Thank you to everyone who responded to our consultation about the revised Expectations for men in prison. We are not able to reply to each respondent individually, but undoubtedly, the final document will be better because of the advice you have offered us. We have considered the feedback received, together with other data collected from prisoners and their families, and two pilot inspections. We are now in the process of revising the draft.

Several key themes emerged:

Human rights standards

We would like to reassure our stakeholders that it has always been our intention to fully reference Expectations against the relevant human rights standards. The groundwork for this was done at the beginning of our review process and the Expectations are underpinned by our understanding of these standards.

Indicators

In the draft document we used the phrase ‘in the better prisons…’ to introduce each set of indicators. For a variety of reasons, many stakeholders objected to our choice of words and we have committed to finding an alternative.

Leadership and management

We are absolutely clear our priority is to report on outcomes for prisoners. But we are equally clear that when we are able to discern the reasons for outcomes, it is helpful if we articulate that. Our reports have always contained commentary on the actions of leaders and managers and it is our intention in future to draw these conclusions more clearly to the attention of the reader. The new Prisons and Courts Bill proposes a legislative requirement for us to ‘consider the effectiveness of the leaderships provided in relation to the prison by a) the governor or director of the prison, b) the prison officers, and c) any other persons the Chief Inspector considers relevant. It is within this context that we have written the new Expectations. Our focus on leadership and management is exclusively in the context of how these factors support or impede good outcomes for prisoners.

Preparation for release

The feedback received about this section of Expectations was particularly helpful and we have made some substantial changes which we hope will resolve concerns about involvement of family and friends, partnership working and some specific aspects of release planning.

Next steps

We intend to make a final draft available to prisons during May and to publish in July. We hope that the first inspections using the new Expectations will be in September, but this will be confirmed in due course.