(Henley) (Con):...I
want to touch on Birmingham prison, which the hon. Member for
Crewe and Nantwich opportunely mentioned in passing. This morning
I participated in a Justice Select Committee sitting in which we
questioned senior members of the Prison Service about what
happened at Birmingham Prison. A key point relates to provisions
in the contract with G4S not to hold it to account in many
ways that we would normally expect. All of us, on both sides of
the political fence, questioned those witnesses about the
legitimacy of excluding those areas from the contract and how
they could manage them.
Birmingham Prison is a good example of the mixture of public and
private collaboration, in that we have public collaboration
through the Ministry and the Department, which hold those running
the prisons to account rather than having to run them themselves.
We asked about the extent to which windows had been broken and
not fixed, and why no one had been held to account and what had
happened. At the end of the sitting we specifically asked the
Minister of State, Ministry of Justice what would happen at the
end of that examination. We got a firm statement that the
contract would possibly at some stage go back to G4S when we could all be assured that it
would be able to keep prisoners in the state to which we would
expect them to be kept and look after them properly. That is
a good combination of private and public sector partnerships in
action...
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