One of the main aims of competition has been to drive improvement in the public sector. This chapter describes the extent of improvement in HMPS over the period, and assesses what part competition played. It also considers the claim that the private sector demonstrated successful innovation.

1990: the Prison Service as basket case

As described in Chapter 1, HMPS at the start of this period was a disgrace. It did not believe in itself – government dismissed the very idea that prisons could rehabilitate offenders. Management was weak, fighting a losing guerrilla war against a powerful, anarchic and deeply reactionary union. The HQ culture of mandarin ‘policy makers’ had little in common with, and was little respected by, governors. ‘Management’ in any modern sense did not exist: the Service did not set out in any clear and measurable way what kind and quality of service prisons were supposed to achieve, and hardly knew what prisons were actually doing. Despite rising resources, management did not know where the money was going and, despite rising staff prisoner ratios, more and more prisoners spent their days locked in their cells (two thirds were locked up more than 12 hours a day even in the early 1990s, when numbers had fallen; HMPS, annual report, 1992–93) One prisoner in three was in a cell with others that was designed for fewer prisoners, many lived next to a bucket of excrement. Around one prisoner in 20 escaped or absconded every year. Prisons were barely under control throughout the 1980s, with serious riots in 1986 and 1988, and in 1990 exploded into the most serious, most prolonged prison riots in British history.

This, then, was the monopoly some strove to protect from the evils of competition.

Extent of improvement 1990–2010

Improvement in the prison system in this period was a slow, patchy process, and there were plenty of setbacks and disasters along the way. The huge increase in incarceration in the Howard/Straw years was so costly, so distracting and so without obvious social benefit that one cannot but wonder what might have been achieved with a more rational penal policy. The system remains, despite a succession of massive build programmes, far too heavily overcrowded.