Sir John Gieve: It was a good report. We generally agree with the recommendations, which I do not find on page 21.

Q25 Mr Khan: That is fine. Wandsworth Prison is in my constituency and we have an excellent governor who took over relatively recently. Can I draw attention to table five, page 12. Can you put your finger there and then look at table 21 on page 36. When you look at the figures for both sharing cells and overcrowding, do you not think that the governor of Wandsworth has an almost impossible task bearing in mind the conditions placed upon him in terms of the aspirations we have to prisoners to rehabilitate?

Mr Wheatley: There is no doubt that the governor of Wandsworth has a very challenging task and the levels of overcrowding in Wandsworth are high. Of course, Wandsworth is one of the few prisons serving the capital where much crime is committed and brought to justice. All the London locals are under great pressure. We have to move prisoners out of the London locals into the surrounding training prisons, which is what we hope will happen to prisoners once they have been sentenced, in order to make room for those coming in from the courts. The London local prisons are particularly pressured and Wandsworth is one of the most pressured prisoners and it does not make his life easy at all.

Q26 Mr Khan: Bearing in mind there have been four suicides in Wandsworth since January 2004, as reported here, what are you specifically doing to alleviate the problems Wandsworth has outside your control, for example overcrowding?

Mr Wheatley: We are trying to make sure that Wandsworth is able to manage the overcrowding better ----

Q27 Mr Khan: How?

Mr Wheatley: ---- hence the governor that we have been put in that you correctly draw attention to as being very capable running a difficult establishment, the introduction of a new anti-suicide monitoring measure, the so-called AST scheme, which involves much more detailed decision-making about individuals and much more support to those individuals, by putting mental health in-reach into all prisons, including Wandsworth, so we can support those who have mental health problems, and the initiative with the Department of Health which delivers health with health money into prisons commissioned by PCTs, also happening at Wandsworth. There are a number of initiatives designed to improve the situation but I do not want to mitigate the fact that Wandsworth is a very challenging environment and requires a high class governor.

Q28 Mr Khan: None of the things you have mentioned, all of which I welcome, deal with numbers.

Mr Wheatley: I am not pretending that we are dealing with the numbers. As long as the population remains as high as it is, although numbers recently have come down quite significantly during November, for which I am very grateful, and that has moved ----

Q29 Mr Khan: Christmas spirit?

Mr Wheatley: That is before the Christmas spirit, so it is not the Christmas drop and it is really quite striking. As long as the numbers remain so high, if we want to stay out of police cells, and I do, we have to use those Wandsworth places to their maximum. It is not the most overcrowded prison but it is one of the most overcrowded.

Q30 Mr Khan: Of the 77,000-odd prisoners who are guests of Her Majesty's Prisons, how many of those are foreigners convicted, how many of those are asylum-seekers and how many of those are people on remand waiting for trial?

Sir John Gieve: I can give you some of those. Nearly 13,000 are on remand. Just over 10,000 are foreign nationals. I do not know how many of those are asylum-seekers, I would have thought only a minority of those. I forgot the other question you asked.

Q31 Mr Khan: That is fine. The report also says that between 2002 and 2004 there has been a 70% increase in prison numbers without there being any significant increase in prisoner unrest. Is that a fair summary?

Mr Wheatley: Certainly there has been no significant increase in prisoner unrest.

Q32 Mr Khan: What is the breaking point?

Mr Wheatley: The breaking point would be population levels in prison above the safe operating capacity, operating at the maximum operational capacity, which is an assessment of the maximum number we can hold without significant risk to safety and security. It is absolutely crucial that we do not exceed that.

Q33 Mr Khan: Do you not accept the implication and the inference one draws from that phrase is you have scope to go higher vis-à-vis overcrowding because at the moment there is no prisoner unrest?

Mr Wheatley: No, I would not say that. The reason why there is no prisoner unrest, and I have made this point on a number of occasions in a number of different arenas, is we do not take more prisoners in any prison than it can safely hold and that operational judgment, which is not a question of space it is an operational judgment of what we can manage in that prison, is a robust operational judgment which I will not have challenged by other people.

Q34 Mr Khan: You will have seen that the report at paragraph 1.49 on page 12 deals with the number of changes that are supposed to limit the rise in population in the long-term. Can I ask you, Sir John, to give me your views on those things set out there? How likely are they to achieve what they want to achieve?

Sir John Gieve: Sorry, I was just looking for ----

Q35 Mr Khan: Paragraph 1.49. Is that pie in the sky or will it happen?

Sir John Gieve: It is very difficult to say. We know that there is greater use of electronic tagging. We know the Sentencing Guidelines Council have issued some guidelines which taken by themselves would tend to reduce the prison population and, similarly, the Criminal Justice Act has a mix of measures, some of which could increase it and some of which would reduce it. At the moment, on our latest projections we have got ten scenarios and I think two of them show us living within the 80,000 projected population limit more or less indefinitely, some get very close to it or cross at points, others go upwards and break through that limit in the next two years. We are trying to work on all the scenarios. In particular, both the Criminal Justice Act and the Sentencing Guidelines Council are very new and we are not yet at a point where we can say what the overall impact has been.

Q36 Mr Khan: If I was to ask you how optimistic you are, would you give me an equally long but no clear answer on that as well?

Sir John Gieve: I am not confident.

Q37 Mr Khan: That is helpful. Can I ask you then about the National Offender Management Service. Is this a drama turning into a crisis, the setup, the objectives not being achieved, the holistic approach? We know, of course, that the reoffending rate is 40% in the first two years, as referred to Mr Wheatley. It has not turned out how we hoped it would, has it?

Sir John Gieve: NOMS is still at the early stages and the main point of it is to draw the Prison and Probation Services together into a single system which is based around concerted offender management from the point of arrest through to the point of resettlement and all of that is very sensible. I do not see it as a prison number control mechanism. Over time, we hope it will reduce reoffending and we have set a target of 10% by the end of the decade. That would make an impact on the prison population, although it is not the only driver of it because a lot depends on the criminal justice system and the police. If they are more active, if they drive up the number of arrests and convictions, then even with a reduced level of reoffending we could see a rise in prison population. I do not see the level of the prison population as the measure of success for NOMS.

Q38 Mr Khan: Would you like to see judges around the country monitored in their sentencing and consistency?

Sir John Gieve: I think that is very difficult. What, league tables for how tough they are and that sort of thing? I do not think it would be right for the Home Office to do that.

Q39 Mr Khan: Final question: bearing in mind we have had one piece of good news about the November figures, do you have anything positive to say about the reforms in this area, any good news around the corner that we can expect?

Sir John Gieve: Yes, I think there is a lot of good news. Firstly, on education, as you have heard, there has been a massive increase in investment in education in prisons and we are carrying that forward. Secondly, the same thing has been happening on health. The healthcare for prisoners is much better now than I should think it has ever been and is getting better still. Thirdly, we have got the outcomes in terms of not just basic skills awards but also behaviour programmes and so on which we are still delivering despite the pressure on the estate. Finally, we have not even discussed security and that is because security has been outstanding for a number of years and remains outstanding.