Chamber and committees

You cannot go through a supermarket without being greeted by somebody with a body-worn camera. It seems odd that our prison staff do not have them.

We look forward to that.

My second question is about PFI contracts, where there is still a bit more digging to be done and other members might do that. I am still a bit confused about how many such contracts are coming to an end in the next couple of years and what the cost to the public purse will be. We may revisit that before we end this evidence session, but do you expect those contracts to come to a natural end or are ministers mooting an early contract termination on some of them? There is a difference there and I presume there is a cost.

My first question is to Teresa Medhurst. I appreciate that you may not want to answer this, but I will give it a try anyway. Did you want to take ownership of HMP Kilmarnock?

Mr Rennick, you are next, I am afraid. Back in 2022, when I sat on the Justice Committee, I asked a similar question about the difference between privately run prisons and Government-run ones, and the response from His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons response was that HMP Kilmarnock

“is the cheapest prison in Scotland”—[Official Report, Justice Committee, 9 November 2022; c 8.]

to run. My initial question is: was the decision to move the prison into public ownership based on value for money or was it solely a policy decision?

As the Public Audit Committee, we obviously have an interest in money, and I am still struggling to get my head around any comparison. I am yet to see, on paper anyway, what the prison cost to run in an average year under Serco and what it will cost to run under SPS. We do not have that comparison, which I think is unfortunate.

What we know about the figures is that the average cost per prisoner is around £52,000 a year under Serco’s direction and management. Can you tell me what that number will look like under the SPS? Is it higher or lower?

Did your directorate do any modelling of what the potential financial impact on the public purse might be? It is easy to say that we should wait and see what it costs, but that is the mop-up after. Should that work not have been done before the transfer?

Finally, I guess that what matters is outcomes. The prison is not a hotel; the issue is not just about turnover and the number of people who come through it and how much it costs to run it. What analysis has been done of what benefits may be reaped from the prison being under the control of the SPS rather than Serco? For example, what is the staff to prisoner ratio before and after the changeover? What do the reoffending rates look like? What are the rehabilitation rates? What do the drug and contraband figures look like at HMP Kilmarnock versus the average for the rest of the estate? It would be useful to see those sorts of metrics and that analysis. Have you done any of that work?

Thanks for the update. I will come back in later with some PFI questions.

That gets to the nub of my question. When times are good and there is money in the bank, the Government can easily decide that, because it has the cash, it would rather fund this stuff directly either through Government borrowing or through capital that it has in reserve and that it would want to try to avoid or to minimise private investment where possible because of the repayments, interest and other costs associated with it, and that is not the direction of travel that it wants to take.

However, as you have just outlined, we are now in very different times. Constraints on capital investment mean that there is less money to go around. In that scenario, if, for example, I knocked on your door tomorrow and said, “I am happy to build a replacement for HMP Greenock or HMP Dumfries”—both of which are in desperate need of replacement—would the door be open to the models out there and could a deal be done, or is it just simply a case of the Government wanting to spend only what it has?

Okay. In other words, you cannot backdate it. You cannot accumulate annually the—