Founded 1980
Chair:        
Secretary: 
Treasurer: 

Graham Smith
Jan Thompson
Graham Mumby-Croft


Looking back at key moments in the Prison Service over the last 60 years or so, it’s evident that there have been some critical instances that have provoked major reforms to the Service. The following decisive moments all led to profound change but there will always remain a debate as to which might have had most impact. By no means an exhaustive list, we can start with the end of the Prison Commission. The 1877 Prison Act created five permanent members, known as Commissioners, to oversee the administration of all prisons in England and Wales. Until 1963, the Prison Commission got a grip on the chaotic, compartmentalised, disparate confusion from which prisons had suffered for decades. The Home Office took over from the Commissioners following the 1961 Criminal Justice Act. There may be the odd RPGA member around who says, “Ah, I remember the Commission,” but it is history to most of us. Before moving on, there is the lovely apocryphal story from Stafford prison during the 2nd WW, when the jail was shut but looked after by a couple of watchmen. These men had taken to allowing local people to look around the buildings for a fee, which was a nice little earner for them. One day, a member of the Prison Commission turned up at Stafford gate some time in 1944 and asked to be let in. The men said he would have to pay the usual fee and were unmoved by his emphasis that he was paying 
 Issue No. 87 Autumn 2022
Peter Atkinson
The Great Reform
By: Peter Atkinson.
nothing because he was one of the Prison Commissioners. They had no idea what a Commissioner was. When the Commissioner returned the next morning with a police escort, the men were shocked to find themselves sacked on the spot.

A significant milestone and perhaps remembered by many RPGA members, was the April 1990 Strangeways Riot. The chaos at this one prison was repeated to a lesser extent in many other jails around the country leading to fundamental questions about how prisons were run. A lot has been written about the event but a useful television documentary was made by Sally Brindle on Channel 5 last March. It is fair to say that over 25 days, this horrendous rampage of destruction was a seismic jolt to the system leading to Lord Justice Woolf’s Report with consequential fundamental change to the Service as a whole. Just at Strangeways alone, the shocking traumatic incident, the bravery of Prison Service staff and the dignity of Governor Brendan O’Friel, are firmly imprinted in many people’s minds. Significant reforms followed which arguably led to a more composed Service.

A further substantial development that had great impact on the Service was the move towards privatisation. The 1991 Criminal Justice Act facilitated the first prison in Europe to go private in 1992. This side of the Atlantic, there had been nothing like it before. Walter MacGowan took over as Governor at the privatised Yorkshire prison The Wolds, which paved the way for a range of other prisons either going private or being specially built as private establishments. At the last count, six private companies operate fifteen prisons and it may be helpful to list them. Altcourse, Birmingham, Glen Parva, Wellingborough, Ashfield, Lowdham, Forest Bank, Rye Hill, Dovegate, Bronzefield, Peterborough, Doncaster, Oakwood, Thameside and the last to move into private hands Northumberland. The last one happened to be my final posting as Governor when the prison was then called HMP Acklington. Three further prisons got taken back into public ownership, Buckley Hall, Blakenhurst and The Wolds. The private sector currently looks after just short of 20% of the overall prison population of around 88,000. Two interesting events relatively close to each other in the mid 1990’s had a profound effect on the Service, culminating in Parliamentary debate and a real shock to the system. In September 1994, five IRA prisoners along with an armed robber escaped from the Special Security Unit within Whitemoor prison. The highly respected Brodie Clark was the Governor and came out blameless from the Inquiry, particularly as he had not been there very long. In the escapees’ possession were two workable pistols, a rope ladder, wire cutters, tying string and poles. The Special Unit only held ten prisoners at the time and over half of them made it over the wall. One escapee astride ‘the beak,’ used a gun against a pursuing officer. Within a brief period and following much bravery from staff, all prisoners were caught. Michael Howard was the Home Secretary. Following on behind this dramatic incident, was the more incendiary escape in February 1995 of three prisoners from Parkhurst. The three inmates, Messrs. Rogers, Rose and Williams had fashioned a ladder and a gun and had acquired money before cutting their way through some wire and scaling the wall. The prisoners were caught days later at a local airfield trying to hijack a small plane. There was a clumsy attempt at trying to scapegoat Governor John Marriot, but the eventual ‘fall-guy’ was the Director of the Prison Service Derek Lewis who lost his job. Michael Howard was still the Home Secretary and took part in the now famous Jeremy Paxman BBC Newsnight interview where he was asked twelve times, “Did you threaten to over-rule him,” him being Derek Lewis. The Paxman interview is still available on YouTube. For those who are not familiar with the details of these two escapes I would recommend you look up the former Chief Inspector of Constabulary Sir John Woodcocks’ report into Whitemoor, as well as the former Army General Sir John Learmont’s report into Parkhurst. They both make fascinating reading.






There are obviously other issues that seriously affected the Service like overcrowding, the installation of integral sanitation and Covid, but I have left out one more major development and it is this one that I would argue had the most profound, positive impact on the Service. To what will inevitably be some groans of anguish and horror, I can put off no longer mentioning Fresh Start. Let me unpack my thesis before I get booed off court. In May 1986, the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, announced the publication of a report by the Prison Department and PA Consultants that examined the glaring unproductive nature of the then uniformed staff shift systems. Out of this, Fresh Start was born, that in so doing scooped up such issues as prisoners having to earn their privileges and staff adopting an effective control and restraint system. A point had been reached where industrial relations had been a running sore for years. Levels of overtime were at an all-time high, many governors could not understand their own V Scheme and FGS shift patterns and prison staffing levels were out of kilter with what was necessary to maintain effective control. Could Fresh Start tackle these issues? Without getting bogged down in too much detail, Fresh Start was defined in a 28-page document called Bulletin 8, including five appendices and three annexes. It dealt with a whole range of thorny issues. Agreed between senior Prison Officer Association officials and senior Prison Service managers, it amalgamated all the operational ranks into an 8-grade tier from basic Officer to Governor 1. It amalgamated Chief Officers 1 and 2 with governor grades AG1 and AG2. It defined and standardised five functional heads of Custody, Medical Services, Inmate Activities, Management Services and Works. It laid out clear procedures in the event of disputes. It established an Annual Staff Appraisal system across all ranks. It devised a comprehensive but simple method for Governors to design a bespoke staff shift system for their prison, underpinned by an agreement on Minimum Staffing Levels and by so doing it abolished paid overtime. Finally, a significant pay rise was awarded to all grades with defined pay bands, delivered by monthly payments. The intention of all this was to enrich prison regimes, improve management control, develop work force relationships and streamline working practices.

Sixteen establishments trialed Fresh Start to begin with, starting in July 1987. It was rolled-out across the rest of the estate, ending with Chelmsford in August 1988. The agony mentioned earlier came in two forms. Along with two others, I was a trainer for the new assistant governors at the Prison Service College in Wakefield during that period, delivering their two-year programme. Apart from our group of trainers, all the other tutors on the entire range of courses at Wakefield were told to abandon their courses and deliver a continuous run of Fresh Start training from a huge, prescriptive manual. Every management grade across the Service were obliged to attend the four-day training. The College Tutors were less than pleased to be assigned this repetitive training, and many of those who had to attend as trainees were likewise less than enthusiastic. The second source of aguish came for the Chief Officers who had to abandon their unforms and don a suit and tie. It was often said that many Chiefs would have preferred to report for work naked, rather than appear in front of their staff in a suit like their governor colleagues. The transformation across the Service was substantial, and when coupled with the development of Control and Restraint techniques and the later introduction of the Incentive and Earned Privileges system for inmates, it would be my contention that the Service successfully completed a massive transformation. 

My experiences may be similar to many others, but I will relate three simple illustrative stories, that in a modest way, demonstrate some of the benefits of Fresh Start. Being given a reduced annual budget whilst Governor at Deerbolt, I agreed with the local POA that we would re-arrange our work profile to match staff resources against the desired regime delivery. Using the Fresh Start staff profile model that was easy to understand, we ended up with a new working arrangement that put the right number of staff in the right places to deliver the right regime for inmates, whilst meeting our reduced staff budget. The second story occurred at Lindholme when I was Deputy Governor to Dai Thompson. Some may remember that Lindholme functioned as the main northern C&R training hub in one of the old RAF hangers just outside the Gate and hence the staff were well up to speed with the techniques. C&R was new at that point as a safe and effective restraining method for any inmate who required to be physically controlled. One such Lindholme inmate became extremely agitated outside one of the wing offices just as I came onto the Unit one lunch time. Other prisoners were beginning to show an interest in the commotion, just as a C&R trained three-man team arrived to deal with the disturbance. Without me needing to do anything, the wrist locks were applied to the stressed prisoner who was then gracefully led from the area watched by about a dozen inmates and me. I am not exaggerating when I say that the prisoners witnessing this event, appeared to be reasonably impressed, in that a noisy member of their fraternity was marched away without brutality and only a minimal loss of dignity. Having looked on with interest, the watching inmates then quietly shuffled off. My experience until then would have prompted me to believe that such a public outburst by an inmate could well have been a dangerous point when inmates might have joined in with harm and danger to all. Not anymore.

The third experience involved a difficult officer at Deerbolt who seemed compelled to challenge authority and offer disrespectful remarks about the Service in general. After a particular episode where he voiced some scorn about the Prison Service in front of me, I took him on one side and reminded him that through the Fresh Start Agreement, he had implicitly signed up to the vision, goals and values of the Service, of which he was a member. Any more deprecating expressions about the Service would result in adverse Annual Reports which could eventually lead to dismissal. Prior to Fresh Start, such recrimination would have carried no weight. The officer subsequently controlled his hostile sentiments or at least kept them to himself and I heard nothing further from him. These examples are indeed anecdotal but I guess other governors had similar post Fresh Start experiences.

The Service of course continued to experience difficult problems after the introduction of Fresh Start, but the task of running a prison post 1988, was a lot easier than it had ever been in the early 1980’s when there existed the dark arts of the staff shift systems, the manipulated levels of overtime and the regular industrial relations battles. I can remember serving at Stafford as a junior governor grade in the early 1980’s and witnessing what some might describe as regular staff rebellions when poor old Governor Ernie Stratford was in the chair. I recall thinking that if that was what it was like being an in -charge Governor, then I had no ambitions to work my way up the ladder of command.

I have often wondered whether Fresh Start was either so cleverly designed in brilliantly achieving all its aims, or whether it just happened to work so well by good fortune. Perhaps it was a combination of both. To try and get their reflections all these years later, I recently wrote to the three key participants in Fresh Start, David Evans (former General Secretary of the POA), Professor Eric Caines and Sir Philip Mawer. Unfortunately, David said he was not available and I wasn’t successful in getting a response from the other two. That just leaves us to ponder alone on whether Fresh Start stirred one of the Services most inspired cultural changes, or whether there was something else that befell the Service, which others may think trumps it.


Peter Atkinson