Bindra Mahesh: Urgent Debates — Mt Eden Corrections Facility—Serco’s PerformanceText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBindra Mahesh: Urgent Debates — Mt Eden Corrections Facility—Serco’s Performance[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5126. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MAHESH BINDRA (NZ First):The images from Mt Eden Corrections Facility were indeed shocking. They were scary to the extent that people switched on their TVs again to see whether they were for real. As a former senior corrections officer I am in the rare position of speaking with some expertise which the Minister clearly does not have. I started at the old Mt Eden prison building which was called a “real jail in the country”. That prison was from the colonial era and it reminded me because of its uncanny similarity of the old Mumbai central jail on Arthur Road. When managed by the Department of Corrections this Mt Eden prison worked. The systems worked. All the systems were very old but the system and the reintegration initiatives taken there did work. The security worked to the point that it was faultless. We did not have any of these things. There were hardly any cameras in those days. The prisoners were observed and monitored by prison officers themselves not by cameras. And obviously those cameras have failed except for the prisoners’ cameras which have really worked as is evident from the Facebook and YouTube videos.Prisoners have been moved from various prisons like Rimutaka Prison and certain other prisons that have been closed to accommodate those prisoners into the $400 million Wiri corrections facility. That is another Serco facility that we do not currently have videos for but it would be surprising if fight clubs moonshining and drug dealings are not present there. This is consistent with other Serco facilities from here to the United Kingdom. Given the housing issues in Auckland how many houses could Wiri have accommodated? At the prisons they have lost the opportunity by not better using the prisons that we have. Also having urban prisons means that we cannot jam cellphones which we could in rural areas and now cellphones are being used for illegal activities in prisons which we have seen in recent years.As The Telegraph noted recently the big problem for companies like Serco is delivering a level of service at a fixed price for a number of years. If the costs rise faster than anticipated then that profit can be wiped out very quickly and the company can then find itself locked into a loss-making contract for years. To circumvent that these commercial companies and corporates hire a lower number of staff so that they do not have to spend much on staffing and most of the expense incurred by any prison system is mainly for staffing. So these companies compromise on staff safety they compromise on prisoner safety and they compromise on the rehabilitation programmes. So this explains perhaps why staffing was thin on the ground. It is rich of the Minister to write in defence of a private company that makes money by doing things cheaper and that will have to do it cheaper increasingly cheaper as each year goes by.Corrections is a core responsibility of any Government so this Government has actually been shirking its own responsibility and giving it away to Serco for profits. Serco is all for profits and not for the reintegration or safety of prisoners and staff. They do not want overseas-owned publicly listed companies and corporates to make huge margins off their taxes while Kiwis get laid off in the regions to pay for it. New Zealand First says that Serco’s prison contracts should be terminated on the basis of gross non-performance. It is simply unacceptable for prisoners to have been able to start and run a fight club at Mt Eden Corrections Facility and it is even more unacceptable for that footage to actually be posted on social media. The Minister of Corrections has to be accountable for this latest incident. We have said it before: he needs to shape up or ship out.What clause of the Serco contract is preventing the Minister from terminating this contract permanently? Sadly this is what happens when prisons are outsourced to private operators. Profits are always put before prisoner and staff safety. Serco-run prisons do not have the right staffing levels. The Minister should put all the corrections facilities back into State hands properly resource them and give staff the tools to do their jobs. That is what a real Minister would be doing instead of being the “Minister for Serco”. Time and again we have asked the Minister whether he has confidence in the functioning of Serco and time and again he has said yes. The Minister has gone to the extent of singing Serco’s praises regarding Mt Eden Corrections Facility. I quote him: “It is a top prison performer on the prison performance table which measures core security internal procedures and rehabilitation.” He has continued that line even today.We must ask why the country needs to stick like glue to Serco despite so many stuff-ups. If this latest incident is anything to go by top prison performance can be counted only in Third World terms by the quality of its fight club the quality of its illegal alcohol and the quantity of its drug dealings. This Minister needs either to take up a job at Serco in the public relations department or to initiate an independent transparent and thorough investigation by the Law and Order Committee. Thank you.