6. What assessment has the First Minister made regarding the call for an independent inquiry into prison violence and suicide? OAQ(5)0260(FM)

Prisons aren’t devolved, and any call for an independent inquiry is a matter for the UK Government, but there clearly are problems within the prison system that the UK Government needs to tackle.

I thank you for that, and I’m sure you are aware, First Minister, that a prison safety and reform White Paper from the Department of Justice was released at the beginning of this month. We cannot divorce the Conservative Government budget cuts in recent years from the reduction in prison staff that has had disastrous consequences for both prisoners and the staff. The Westminster Government has now budgeted an additional £104 million to help recruit 2,500 new prison staff, and some prison reform, and I hope in a way that that will help. But my question is: what representation has the Welsh Government made to the Westminster Government in terms of our Barnett consequential and how that might help us here in Wales in picking up the pieces of their mess?

They have the responsibility to pick up the pieces of their mess, primarily. The reduction by 25 per cent of front-line prison officers means that those that remain are overstretched, overwhelmed, and without support, and both prisoners and staff are being left in a vulnerable position. I was the local councillor when the Parc prison was built in my council ward, and the major problem the prison had was that it was understaffed, and the staff were undertrained. There were riots there on a regular basis, while staff from Swansea and Cardiff had to come in to assist the situation. One gentleman managed to escape by hanging on to the underneath of a lorry and he was never found. All those first years of the Parc prison’s operation were shambolic because of the fact that it was all being done on the cheap. Now, of course, it’s in a far better position, but it does show that, if the UK Government isn’t willing to invest in prison officers, then the result is chaos and vulnerable prisoners and vulnerable prison officers. They need to re-examine their plans.

The prison system’s in crisis and thousands of prison officers are protesting at their dangerous working conditions. At what point will the First Minister deem it essential for Welsh prisons and the well-being of Welsh prisoners and prison staff to come under the jurisdiction of the Welsh Government and the Welsh Assembly?

An interesting point, but it’s not quite as easy as that, because we don’t have a self-contained prison estate. For example, you’d still to need to buy in, as it were, prison places in England, at a price that England wanted to charge—we’d have no particular control over that. We lack certain high-security prisons as well, so all this has to be examined to make sure that we don’t end up with control over prisons, which in principle, actually, I’ve got no objection to, but end up with a financial deal that’s far, far worse. Unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, we’ve never had that self-contained prison system. It is something, of course, that we’ll have to consider when we look at the devolution of prisons.