Mr Wheatley: Yes.

Q25 Mr Khan: How high up are prisoner diet and exercise in your list of priorities and issues?

Mr Wheatley: High, because it is essential that prisoners feel reasonably content.

Q26 Mr Khan: It is one of your top priorities.

Mr Wheatley: It is high because it is an important component of delivering a safe and decent prison.

Q27 Mr Khan: As important as issues around over-crowding, self-inflicted deaths, industrial relations, budget concerns, rehabilitation issues?

Mr Wheatley: It may play into a number of those. A prisoner is unlikely to be ready to engage in rehabilitative work, if we have not fed that prisoner correctly. The prisoner whom we have not got off drugs and built up in their strength is unlikely to play a part in the rest of the regime. That is why I say it is high rather than my top priority and it has to be balanced alongside, you are quite right, the question makes it clear, a number of pressing priorities which are inter-dependent on each other in many cases.

Q28 Mr Khan: So it is not the most important, but it is an issue for you?

Mr Wheatley: It is an important issue, not the most important. It is one of the important issues in running a successful Prison Service and running a successful prison. As a governor, if I did not get good food served in my prison, I had real problems and indeed the NAO report makes that plain.

Q29 Mr Khan: How do you relay to your governors the importance of prisoner diet and exercise, leading on to improvements in issues which are of utmost priority?

Mr Wheatley: The way of doing that is to have clear standards through which prison governors are judged on diet and ---

Q30 Mr Khan: But Helen Goodman asked you a question which showed the disparity between, for example, prison A and prison B.

Mr Wheatley: But we do have clear standards and the Chairman quoted one, that we are not getting full compliance with the requirement to feed people at the hotplate within 45 minutes of the food being cooked, but that is a standard which we are trying to drive through and make sure that is followed. We have a number of standards which we make plain to prison governors.

Q31 Mr Khan: How do you do this?

Mr Wheatley: They are published standards which are audited and prison governors are measured on them, they form part of our judgment about establishments.

Q32 Mr Khan: When was the last time you spoke to a governor about prisoner diet and exercise?

Mr Wheatley: At the last prison I visited, which was the week before last actually, because I had last week off.

Q33 Mr Khan: Were you surprised then that in a 48-page report, only three paragraphs refer to religious and ethnic food?

Mr Wheatley: In terms of concerns for me, getting food right, particularly for ethnic minorities and for different religions, is important and has occupied quite a lot of my personal time and was one of the things I was talking to both prisoners and staff about on my last prison visit. I cannot judge the report.

Q34 Mr Khan: The question is: are you surprised that in a 48-page report, three paragraphs are devoted to the food that your guests who are of a certain religion and ethnicity receive?

Mr Wheatley: I did not think about it and it was not my report.

Q35 Mr Khan: I put it to you that there are about 7,000 Muslim prisoners.

Mr Wheatley: It occupies more of my time than three paragraphs.

Q36 Mr Khan: So I infer you were surprised that this NAO report only ---

Mr Wheatley: I did not seek to judge it. I noticed it was in there. It is something that matters to me and I have to spend quite a lot of time on, as we have been seeking to consult about what is a good and appropriate Halal diet that will meet most Muslim prisoners' needs.

Q37 Mr Khan: What have you done to make sure that all of your prisons serve prisoners who are of a certain faith a food that does not breach their faith?

Mr Wheatley: We already serve Halal meat in all establishments, certified as such. What we have discovered in the process of consultation with our Muslim imams and leading Muslim organisations is that that certification does not, by itself, satisfy all Muslims.

Q38 Mr Khan: So you are aware some of our inmates and detainees are boycotting your Halal food? They do not trust you.

Mr Wheatley: Yes, they are. It is all certified. The issue, and it is quite an important issue for Muslims, is what Halal food is. It varies depending upon the exact state of your Muslim faith, whether you believe, for instance, that an animal stunned but nevertheless individually killed by a Muslim using a knife saying the appropriate words, would be regarded as Halal or not. There are all those variations.

Q39 Mr Khan: Come, come. Are you suggesting that the concern that a high proportion of your 7,000 prisoners have is around the method of slaughter?

Mr Wheatley: Yes; the method of slaughter has been very important.

Q40 Mr Khan: May I take you to page 15 please? One of the three paragraphs referring to this important issue is paragraph 2.15 and it gives some ideas: for example, inviting local religious leaders to prisons to inspect preparation and storage; for example, discussing any concerns with prisoners and caterers; for example, observing major religious festivals. Then it goes on. Where do you see mention of the method of slaughter?

Mr Wheatley: I am saying that in terms of what I have had to think about in developing the Halal food standard, that has been one of the key issues.

Q41 Mr Khan: The Committee of Public Accounts of this House is investigating prisoner diet and exercise. Almost 10% of your prisoners are Muslim. Did you not think it important to raise with the NAO this huge omission from the three paragraphs that they devoted to this?

Mr Wheatley: I do not regard it has a huge omission on the NAO's part. I am saying that that is one of the things we have been consulting about and is a crucial issue in developing the new standard for Halal food. There are also important issues around making sure that food is kept separate, that when it is served it is served in a way that is appropriate and given separate status and we have just issued, as part of that process, labelled, completely separate utensils to be used only for Halal food.

Q42 Mr Khan: When was the last time you spoke to a governor about Halal food?

Mr Wheatley: The week before last.

Q43 Mr Khan: Which prison was that?

Mr Wheatley: That was at [?], the last prison I was at. It is an issue in most prisons now, so it is a thing I would mention and that happens to be the last prison I visited.

Q44 Mr Khan: How do you convey to those governors who you do not visit the seriousness of this issue?

Mr Wheatley: By speaking at conference about the importance of getting all issues to do with our black and minority ethnic prisoners right and particularly about being sensitive to issues around the Muslim faith.

Q45 Mr Khan: Which prisons do you hold out as beacons of good practice that we should all aspire to and aim towards?

Mr Wheatley: I would hesitate to name any.

Q46 Mr Khan: Just name five.

Mr Wheatley: No, that would be an inappropriate thing to do.

Q47 Mr Khan: Just name one good prison.

Mr Wheatley: At the moment one of the places which is most careful in doing their work, because of the concern, is Belmarsh where a lot of work has been put in to make sure we get the diet right for prisoners who are Muslim. That has required a great deal of effort. There is some good work being done at Bullingdon; that is another example. Actually, the big thing we need to get right to make sure that I am content that we have got the food right for Muslims is to make sure that we have a very clear standard for what is Halal food and an excellent supply certified to an appropriate standard.

Q48 Mr Khan: May I move on to another issue? Is obesity a problem in your prisons?

Mr Wheatley: Obesity is a problem for some prisoners. It is not a problem in prison. The prisoners who become obese in prison are few and far between. The number of prisoners who arrive in prison who are obese is significant, though actually we have probably got a slightly larger problem with people coming in under-nourished, usually because of substance abuse.

Q49 Mr Khan: May I take from that the answer is "not really"? It is not really an issue?

Mr Wheatley: No, it is not a big issue. There will be exceptions.

Q50 Mr Khan: Does that explain why you are taking no steps to prevent obesity in prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: No, it does not explain why we are taking no steps. We are taking steps. We are changing the diet as a result of some of the research that has been done for this report. We have done work to try to make sure that we reduce the amount of frying we do; we do more oven baking which is one way of reducing the amount of frying we do while still producing food that is acceptable to prisoners. We are increasing the supply of healthy options, particularly fruit versus sweet, which will make a difference.

Q51 Mr Khan: Are you educating your prisoners about the importance of certain types of food?

Mr Wheatley: Yes, and we are employing somebody centrally to help us to work up advice on that and working with the Department of Health, which nowadays supplies our health provision in establishments.

Q52 Mr Khan: Exercise?

Mr Wheatley: Exercise is to make sure we make the best possible use of the PE facilities we have.

Q53 Mr Khan: Right. That leads me on to the next question.

Mr Wheatley: We have over 40% take-up in PE which, compared with the world at large, is probably pretty good actually.

Q54 Mr Khan: That is a very good answer. What does take-up mean? How do you define take-up?

Mr Wheatley: Take-up means people are going to the gym and engaging in activity at least once a week.

Q55 Mr Khan: Male prisoners and female prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: The overall figure I have is for all prisoners and it varies prison by prison.

Q56 Mr Khan: Do the figures for male prisoners not mask how appallingly badly female prisoners are vis-à-vis exercise?

Mr Wheatley: I would need to go back and look at that in more detail. I do not have the detail to give you an accurate answer to that at this point. I can write to the Committee separately on that.

Q57 Mr Khan: You are not able to say whether physical activity female prisoners receive is much worse than male prisoners?

Mr Wheatley: I do not think it is much worse but I do not want to invent figures and I do not have the figures in my head.

Q58 Mr Khan: Two final issues. Is there an issue for you about over-crowding, low numbers of staff and lack of facilities impeding your ability to provide the physical education that your prisoners deserve?

Mr Wheatley: If we over-crowd too much and we do not have sufficient staff, there would be a real risk of that and it is one of the reasons ---

Q59 Mr Khan: Is it an issue at the moment?

Mr Wheatley: It is not, providing we keep the population under the operational capacities we have certified as being safe. That is why it is crucial we do not over-crowd more than we think the facilities will allow us to do in a reasonable way.

Q60 Chairman: Do you want to ask the National Audit Office why they have only devoted three paragraphs to Muslim diets, as they wrote the report?

Sir John Bourn: The fact that there were three paragraphs does not mean that we did not take this as a serious matter. I absolutely agree with you Mr Khan that it is and the way in which you have developed the issue has reminded me that we might have paid more attention to it; that does not mean to say we disregard it and do not think it is important.

Q61 Mr Khan: You were in discussions with the DG obviously as you always are when it comes to these reports with permanent secretaries and so on.

Sir John Bourn: Yes.