is having a negative impact on the ability to get into drug rehab, the ability to educate and the ability to reduce reoffending rates by giving people purposeful activity.”

“I have one final question on this matter, which comes to education. There seems to be evidence of links between getting education in prison, as part of prisoner rehabilitation, and reoffending, but also employment on release. We received quite a lot of evidence that those educational facilities were in a state of decre…”

“Are we talking about spice?”

“Well, basically making sure that there was drug treatment available. We have not had any evidence that these numbers of 15% are going down.”

“What progress has been made on implementing the Carol Black recommendations from 2020 in regard to drug use in prisons?”

“What would you consider a safe level of crowding for your projections?”

“On the one hand, you are saying that you are highly efficient because you are running at 99% and you have only this small number of spare beds, but you are also admitting that trying to manage at that level with that tiny margin of cells and places means that, effectively, you have to do things that are very inefficien…”

“What would 90% allow you to do in terms of improved prisoner outcomes?”

“In terms of policy, are the drug rehabilitation requirements in terms of the sentencing review being looked at as a cost-effective alternative to these short custodial sentences for people who are known to have drug use and be part of this cycling in and out?”

“That is acceptable.”

“I would like to come on just to the impact of this in terms of rehabilitation. Back in 2020, Dame Carol Black produced a report about drug use specifically. We have evidence from both His Majesty’s inspectorate and Camurus Ltd that set out the scale of drug use in the prison population. Random drug testing at the time …”

“At what level is it currently set?”

“Can I just ask a follow-up in terms of the projections and assumptions? What assumptions did they make about the 95%, 90% in terms of occupancy, and what assumptions did they make in terms of crowding and that 25%? When you did your projections about the point at which supply and demand do not meet, have they built int…”

“How do you plug all that into your long-term workforce strategy, to be confident that you have that longer-term supply of workers?”

“A quarter of prisoners at the moment are living in those conditions.”

“I will come back to staff and, indeed, as you raise, the public impacts of this capacity crisis. If I may turn to you, Ms Rees, you are running this hot and there is this level of overcrowding. It seems almost that this has become the norm for how you are having to operate. What are you doing to try to manage some of t…”