Speeches by Cox.

“What are those specialist courses where you have vacancies?”

“We are not currently delivering to the potential that we could. Is that what you are saying?”

“I know we are a little short of time here, but one more from me. You talked about the Prison Education Framework, but we have not talked much about the Dynamic Purchasing System. Could you explain that to a lay member of the public who might be watching this?”

“Thank you for the overview. There are four major providers, I believe. You at Novus, Peopleplus, Weston College and Milton Keynes College, on the routine education. What are relations like between the four of you? Do you collaborate? Do you innovate together?”

“To recap what you said in one of your opening answers, 86% of prison education in the last year was found to be less than good, and a decent proportion of that was found to be inadequate. As a former educator myself, that suggests to me that the framework that is delivering is somehow not performing.”

“That brings us to contracts. Could you talk us through the contracting framework for education services in prison, broadly speaking?”

“You said you are in 43 prisons, is that right?”

“We are not currently delivering to the potential that we could. Is that what you are saying?”

“There is a question around technology in prison education: in short, do you think it is being used to its full extent? It can be a yes or no answer.”

“I am going to talk about contracts, and it could come in there, could it not?”

“I am looking at your website, which says, “By providing access to cutting-edge technology and training,” you are providing prisoners with essential digital literacy skills and boosting confidence. How realistic is that actually? It is not the picture we have seen on our visits.”

“I am pleased to speak in support of the Government’s Crime and Policing Bill, the most comprehensive package of such measures that we have seen for decades. As a member of the Justice Committee, I know that it will play a crucial part in tackling the serious violence and high-harm offences that have plagued our communi…”

“I welcome the Lord Chancellor’s announcement of additional sitting days. The Justice Committee has been looking into the court backlog issue, and we have also been hearing about the ongoing need for the digitisation of court and wider criminal justice processes. We need to replace the creaking paper-based system, which…”

“I wonder whether we might move our discussion of contracts to this point as a natural segue.”

“While we are talking about the mountains of paper, we saw that in the county courts. The bundles are huge. Every prison we visited has been paper based, and that is a huge inefficiency in the system. It has a knock-on effect for prisoners when information does not pass through the system in the way that they need it to…”

“This Committee has heard that there has been a £1 billion attempt at court transformation that failed. Taking us back to public value for public money, we are interested in who were the contractual agencies responsible for that seemingly £1 billion failure.”

“We will save that for another day, but it is good to hear.”

“I have a broad one, given the prospect of devolution in so many new areas and the implications that may have for the commissioning of probation services. I know that in Greater Manchester they have a co-commissioning arrangement, which is quite unusual. It would be interesting to hear any thoughts you may have on procu…”

“Does that mean that there is some light on the horizon in terms of the new approach to commissioning and contractual arrangements?”

“Yes.”