Andrew Turner was on his feet in the House of Commons yesterday during Prime Minister Questions (PMQs) asking about a recent budget change that sees the Isle of Wight Primary Care Trust (PCT) being responsible for the cost of keeping prisoners secure when they are being treated in hospital.
The cost of guarding Island prisoners costs in excess of £2m over two years – that’s prison escorts (for out-patient prisoners) and bed-watchers (for in-patient prisoners) – excluding any cost of medical treatment.
The PCT only receives around £1 million over that two year period, so they end up with a £1.15m short fall.
This shortfall comes directly out of the PCT’s £125 million/year budget to treat people.
April last year, Andrew Turner went to see Ivan Lewis, Prisons Minister, after the PCT alerted him that there would be a short fall. The Minister conceded that they may be a problem and would look into it. To date, nothing has occurred.
The question Andrew Turner asked was, “Island prisoners must be guarded when they need health care outside prison. By the end of this year, the local health budget will have been exceeded by more than £1 million. That could pay for an extra 15 nurses. Will the Prime Minister ensure that this inequity is corrected urgently?”
Here’s a video of Andrew Turner asking the question, followed by the frankly Teflon-type response from Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
Following PMQs Andrew Turner said, “I am very concerned about this shortfall. To put the £1m into context it could pay for an extra 15 nurses over the two years and the whole budget for St Mary’s hospital is £125m per year. This is not an unforeseen problem – I organised a delegation from the Island’s health service to raise these issues with the then prison minister Ivan Lewis MP back in April last year. He promised to keep this under review – that seems not to have happened.”
He continued, “I am pleased that the Prime Minister has indicated that he will ‘deal with’ this issue but I will be chasing him up on this. It is simply not fair that the health service for my law-abiding constituents should suffer because the Home Office massively under-estimated the cost of guarding prisoners. It is not a question of extra resources – we all know that these are difficult times – but the Government should make sure that Islanders do not suffer simply because we have a high prison population here.”
image and video: BBC Parliament and mySociety
