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Steven Twinn
FRESH START
In the late 1960's,as a 22 year old Direct Entry AG 2 (I may have to add a glossary of archaic Prison Service terms to this article), I remember crusty old senior governors complaining bitterly that the Service had gone to the dogs and me thinking what silly old dinosaurs they were. Sadly, it seems to be the fate of each generation of bemoan how things have slipped and how much better they did things in their day. But I
find myself often at odds with the good-old-days sentiments often expressed in articles in the RPGA magazine. I am firmly of the belief that, generally and overall, the Prison Service got steadily more professional, more efficient, more humane and more managerially competent over the 40 years I was associated with it. Of course, it went down some cul de sacs, some things did not work out as intended, progress was patchy and glacially slow, but progress there was.
So I was interested to read Peter Atkinson's balanced and impartial summary of important events in the post war history of the service. While he was right to name me as the first Director of The Wolds, I was more interested in his mention of Fresh Start and three of the leading lights (I would argue one
leading, two following and a couple missing) and, at Peter's suggestion, have refined here a letter I wrote to him in response to his article. While privatisation was, in my obviously not impartial view, an important and useful development in how prison services where delivered, it was not, again in my view, as profound a change as Fresh Start. Unless FS had happened to greatly level their playing field, privatisation might not have happened.
I was right in the centre of Fresh Start from the beginning, leading a P6 Manpower team (another delightfully archaic title and concept), working at an operational level, but with clear sight of what those leading and those attempting to sabotage FS were doing, saying and thinking.
It has always surprised me that no one has ever made a proper study of FS as an academic treatise or a piece of serious journalism. It was a piece of organisational reform of huge breadth and scale, given the size, age and resistance to change of the organisation it changed, the breadth and depth of the change and the number of powerful enemies it faced. It must be one of the most impressive pieces of organisational re-engineering and would, I would have thought, be worthy of detailed academic study which would then become required reading on any decent MBA course.
I find it interesting to view the Brexit process through the FS prism. The key feature of both, that Eric Caines, Boris and David Frost all grasped but most others could or would not, is that there is no hope of forcing though change of that profundity, and with so many powerful enemies, with a fully worked out scheme, every I dotted and every t crossed. By the time you get there, if you ever can, the issues will all have changed and the opposition will have had too long to dig in. What you have to do is to identify the essential elements of the change you are trying to achieve and force them through at speed, leaving many second tier and subsidiary issues to be sorted out later. Thus the Northern Ireland protocol and the Wandsworth strike are parallel tidying up events, full of sound and fury at the time, but in the long term signifying little.
The key issues of FS, in my view as always, were the abolition of paid overtime, the move from two, very old, entirely rigid, inefficient, centrally determined shift systems to a broad set of rules within which shift systems were a matter for local decision and negotiations. A natural consequence of this, although not one of the stated objectives, was a move from staffing levels being determined nationally to them being determined locally.
A number of beneficial changes came along with FS, the change from an outdated two-class, military-style (to be historically accurate probably naval style) grade structure to a more modern unified structure, some rationalisation around the payment for allowances and a new management structure within establishments, but these were not essential to the success of FS, merely incidental bonuses. The general sale of quarters to staff, something from which I am not ashamed to say I benefitted personally, was a sensible modernisation and economy, but while not a key issue it was an extremely useful bribe to longer serving members of staff who might otherwise have been much more hostile than they were.
And of course with so many powerful enemies ranged against it- FS was opposed, even though not all the opposition was overt, by many on the Prisons Board, many of the affected politicians, many if not a majority of governors, the POA and, separately many staff. You have to play dirty to have any chance of success. Thus, Eric Caines and Boris were both prepared to misrepresent and mislead, without actually lying (debatable I know),and promise what they knew perfectly well could not be delivered, in order to get where they needed to be. They will have considered the ends justified the means, and I would agree with them, but you cannot avoid the fact or the consequences, of the strokes they had to pull. I was once sent to meet with Gordon Lakes, then the much-revered DDG, with an almost-explicit brief to con him
over a particular aspect of FS that he had got his teeth into. I am not in the least ashamed to say I succeeded and that it wasn't very difficult.
It is a pity FS has never been properly and independently documented. Some of the fairly small group who were involved have now died, and it appears from Peter's article that others have no interest in their legacy. There are a few left, Harry Brett being one, and I am sure Francis Masserick is around somewhere, but even as FS implementation was drawing to a close, people were starting to re-write history. When I returned to the service after 10 years in the private sector, for most people I then worked with, FS was something in the dim and distant past they'd heard about, and a few of the old timers would mention,
but no more than that. The folk memory of the pre-FS days had moved a long way from the reality. Bulletin 8 was still mentioned by some, but all had forgotten, if they ever knew, that it was intended to be what its title suggested, a newsletter, one, if I remember rightly, of about 14, just updating the service on how the proposals were developing. It was never intended as the founding document and tablets-of stone rule book for FS that it became. I was involved in its drafting and indeed wrote several chunks of it, but there were issues that were too unclear at the time or considered too incendiary, and we were instructed by Lex Gold, then head of P6, to either fudge them or leave them out. We did a bit of both.
My clear view then, as now, is that FS was, by some distance, the most beneficial change, and the largest, the service saw, since WW2. It succeeded where previous attempts to do much the same, less ambitiously and on a smaller scale, had failed miserably and for the first time in my career enabled and required governors to control, direct and properly manage their institutions rather than simply presiding over them. It was a disappointment but no surprise that so many resisted doing so for so long afterwards.
STEVE TWINN
