Clendon David: Urgent Debates — Serco—Decision to End Contract for Mt Eden Corrections FacilityText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Urgent Debates — Serco—Decision to End Contract for Mt Eden Corrections Facility[Sitting date: 09 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8704. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): I would have to begin by saying that if ever a Government has sat in this House on the last sitting day of a year with egg liberally smeared on its face this is the day and this is that Government. The announcement today that the contract with Serco would not be renewed at Mt Eden Corrections Facility is an admission of a failure. It is a failure that has been predicted and that was predictable. It has been glaringly obvious to everybody but the Minister of Corrections and the Government that Serco had failed at Mt Eden prison and the fact that we have delayed effectively 6 months to make this announcement to begin to terminate this contract has exacerbated that problem—made it worse.It is most unfortunate that the Minister and the Government took such a long time to concede that their privatisation model has failed. It has failed badly and we should learn from that and acknowledge it. The failure was predictable as I have said and I would like to quote briefly from the Hansard: “The Green Party remains absolutely opposed to this legislation. It is not evidence-based. It is ideological it is dangerous to the community to staff and to prisoners and it will increase costs to the public purse.” That was my colleague Metiria Turei in November 2009 speaking to the Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Bill. That was legislation ushered in by the once and future corrections Minister Collins that enabled this fiasco to emerge—that enabled the private management of New Zealand’s prisons. It has failed badly. That failure should be acknowledged.Unfortunately what we saw earlier today was I think indefensible excuses made on Serco’s behalf for why it has failed so badly. We were told that remand prisons are different; they are hard prisons to manage. We were told that there was an unexpectedly high muster that nobody anticipated when the contract was signed in 2010. We were told that it is a very difficult place to manage and of course Serco has been up against it so now we need to put the Department of Corrections in to clean up the mess. That language is remarkably at odds with the language we heard when the contract was announced and that we have continued to hear about Serco about its wonderful expertise and long experience in prison management about how it is an innovative world-class prison manager. About the only innovation we have seen at Mt Eden prison is a rather unfortunate innovation: effectively Serco has raised its hands and handed control of that prison over to the inmates. In terms of behaviour in terms of management it has simply relinquished its responsibilities. It has done its level best to disguise what has been going on there.Corrections unfortunately has also failed badly in that its monitoring of what was going on in that prison and the monitoring built into the contract conditions has also failed badly. The fact that young people teenagers were being locked down 23 out of 24 hours a day was not picked up by those monitors—there was something seriously amiss if the levels of violence of contraband and of drug use in the prison were not spotted by corrections. It has to bear some blame for this. The fact that Serco was able to carry on failing in its duty to operate a safe humane secure prison is evidence that there was a generic and overall failure in that place.There was an opportunity at least as long ago as July to accelerate the termination of this contract. We had what can only be described as an attempted tutorial in contract law from the Minister a few moments ago. Had he read that contract a little more closely he would have noticed that there were clear grounds for termination. We stood in this House in July and asked him why he had not issued a final warning to Serco. Another performance notice after that time would have enabled him to immediately terminate that contract. Instead we hear again this litany of excuses about why this appalling situation could emerge why it has been able to be dragged out for the last 6 months and why it is going to continue for another 14 months.We heard the Minister make some comments about the cost to the public purse. I have endeavoured through my office through written questions and the like to find out what has been the cost to the public purse of the step-in procedure. How much more is it costing New Zealanders to have corrections in there trying to clean up the mess while Serco continues to be paid out the amount determined in its contract? That additional cost has been borne in terms of people. How are those people being replaced in the Public Service? Is it because we are paying more overtime to the other hard-working prison officers? Those answers have not been forthcoming but we know that any costs that might have been reduced or any efficiencies allegedly that Serco has produced over the previous several years have long since been chewed up by the cost of cleaning up this mess and apparently we are to wait another 14 months before we see the back of it.Our colleague Kelvin Davis is to be congratulated I believe on his unrelenting attention to this issue on having revealed some of the worst abuses suffered by inmates and staff alike in that prison. He made the point about staffing. The private prison model will always fail to produce safe humane and secure prisons for one very simple reason: there is only one means by which a private operator can extract profit from a prison and that is to reduce the number of staff working in it and to reduce their wages and conditions. Mr Lotu-Iiga might rail at length about the inequities of unions and the like; the reality is that we need well-paid and ample numbers of staff in our prisons who have high morale in order that they can continue to do and to do well the very hard daily grinding work of being on the ground in the units engaging with inmates getting a sense when there is tension building up and seeking to diffuse that tension before it boils over into violence. This is what well-trained well-resourced and experienced prison officers can do when their morale is high and when they have good commitment to their task.None of those characteristics are present in a private prison typically. You will look at the average age profile the experience profile the payments made to them and inevitably you will see a reduction in quality of service that links directly to increased outbreaks of violence increased outbreaks of contraband and all of those negative things that we have seen at Mt Eden.I thought it most unfortunate that the Minister saw fit to denigrate and to speak ill of the unions. Between the Corrections Association of New Zealand and the New Zealand Public Service Association I think the majority of those 8000 employees he talked about in our prisons are actually for the most part union members and there is a very good reason why those sides should be unionised. It is to ensure that they are well-resourced that they are well-enough paid. I thought that it was very unfortunate that the Minister saw fit to denigrate those very hard-working men and women in our prisons who do actually put themselves at risk by intervening and by seeking to reduce outbreaks of violence. Ultimately they are on the front line and when things go wrong as they inevitably must because we are dealing with difficult people—I think it is most unfortunate that the Minister saw fit to speak ill of those employees and the organisations that represent them.I will not repeat again the litany of errors we have seen from Serco. I think we can only speculate. I had imagined that it would provide for the first several years of its contract a gold-plated service because that is the experience we have seen overseas. Private operators get into the public sector they over-deliver for a number of years get themselves thoroughly embedded and entrenched then they start winding back and then they start generating their profits. They do take a long view of that.In this instance as I say I can only speculate but I think it is fair to speculate that given the parlous financial state of the UK-based parent company Serco the message has gone out to New Zealand and indeed to Australia: “We need the cash. Get the cash out of that investment as soon as you possibly can.” I believe this is a direct result of that imperative to generate as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time. Understaffing failure to get replacement staff when Serco staff have gone ill or have taken leave—we have very credible reports that this has been commonplace. Serco already operates on a much lower staff-to-inmate ratio than the public service. When people take leave when they are ill—and often it is stress-related—those people have not been replaced. Serco has not succeeded in running a safe secure humane prison nor can it. The sooner this Government accepts that and turns its back on this flawed ideologically driven privatisation model the sooner we can return to sanity and to safety. Thank you.