Offender Management Bill

I draw the attention of my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) to the points that I made about clause 14 in Committee on 18 January, when that clause was discussed in detail. Through it, we are seeking to transfer to directors of private prisons certain powers currently exercised by controllers—Crown servants—regarding the segregation, control and disciplining of prisoners. It is important to keep in mind that we are not seeking through the clause to create any new powers. The powers of segregation and adjudication are essential control tools for maintaining order, control and discipline in our prisons. Rather, the clause transfers the responsibility in private prisons for segregation and adjudication from a Crown servant—the controller—to a private sector employee, the director, who under contract acts on behalf of the Secretary of State. Although we accept that the current restrictions made sense when private prisons were first introduced, they appear to be increasingly unnecessary, especially as the private sector has been credited, as I said earlier, with helping significantly to improve conditions for prisoners and has had a central role in advancing the decency agenda across the prison estate. Directors can already take decisions about the segregation of prisoners in an emergency; indeed, such decisions are more likely to be taken in those circumstances. In such cases, the director has to seek retrospective approval from the controller. There is no evidence that that system has been abused since the opening of the first private prison, Wolds, in 1992. Adjudication powers can also be transferred safely to directors, who will operate within the same constraints of prison rules as public sector governors and will use exactly the same procedures as those laid out in the prison discipline manual. Hearings that may result in the award of additional days will have to be passed to an independent adjudicator, in line with operations in the public sector. The benefits of the change are that directors will be able directly to influence order and discipline in the prisons for which they are responsible, and controllers will be freed from a time-consuming task to spend time monitoring the delivery of the contract and the quality of service provided. The discipline system in private prisons will mirror that in the public sector for the first time.