The Job of the Estate Manager Defined.

Governor Gareth Edwards is the Estate Manager for three prisons, HMPs Preston, Kirkham and Buckley Hall.An electrician by trade he served 3 years with the Merchant Navy followed by a stint as a taxi driver before becoming involved with the Prison Service as a contractor re-wiring Albany prison. Impressed, he joined the Prison Service and, following training at Lancaster Castle and Wakefield Training Centre, was posted to Strangeways as a trades officer where he remained for 5 yrs.He moved to HMP Preston in November 1990, becoming a senior trades officer in 1993, later promoted to Principal Officer and in 1997 Governor 5 as Head of Works which included discipline duties.He became involved with the Northwest Area Review of Works (1999 to 2001) an extensive document which impacted on Prison Service Headquarters and became the seed of a national programme that led to improvements in efficiency and the civilianisation of many posts.

How does your No 1 governor at Preston feel about having an Estate Manager who also has responsibilities at two other prisons?

Gareth Edwards (GE) At first not a lot! Following the Review efficiency became a priority.One recommendation was that estate managers should take responsibility for additional establishments, that is look after two or three prisons.So I took over Works at Kirkham in 2002 and recently added Buckley Hall.I think it fair to say that my governor  was a little alarmed at this because he felt that the service I could offer his prison would be diminished; as did both my governors when Buckley Hall was added. I understand their feelings but I know I can offer a valuable input to their senior management teams because I am deeply involved with strategic issues in both of my original jails and will probably be similarly involved at Buckley Hall. The area coordinator,Joe Farrell,has minimised my role at Buckley Hall;although my job at both Preston and Kirkham is very much hands–on. My involvement at Buckley Hall is not so intensive......more of an auditing role.

That’s the downside,what might be the advantages?

GE Just the savings in manpower. Preston has changed out of all recognition; I felt it just seemed to happen whereas at Kirkham I feel I’ve been instrumental in bringing about a lot of change and improvements.

Like you gained experience at the first and applied it to the second?

GE Apparently I have a reputation for being a little gung-ho in my style of management, you could possibly say I’m not shy about making decisions when they need to be made and I’ve certainly gained a reputation for being quite direct and straight talking; although I don’t always see myself as being this way. I’ll certainly have to tread carefully at Buckley Hall for a while because of the different management structure there; Buckley is managed under a Service Level Agreement and is quite different to the jails I’m used to. I would like to think that my style of management has worked for me so far and my governors appear to approve because they haven’t told me to change my ways; well not too often anyway.

When I arrived at Preston in 1990 the prison held 440 and was changing from a Cat C training prison to a Cat B local prison. Unfortunately the infra-structure wasn’t in place to make it successful. It didn’t have a sufficiently high level of security and we had major problems, not only with the perimeter but also with the building itself. It’s fair to say that at that time the building and cell security was quite weak; this required a large dog section to ensure perimeter security was maintained.The kitchen was out of date,it was dirty and a shambles. Then the Home Secretary announced that slopping-out would cease and that gave rise to a major programme of work starting in 1996.

Well, that was then; can we discuss the situation now and then go on to describe how you got there? What is the capacity of Preston now?

GE We now have capacity for 842 prisoners, we have a new ‘state of the art’ kitchen able to cater for 900,every wing has been completely refurbished and security has been very much enhanced.The wing exteriors have been steel meshed and welded to the metal of the window frames. There are new and bigger windows and that makes the cells bright and airy. The heating has been replaced, the buildings rewired, new floor coverings and new cell doors fitted. New alarm and cell call systems have been installed. The blocks are now extremely modern and quite secure. A new purpose designed and built visits centre will open in the next two months which will offer the establishment greatly improved facilities.

How long was the prison closed to do all this work?

GE The prison was never closed;we managed the contracts by closing parts of it in turn.We were pressed into action by an inspection and following a report from an organisation called the Crown Premises Inspection Group (CPIG) which reported that we didn’t comply with Health and Safety legislation in that we didn’t have a smoke extraction system fitted to our residential accommodation. Consequently the roof had to be removed to accommodate the vents that this would require.That’s how the whole refurbishment started and we closed one wing at a time starting with the top floor of one of the smaller wings. It was quite difficult and required careful planning to operate a prison with a building site on top of operational residential accommodation. We covered the whole wing with scaffolding and weatherproofing and added a very secure barrier between prisoners and contractors.By careful management,a tremendous amount of good luck and close co-operation with the contractors we succeeded.We hadn’t ‘lost’ a prisoner since early 1994 and, with the alterations all complete that record, touch wood, remains intact. Other necessary works were carried out at the same time,supported by refurbishment packages from headquarters, so we completed the job as we went along.So, what began as a £1.5 million job just to comply with Health and Safety regulations became a £25 million total transformation of the prison. This was a very extensive job, was it covered by a single tender? GENormal tendering procedure was carried out with acceptance of the best package.We had some good contractors and some not quite so good.Unfortunately we were not able to retain the good ones because each wing was tendered for individually and each new firm arriving on site had to climb a steep learning curve. We at the prison were not directly involved in the choice of contractor but we did make known to HQ the firms who we thought were probably better suited to the work so it would be nice to imagine that we had a little bit of influence.The situation has changed since then and we now have a contractor on site in what is called the Framework Agreement, set out by headquarters to carry out our building requirements.From a local management point of view the scheme is working very well; our term contractor is extremely competent and helpful and very ably directed by the Prison Service senior programme manager, Duncan Deboltz..At the moment they are carrying out a refurbishment package in our old kitchen to make it into classrooms,a resettlement centre and storage for prisoners’ property due to Preston’s Reception area being woefully short on space. I’m trying to imagine running a prison and a building site simultaneously. Can you use words to give a flavour of day to day activity, perhaps how one function impacted on the other?  GEBefore any of the contracts started we set-out to minimise the disruption that was bound to take place. We maximised accommodation elsewhere in the jail by filling every nook and cranny with cells so that we could maintain our numbers at about 600. When I arrived in 1990 probably 10% of the accommodation was used as classrooms, offices, tearooms....you name it, just about anything but a cell and that stemmed from the old training prison days. Among other things we made space by building offices on the wings and reclaimed other areas being misused. This involved a significant amount of enabling works prior to the main refurbishment contracts ever starting. What sort of activity does your Works department do on a daily basis? GEThe Works department is there for proactive and planned maintenance,taking care of breakdowns, damage, vandalism and planned inspection of buildings and plant... in short we carry out the work that is requires by the governor in order to make the jail function as it should. Never a day goes by without prison management requesting something doing.The Works department employs about 15 prisoners,in fact we are an integral part of the resettlement programme although the work they do is not currently accredited because it would be to too labour intensive for the limited staff available for maintenance duties. The prisoners do an initial generic training exercise, are given Health and Safety information, shown the use of hand tools and ladders; in fact how to look after themselves. They then work as assistants to the tradesmen. Is that cost effective? GEDepends on which angle it’s looked at,the training and the work is valuable from the point of view of resettlement but from the department’s point of view the supervision of prisoners decreases the effective working day somewhat. We do however have the advantage of not having tradesmen labouring for other tradesmen which is very cost effective and offers good hands on training to our prisoners. Prisoners are particularly useful in our waste management unit and there is a self-help painting scheme. While we are talking about working prisoners I’d like to tell you about a prisoner currently at Kirkham who is an excellent time served plumber and works mainly unsupervised around the prison along with our other staff. He has done some fantastic work for us which has been recognised by the governor, positive comments entered into his prison record and has resulted in a not insignificant wage increase (for him, not me). He has just refurbished the staff toilets in the administration block among other pieces of high quality work. Of course, being a Cat B local prison we couldn’t allow that at Preston even if we had such a 1st class plumber. Self-Help Painting Scheme Can you explain the workings of the selfhelp painting scheme? GEWhen I arrived at Preston the prison was in a dreadful state,it looked like it hadn’t been painted for a number of years and there was much graffiti painted on walls.I thought that it required a lot of care and attention.I spoke to my functional head, Malcolm Boyd about the possibility of prisoners re-decorating their own cells. Many of the staff were doubtful it would work; some even said that it would be