Don’t downgrade prison officers

I went to the NOMS conference in Birmingham last week. Two days in the NEC with governors and probation managers, and you pick up a lot of gossip and news.

Jack Straw seems to be quite obsessed with Harry Fletcher. It seemed like a third of his speech was a personal diatribe, really rather odd. He even produced a grubby copy of an article from the Mirror inspired by Harry that he is clearly carrying round with him and showing to anyone he bumps into.

But what is really worrying is the plan to downgrade the prison officer.

This is part of planned budget cuts across the prison estate, so that 1,500 governor staff will disappear too.

As far as I understand the plan, civilian staff like personnel managers and accountants will be expected to carry out some of the duties previously done by governors, including adjudications and being on call to oversee the aftermath of a death, deal with a hostage taking or other incident.

Prison officers will go back to being turnkeys, with a much lower starting salary (around £14k) and only two weeks training. They will get an extra two weeks training if they are “residential officers” and have to deal with prisoners.

Principal and senior prison officers will disappear. Instead “team leaders” will be appointed, but they will not do the supervisory and management role previously undertaken by POs and SOs – for example annual appraisals. That will have to be done by governors, and the multi-faceted personnel and accountants! I understand that the Prison Officers’ Association was intended to recommend acceptance of the plan, because the Ministry of Justice had found £50 million to put into the pay packages as an inducement, but the grass roots was against it. So the delegate conference that was to have been paid for by the MoJ to secure a favourable vote went the other way and the MoJ refused to foot the bill. This all seems entirely crazy to me. At a time when the government is intent (quite rightly) in up-skilling the workforce and has a target of getting half of young people through university, how can it be sensible to downgrade a really complex and challenging job like prison officer?