Ms Pauline McCabe:

I will take the first question first, relating to what is in place to contact the office. The concern Deputy Feighan expressed is one that I shared when I took up office because of the requirement for prisoners who were contacting the Prisoner Ombudsman to write registering any complaint. We have completely changed that arrangement. Now in the case of contacting the Prisoner Ombudsman, prisoners may use the telephone on their landings to make a freefone telephone call to the office. We receive the call in the office and take details of the complaint. We have further put arrangements in place such that we immediately access the prison service internal complaints process in order that we can tell the prisoner there and then on the telephone whether the complaint is eligible. If it is not eligible we can give the prisoner advice and support and encourage him to do whatever he needs to do to address the complaint internally for it to become eligible. Then, having confirmed that it is eligible, we can take steps to give it to an investigator in order that an investigation can commence.

If there is a prisoner for whom English is not his first language, we have an arrangement in place whereby it will be communicated to him in his own language. Then he can simply ring us and give the name of his country and we will immediately put him in conversation with an interpreter and they can tell us immediately about the complaint they wish to register. At that stage we will go into the system and inform them immediately whether it is eligible. Future communications with such prisoners will be in their own languages and, if necessary, our staff will take out interpreters.

There is one weakness in the system. Before prisoners can bring a complaint to us they must take it through the internal complaints process. That process was reviewed some years ago because it was widely recognised that it was not serving the intended purpose. We welcome the changes that were made. For example, the process was reduced from a three-step process to a two-step process. There was a built-in provision to ensure that once a prisoner had made a complaint, someone had to discuss it with him. Previously we found many examples of where a prisoner complained but no one discussed the complaint with him. The main thing it did not achieve - we have constantly registered the fact that we believe it is undesirable - was to address the fact that they still require the internal complaints to be made in writing. If they are struggling, we encourage prisoners to avail of the services of the Independent Monitoring Board, IMB, to assist them, where necessary. There are some instances where a trusted member of staff would be able to help, but we would rather have a system whereby prisoners who cannot write can complain without having to do so.

The second question related to how vigorously the Anne Owers report is being implemented. Is it the way I would wish? Absolutely not. People have different views on the Patten report on policing but I sat on the Northern Ireland Policing Board. When it was published, the Patten report offered an implementation plan. It was comprehensive, fully joined up, all the necessary strands had been identified and interdependent activities had been recognised such that there was a proper sequencing of the things that needed to happen.

Given the political situation, this was a little more complex because Dame Anne Owers produced her report and the political responses to it varied. There was no unanimous view that people wanted to accept the report and implement it. My interpretation is akin to that of the Minister for Justice in taking the work forward: rather than having a scenario where the Anne Owers report has been accepted, we acknowledge that this is not the case and we now move to see how we can best implement it. To some extent there has been a necessity to feel our way. It has been done in more of a step-by-step approach rather than a comprehensive acceptance. There have been consequences of that.

We make a point of meeting each of the political parties on a regular basis. We welcome the fact that over time because of the dialogue and because of people becoming involved in the issues and understanding the possible benefits of alternative approaches, we have made progress in terms of the commitment to reform. However, the problem with doing it in that way is that in terms of maximising the return on the investment we are making, the process has not been as clean as I would have liked. We are making progress step by step rather than having unequivocal support and thus having the opportunity to get stuck in to making it happen.