Striking a balance between punishment and compassion

Striking a balance between punishment and compassion

Interview with Phil Wheatley, head of the National Offender Management Service

By Erwin James

It’s expensive to lock people up, says Phil Wheatley, head of the National Offender Management Service. Photograph: Martin Godwin

What strikes you about Phil Wheatley is his steady manner, his dedication to his work, and the fact that he unfailingly strives to emphasise the importance of a humane and decent approach towards his organisation's "service users".

As director general of the National Offender Management Service (Noms), he controls a budget of around £4.5bn and is responsible for the welfare and supervision of around 260,000 offenders in prison and on probation. Outside the armed forces, it is possibly the biggest delivery job in government.

People who know him know that he loves his job with a passion. So why has the softly-spoken Yorkshireman decided to step down in the summer?

Wheatley, who has been in the civil service for 40 years, explains: "When I took the job on, it was decided then that it was such a big job that it would have to be put out to competition in two years. I made it clear that at the age I then was, nearly 60, I didn't compete for a job. What I didn't want to do was to apply for a job, fail to get it, and then leave as the person who didn't get something."

So would he have stayed on if he hadn't been expected to apply for his own job? "I would probably have stayed on for another six months or a year," he says vaguely.

New beginning

The Prison Officers Association will not be sorry to see him go. Its chairman, Colin Moses, hailed news of Wheatley's retirement as "an opportunity for a new beginning". And the National Association of Probation Officers has called for the ­abolition of Noms, describing the merger of prisons and probation in 2008 as "a dreadful disaster".

But the key issue is whether probation and prisons are working better under Noms. In his last annual report, chief inspector of probation Andrew Bridges pointed to the "historically significant" 5% reduction in reoffending rates in recent years among adult offenders serving sentences in the community. And he told me a few days ago that the probation service is showing "visible signs of ­tangible improvement, despite its resource difficulties". In addition, chief inspector of prisons Dame Anne Owers states in her eighth and final annual review, published today, that "prisons have improved, despite struggling with an increasing popu­lation and decreasing resources".

Under Wheatley's leadership, Noms has met or exceeded 27 of its 28 national performance targets for 2008/2009 – one of which was an £81m "efficiency saving". The target for 2009/2010 is £171m.

"No matter who wins the election," Wheatley says, "the question is how do we manage to run a safe and decent prison system and probation service that keeps the public protected with money that is already being reduced?"

He points out that he has already cut jobs at headquarters – "because there are more of us there than are adding value" – and reduced management layers by doing away with the rank of principal officer in prisons. But he maintains that "none of this affects prisoners or those on probation". He has also maximised his purchasing power by stopping individual prisons having their own contracts with suppliers, instead negotiating supplies as one big organisation. He says: "Supermarkets often give their supplier a hard time, but give their customers reduced prices. In a way, I'm trying to do the same."

Different perspective

Wheatley, whose mother was a nurse and whose father was an environmental officer, had his interest in criminal ­justice sparked at Sheffield University by criminology lecturer Tony Bottoms, an ex-probation officer who went on to become chancellor of Cambridge University's Institute of Criminology. "Tony gave me a different perspective on what working with people who had been involved in crime was like," Wheatley says.

A holiday job working for the parks department in Leeds was an earlier catalyst. "In many ways, it was one of the best jobs I ever had. A real nice group of people I worked with, and we made a difference. You looked at your park at the end of the day and it looked really good, in a way that I can't do now in quite the same way."

It also brought him close to people with troubled lives – such as people with alcohol problems, who would drift in and out of prison. "I found them really quite interesting," he says. "Somebody suggested that I might like to work in a prison, and that's what I did."

He began his career as a prison officer, but swiftly moved into management. What sort of person, in his view, makes the ideal prison officer? "There isn't a single ideal," he says. "It's got to be a mix of people, but at the core of it is the ability to understand people and to be able to ­empathise more than sympathise."

But surely one major problem is that we put too many people in prison? "That's an area I avoid commenting on," Wheatley says. "I'm a jailer. It is for society to work out what they think is right for people, realising that locking people up carries a cost to those we lock up and to their families, and a cost to society. It's expensive to lock people up.

"I think the idea of prison as a holiday camp is a very, very bad joke, but we've got to be careful we keep a balance. It is acceptable to say prison should involve some deprivation, but we've got to make sure it is not vindictive. There are 13,000 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences who will be inside for 10, 15 or 20 years. We have to offer a way of doing imprisonment that is bearable and constructive."

A recent poll indicated that 54% of the British public would vote for the re­introduction of the death penalty. But Wheatley, who joined the prison service the same year that capital punishment was abolished, says he has worked with staff who had been at the side of the hangman when the condemned were executed, and it is "not something that I have ever wanted to deal with".

Meanwhile, he wishes his successor well – and looks forward to "spending more time with my grandchildren".

Curriculum vitae

Age 61.

Status Married (to Ellie Roy, former chief executive, Youth Justice Board); two children, four grandchildren.

Lives Central London.

Education Leeds grammar school; ­Sheffield University, law degree.

Career 2008 --present: director ­general, National Offender ­Management ­Service; 2003-2008;: director ­general, Prison Service; 1999-2003:; deputy director general, Prison Service;, ­1995-99;: director of dispersal prisons (high security prisons) and became member of the Prisons Board; ­1992-95;: ­assistant director, ­Custody Group/DOC1 Division; 1990-92;: prison service, area manager for east ­Midlands; 1986-90: governor, HMP Hull; 1982-86: deputy ­governor, HMP Gartree; 1978-82: ­governor 4, HMP Leeds; 1974-78;: ­governor 4, Prison Service College:; 1970-74;: ­assistant governor, HMP Hull; 1969-70;: prison officer, HM Borstal Hatfield, HMP Leeds; ???1969: Armley prison, Leeds???.

Public life 2004, Awarded the Order of the Bath (CB) in 2004.

Interests Good wine, good food, and holidays in which to enjoy them.