Tolley Anne: Financial Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTolley Anne: Financial Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 04 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16294. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Corrections): Can I start tonight by congratulating the magnificent staff of corrections who have worked professionally and enthusiastically and in a dedicated manner for the financial year that we are currently reviewing. We are lucky in this country to have such a professional staff manning our prisons and looking after the 34000 to 35000 people who are serving community sentences.As the previous speaker Jacqui Dean said there is a lot happening in our prisons and with those who are serving community sentences. This Government has set them atarget of reducing reoffending by 25 percent by the year 2017. Reporting against the Better Public Services target at September of last year we had reached 11.4 percent. The current figure stands at about 11.7 percent. That is as a result of some outstanding work from our staff. So yes we have increased the amount of education that is being made available to those who are serving sentences in our prisons and those who are serving community sentences.Every person now who enters a New Zealand prison gets an educational assessment and has developed for them an educational plan. They are getting skills training they are getting on-the-job training as we have just heard from Jacqui Dean. They are getting drug and alcohol rehabilitation and that has certainly ramped up. We have three working prisons. They are structured around a normal 40-hour week that includes both work and qualification and skills training. The three youth prisons that we have also have a 40-hour work week but it is based around education and gaining qualifications.A number of outstanding things have happened throughout the last financial year. One of them that I would like to mention picks up on the previous speaker Jacqui Dean talking about working in a commercial kitchen. That is fantastic and they are learning extremely good skills and doing a great job. Rimutaka Prison in this last year took part in Visa Wellington on a Plate. MartinBosley the chef went and worked with some of the prison cooks and then delivered to the public a restaurant-quality meal as part of Visa Wellington on a Plate. It was the fastest-selling offering from Visa Wellington on a Plate and the organisers have come back again this year wanting the prison to continue with this. One of the staff was actually taken on immediately and worked in a commercial kitchen. The skills that both the waiters and the cooks learnt will stand them in very good stead I am sure.I just want to pick up on an area that is given a lot of prominence from time to time mainly from a critical point of view and that is around prisoner health. Just today I got the latest magazine from the Department of Corrections which focuses on health. I just want very quickly to take this opportunity to talk about a couple of things that are happening that have not perhaps had the prominence they deserve. First of all this Government has opened a High Dependency Unit in a prison—20 beds initially mainly for dementia patients because like the general population the prison population is ageing. We have over 100 prisoners who are aged over 70 and we are now expanding that unit by another 10 beds. It has been extremely successful.At Auckland Region Women’s Corrections Facility the health service has now taken on board the fact that it is a working prison and the women are working a structured 40-hour week. They do not want to take time off work to go and visit the nursing staff so the nursing staff have now made themselves available 7 days a week. They are making themselves available around the normal work hours for those women. It is a fantastic partnership approach to health.Whānau Ora visits on a regular basis now in the Northland prison and it visits during regular visiting times so that it can work with the families who are visiting prisoners. They are generally hard-to-reach people and it knows they regularly visit their family members in that jail. That is a very good time forWhānau Ora to be talking to them. I could go on for much longer.Report noted.