In the last edition of the Review I visited the new kitchen at HMP IOW. Run by David Clough, it had been built to feed the three prisons that now make up HMP IOW. Before they were ‘clustered’ they were known as HMP’s Albany, Camp Hill, and Parkhurst. I went and met the Governing Governor Barry Greenberry to discuss how the clustering process was progressing.

Barry Greenberry’s office is in an administrative block situated between the 3 prisons. It’s an old building with an impressive entrance. His career started on the landings at Dartmoor where he learnt the craft of the Prison Officer and the role of tradition and history in the service. He has a fiercely held opinion that the Prison Service is one of the great public services and that not enough is done to celebrate it. Then he served across the Country in a range of establishments and HQ, including as an adviser to the permanent secretary of the Home office, and now has 4 successful commands as Governor under his belt. His last appointment was at HMP Sheppey where he worked on improving the way it worked as a cluster of three prisons.

You have two huge flow charts on your wall, what are they all about?
Barry Greenberry   My father was a Royal Marine and he taught me some valuable things. One was that you cannot manage something you cannot see, the second is that if it will not fit on one piece of paper then it will not work. So the two large pieces of paper are the organisation and the timeline for change!

The 3 prisons here have been ‘clustered’- what does that mean, what are the driving forces, the process and what changes are involved?
Barry Greenberry  Simply put you are literally taking several independent establishments and making them into one prison. I think originally the service had a one model fits all approach to clustering, but it has to vary from one case to another depending on the actual situation. What ever word you choose to use to describe joining two or three prisons together, is the process that clustering is about. It’s a financially driven initiative and it’s a logical one too. Amalgamating the senior roles and processes of several establishments delivers greater efficiencies that enable more money to be spent at the sharp end.  It’s the economy of scale. Large commercial organisations do it to cut costs by combining the administrative roles and utilising the best practice in both organisations - it’s no different here. The processes that must be gone through are done to make sense of the new organisation in order to help us reduce reoffending. What starts as a financially driven initiative becomes a process that leads to a better outcome in all areas.

It creates some real opportunities, by making three separate units think about how they can amalgamate, you create a process where they look at what they are doing, and compare it to see who is doing it better.

There is a massive human element to this type of development. Here we have had colleagues coming to work in almost parallel worlds but never having formally met so that they can exchange the good practice, experience and know-how between one another.

Lets look at the financial side first. The management costs must have dropped. Have you lost 2 Governing Governors, 2 assistant governors, 2 heads of security...?
Barry Greenbery  We have saved £1.1 million annually from the payroll by scaling down the staff we had to the staff we needed. This has been achieved without anyone loosing there job. For instance, the former Governing Governor of Camp Hill is now the Deputy Governor of HMP IOW. The rest of the downscaling has been achieved by natural wastage. There hasn’t been one compulsory redundancy. We lost 30 posts during the first clustering process; we went from 20 PO’s to 9. There were no posts lost during the flattening stage. In the latest round, we will loose 9 posts.

Looking at your chart on the wall it shows that there was a £1.1 million saving on the first stage, the same on the second and £600,000 on the third. Are these actual savings of £2.8 million or are they the ‘Humphrey Appleby’ type that are expected forecasts, but never achieved?
Barry Greenberry  What we did to organise the clustering process was to make organisational charts of the 3 jails and the clustered one. Then we could see where the jobs overlapped and how many staff it would take to do the job. Who would stay in place and who would have to adapt their role. The charts you see in front of you are actual reductions in headcount. The Humphrey Appleby bit is that these are identified savings that will be realised. However, we recognise that we just cannot simply discard people at the stroke of a pen. So compared with the ideal, we will achieve at present. We are overmanned. However, over the next 5 years we will achieve this structure and manning levels by natural wastage. The target is to have 19 managers per 100 staff.  The savings will then be locked in. Until then, we are likely to be over budget. One notable thing in this is that for the first time the Prison Service is planning for staff costings 5 years in advance. By doing this, we have made sure that no one has lost there job and the cost savings will be achieved.

What benefits will the inmate in his cell see from this process?
Barry Greenberry  None, the inmate should see little if any change from the process itself. It’s the organisational set up that we are changing. The regime suffered a little as staff adjusted to the changes, but it has now recovered. The inmates will see benefits from the move to best practice that the changes will bring.

How are the staff and management on the wings adapting?
Barry Greenberry   Some are coping better than others - that is the nature of managing change. I’m not suggesting that this is an easy process to go through. An immediate effect was that staff sickness increased and this affected the routine on the wings. We realised that people were having to cope with considerable changes to their work. This is why the process has been incremental. We could not have gone from the 3 prison model to a fully clustered model in one step. It would not have worked. We’ve also been able to create a sickness manager who tackles illness issues. This has brought long-term sickness down from 76 cases to 49.

What about staff slightly further away from the decision making process?
Barry Greenberry   There is a great deal of pent-up emotion around the changes we are making. They have been talking about clustering for 20 years and suddenly here it is. The changes have started, and there are more to come. This uncertainty creates tension and that will cause problems. Another change is that we no longer need 3 seg units, or 3 kitchens. Do we need 3 points of entry? Why not have just one visitors unit? There is a lot of tradition and history within these prisons and people are rightly proud of their establishments. Because of these feelings, any of these changes would have been treated as heresy 3 months ago. Now they are happening or being discussed! I decided to keep the existing names for the sites; it could be seen as more ‘clustering’ to have named them ABC or 123. However, I learnt at Sheppy that clustering 3 prisons should not be seen as a threat to the respect people hold for the history of the 3 sites. The good bits anyway, as there are some less favorable and unsavory pieces of history attached to all three. It is possible to be proud of more than one thing at a time. Lots of people support their local football club and England. So it’s not beyond reason to expect people to be proud of Albany and HMP IOW.

From a senior management perspective, what immediate staffing advantages were there?
Barry Greenberry   The first one that comes to mind is this: There are 3 jails adjacent to each other, and the island hospital is opposite and across the road. Prior to clustering each prison will have staff over there on bed watch. Each prison had its duty governor walking over there each day to inspect. They were passing one another in the corridors. This happened even if the inmates were in adjacent beds! Since clustering one manager does all the bed watches. This type of efficiency is multiplied throughout the whole establishment and is why we can do more with less.

What other advantages have started to be realised.
Barry Greenberry   We used to operate on the basis of the 3 separate teams gradually working more closely together. Now we have moved onto the ‘one prison model’ for example we now have only one head of Learning and skills for the whole site. That means they can start to work strategically and direct resources to where they are needed. Not just staff but also other resources,  facilities and equipment can be easily moved around to where they can be used. If Camp Hill has a carpentry shop it doesn’t need, then it could be moved. Prior to clustering there wasn’t a mechanism to enable that to happen and scarce resources could languish unused. A concrete workshop has been moved from Camp Hill to Parkhurst. A computer shop has been moved in the other direction. Another benefit is that people can move from cat B in Parkhurst to Cat C in Camp Hill without transferring prisons.

Has this altered the regimes in the 3 units?
Barry Greenberry  Yes, we can move towards each unit having a single regime, at present. Parkhust has two. We want Camp Hill to be a resettlement unit getting inmates ready for the outside. We want Albany to develop its offender behavior programs, to better tackle sex offenders, older inmates and people in denial. All this can come about from the clustering and the foundations the last years’ work has laid.

Aren’t you creating a Titan or super prison by default - and is that necessarily a good or bad thing?
Barry Greenberry   We would not have a single perimeter wall, so it won’t be following that model.  One wall would make things a lot easier, but it isn’t part of the plan. At Sheppey I found that clustering prisons is as much psychological as physical. Once a group of prisons have a single management structure with a single chief executive, the benefits flow even though they still have their own walls. People start to think of the individual prisons as separate wings of the same establishment. Once people’s perceptions change, then so will their behavior. We had an example of this recently when I suggested to the Prison Board that we delay combining the residence teams for 6 months. They said no. Because they could see that by combining all 3 separate residence units under one integrated management structure the job would be easier to manage and produce a better result. I found that most gratifying.

You speak of wanting to become a flagship establishment. Bearing in mind the reaction to the changes you have been bringing in, is that possible?
Barry Greenberry    Yes it is, and it probably makes it more likely. By joining up the talent and sharing the good practice from all three establishments, we are more likely to become the best and have more to be proud of. We can best achieve this by taking the strategic decisions that over a period of time manage the changes that get the right things in the right place.

You say that certain parts of the prison have become ‘centres of excellence’. What parts do you refer to and how have they achieved that? And what does it mean to HMP IOW, or is it just significant to the prison that won it?
Barry Greenberry   The one I refer to is the Albany Gym; they are the first gym in the country to win the Charter mark three years in a row. This is an external accolade. They have done it by having a dedicated team who understand what the standards are and what it takes to achieve them. At present I think it means more to Albany than the whole cluster. This is because the award was first made before the changes, However, I think that in 12 months time it will be very different because then we will not have 3 gym managers for 3 gyms, we will have one gym team under one gym manager. It will be that team that will hopefully win the award, and it will be for the whole gym set up in HMP IOW. This is what I mean by spreading the excellent best practice throughout. The logic of clustering is that we will have one gym manager for all 3 sites managing all 15 staff. The benefit of clustering is that one manager will spread their knowledge and best practice across all 3. The staff will then not be tied to one site, but to the delivery of PE generally. From my perspective I have to ensure that we progress to that target incrementally and for the right reasons. Without threatening the existing high standards. We must ensure everyone trades up, not dumbs down.

Education and training. You must have a huge diversity of customer and delivery, three separate education departments, three contracts, three managers, three regimes. How are you going to cluster all that?
Barry Greenberry  Very fortunately the education contract is outsourced! So it’s my responsibility, but not my problem! The national contract with Manchester College is delivered here. Now I know there have been some difficulties, however it runs really smoothly. They took over the existing staff who delivered education prior to the contract; they tell me that they highly value the connection. What I have at present is 3 heads of Education and Skills who manages the contracts for me. They have not been affected by the clustering process yet. What will happen before the end of April is that a single head of Education and Skills will be made responsible for delivery across all 3 sites. They will answer to me. We can then accrue similar advantages to the non-contracted out parts of the regime. In 12 months you will see the aspirations become reality and the long-term benefits will have outweighed the short-term problems.

You are running a 1700 capacity prison, across 3 sites and you are on a small island. On catering you have a back-up via a cooperation agreement with the hospital over the road. What about all the other essential services and specialist staff? A few weeks back you were nearly snowed in. You cannot call for back-up quite as easily as a prison on the mainland, and all whilst undergoing a huge change process. What contingency set-ups do you have?
Barry Greenberry   It’s not the problem it seems as we are more self-reliant. That is in the nature of the people who lived on the island. During the snow most people got into work and 99% of them live on the island. There are a few valiant seafaring types who make the Solent crossing every day. We have evidence that suggests we have the longest retention of staff in the Prison Service. People come to the island and staff. The average service time here is 20 years, at the island of Sheppy it was 3 years. This is another dynamic that affects how you make the proposed changes. Because I have this huge pool of experience within the staff I know that changes will be handled by people who have the experience to do it. Most of them will have experienced major changes in working practice and regimes at one time or another. That level of experience in the staff is invaluable.

You say you want to be the Prison Service flagship... How will you measure it, what standards will you use to judge it?
Barry Greenberry   The UK Prison Service is unique in the world for being built on a premise of being a reformatory. So we will be a flagship when we are really changing prisoners’ lives. You measure that through reoffending rates, inmates getting and keeping jobs on release. Their having strong relationships, staying off drugs, and their engagement with the community they live in.  If you want to measure that your need things like key performance targets. If you interpret the targets then that’s what they are telling you anyway. We now have a weighted scorecard system called the HUB that provides qualitative and quantitive measures. So in addition to those already mentioned, we add MDT, education skills, Staff survey, prisoner survey, perceptions of what difference we are making. Not forgetting HMIP reports. Take all those together and we will know if we are a flagship establishment.

What I am fascinated to see is the improved technology that will enable us to see what is happening to the people we release. Nationally there are some fantastic figures coming out. For instance, over the last 10 years, for sentences over 4 years the reoffending rate is down a huge 31%. This is a fantastic achievement. What I want to know is the reoffending rate for this prison. We are now a big enough unit to be able to progress people from Cat B to Cat C and then to the outside world. If we could know the reoffending rates for this prison, they would be of huge value. I could then use those to say to our staff where we need to improve, what we need to change. I think over the next 5 years that data will be available. As a Governor, reducing reoffending is the only real target that matters.

That sounds like a case for considerable autonomy.
Barry Greenberry   Give me the money, the facilities and tell me my job is to reduce reoffending and then let me get on with it. If the stretch of water gives us some isolation then all well and good, but it makes no difference to the need to achieve a reduction in reoffending.

The definition of ‘purposeful activity’ has changed over the last few years. It is now skewed at education and training and no longer includes mundane tasks. What does HMP IOW do to achieve its purposeful activity and how will clustering affect it?
Barry Greenberry   When I took over we inherited 300 prisoners we do not have jobs for. 12 months clustering preparation has meant we have not focused on getting purposeful activity for everyone. The majority of the work we provide here is very good; all the furniture you see here was made in the prison workshop. The quality of the woodwork in the Albany workshop is second to none. We make clothes that support local charities, we have a print shop that supplies local business, gardens also provide work and training. We make metal work, pottery, computer and textile shops. Because our population is predominately long-term, we can develop a high quality workforce.  To get more work we are changing the way the work and skills departments operate. When the clustering is complete we will have a Director in charge of this role who will have a team that can obtain work for all three units and place it where it is best done. So we won’t have 3 people all investigating the same possibilities. The Directors’ job will be to look strategically over the next 4-5 years.  Something they are not able to do with their noses pressed to the grindstone. That ability to seek new employment will be to our advantage.

Already the relationship with our partners on the island has improved. We have been able to create a Head of Community projects, we were able to do this because we took out a layer of management made superfluous by the flattening procedure. His job is to work on small scale projects, such as putting inmates out to clear the grounds outside the walls, work in the kitchen; this has saved us £100k per year alone. They now link up with charities and do community work. This lets us show the community that the prison is making the safer community strategy work. We want to build a heritage centre similar to the one at Dartmoor which earns £150k per annum. We have a derelict building next door where we could have a restaurant for staff and visitors, be able to sell goods actually made in Parkhurst. We can also respect the history of the 3 institutions in a proper way that isn’t threatened by the creation of the great institution that HMP IOW is going to be in about 5 years. The Head of Community projects will be responsible for applying for Lottery grants, liaising with the local tourist board and the Chamber of Commerce, of which we are a member. It will also create opportunities for prisoners to gain experience in a retail environment and so aid tackling reoffending.

How would you sum up progress so far?
Barry Greenberry   The last 12 months have been difficult, however, we have created the momentum that is needed for the changes to be carried through. Over the next couple of years all this will come to fruition, however, I am fully aware that the staff are not completely on board yet. There is a sense that the increased size has distanced me and the management from the wings. So we are launching a staff engagement programme. By this time next year I will be a lot happier because the staff will have influenced where this process is going. If you ask anyone here what this job is about they will say it’s changing prisoner’s lives. That knowledge and the experience that everyone here has is why once things have settled down I have every confidence that we will become the Prison Service flagship.

What effect has all this had on you?
Barry Greenberry   For the first 12 month it was grueling, stressful work, however, since the clustering happened I have been going to the gym and I have lost 20lb! So that personifies the prison, I too am leaner, fitter and more fit for purpose!

Thank you for talking to the Review.