WE DESERVE BETTER

Annual conference 2023 was a positive and enjoyable experience, in my view. However, as the cover of this issue of Gatelodge demonstrates, not everyone was happy.

If the Prisons Minister, Damien Hinds, ever doubted me when I berated him privately about the unrealistic retirement age of Prison Officers, those doubts were obliterated at conference.

Why is it that all politicians consistently avoid a simple yes or no answer?

Asking the Minister if he agreed that Prison Officers could not work in the most hostile and violent workplace of any jurisdiction until the ripe old age of 68 should have brokered an easy, straightforward yes or no answer. But it didn’t.

The delegates were not impressed. Cries of 'answer the question' could be heard.

At least now he is in no doubt as to the strength of feeling among staff in relation to their cruel retirement age. This is an issue that quite simply needs to be rectified sooner rather than later. We need to be allowed to retire with dignity instead of worrying about dying in service.

Old arguments about not being as much at risk as other frontline services no longer hold weight. That was then and this is now. Lord Hutton’s 2011 recommendations are a glaring oversight of our workplace. That report is now 12 years out of date and the landscape in our prisons now paints a completely different portrait.

It’s as simple as this: we cannot work in our late sixties in such a volatile environment, and we deserve a retirement age of 60.

WE DESERVE BETTER.

Our colleagues working in secure psychiatric hospitals continue to suffer from similar problems to the rest of the membership. They struggle to attract new recruits and when they do manage to secure fresh staff they seldom stay for any length of time. Chronic staffing shortages and poor pay are leading to staff burnout, excessive-hours working, atrocious allegations from senior managers and the use of food banks to feed their families. One statistic that is concerning is the number of suicidal staff branch officials have to support. This, in turn leads to additional stress and strain on our hard-working committees. You would think that, in an NHS setting, support for the mental health of staff would be abundant, but it all too often sits with local branch officials who have to pick up the pieces of a broken workforce.

THEY DESERVE BETTER.

As we eagerly await the outcome of the pay review body recommendations, it is no surprise to anyone that inflation sits at a rate that continues to degrade our standards of living. When we gave our oral evidence, it was 10.1%; today it is 8%. Why should any workforce be happy with a below-inflation award? To maintain your current standard of living you need to at least match inflation in any pay award, but people who earn six-figure salaries continue to state that the working class should not expect above-inflation rises because it fuels inflation! I always thought giving people spare cash to spend boosted the economy and ensured financial stability. It's easy to make such statements when you have no money worries because you earn hundreds of thousands of pounds. I wonder if bankers’ bonuses will be scrapped in case they fuel inflation?

WE DESERVE BETTER.

The worrying rise in violence continues to plague our prisons, especially within the under-18 youth custody estate. Over the past few months, our juvenile estate has witnessed concerted indiscipline, a shocking rise in assaults on staff, and a young person being so seriously assaulted that they had to be airlifted to hospital after coming close to being murdered.

Without the brave actions of staff, we would have seen a murder within our under-18 estates. Staff intervened and, without any thought for their own safety, presented themselves in the middle of a baying mob who repeatedly stabbed and stamped on the youngster’s head. Staff were protected by a polo shirt while the assailants had homemade knives.

I would prefer staff to stand at a distance and spray criminals with an irritant to quell such attacks and I’m positive any parent would wish them to do the same if their child was at risk of being murdered.

The Secretary of State for Justice needs to issue PAVA spray without delay. I have already placed on public record my concerns if he fails to act.

WE DESERVE BETTER.

The debacle that is the annual fitness test continues, with no clear date in sight as to when a decision will be made to either scrap it, replace it or continue with it. Although a report on options will be delivered by this summer, we then have to wait for decision-makers to actually make that decision. By the time they do, the test would have been paused for more than 12 months and, as we witnessed during Covid, dispensing with the test did not diminish our delivery on the frontline. If staff are fit enough to pass their annual Control and Restraint refresher then they are fit enough for duty. Running around cones and keeping up with a bleep are so far away from what we actually do on the frontline its time to scrap the test and replace it with health screening and advice on lifestyle choices. Turning on the fitness testing tap again would simply cause chaos. It needs to go!

The pressure on the frontline continues at pace and we now see bedspaces filling up at a rate we just cannot keep up with. Police cells are regularly used under Operation Safeguard and, by the time you read these jottings, I suspect we will have reached a ‘Capacity Critical’ point, which in plain speak means ‘we are full.' Of course, if a government that was not obsessed with austerity had kept prisons open and invested in the infrastructure, we would not find ourselves in this position. I am fed up reading repeated inspectors' reports that highlight the same themes but place the blame with staff. It’s not staff or management’s fault that some prisons are witnessing 23- hour bang up and its nothing to do with staff that the most basic regimes cannot be met. We are well below the attractive salaries of other public sector bodies and our working conditions are excessively violent. It’s no good having a competitive starting salary if you burn staff out because of chronic staffing shortages and who soon realise that the promises in the recruitment literature doesn’t match the reality of the landings. Expecting new recruits to cope after six short weeks of training with limited, if any, support is a recipe for disaster. The government has let us down and our employer continues to bury its heads in the sand. We need a total restructure of our pay offer, a contractual incremental pay structure and support in place to entice staff to stay. I fear we are hurtling towards a summer of discontent.

WE DESERVE BETTER.

As summer approaches I hope you all get time to unwind, spend some downtime with your loved ones and totally switch off from your work environment. To those who are absent because of illness or assault, I wish you a speedy recovery. To all, until next time, have a restful summer and all the best.

 

MARK FAIRHURST
NATIONAL CHAIR