Prison transporter accused of breaching human rights
Chief Inspector of Prisons has accused the firm tasked with transporting inmates of breaching their human rights.
GEOAMEY has long been criticised for its handling of the contract to transport people between court, prison and noncourt appointments such as medical visits, with Justice Secretary Angela Constance saying in January their work was “utterly unacceptable”.
The firm’s performance has been inconsistent in recent years, with the quarterly number of missed appointments varying wildly between November 2021 and September 2023, according to a letter from the Scottish Healthcare in Custody Oversight Board.
Between November 2021 and January 2022, 690 appointments were missed, a figure which dropped to just 53 and 42 in the following two quarters, before spiking to 356 and 819 in the two quarters between August 2022 and January 2023.
Again, the figure dropped dramatically to 88 and 209 respectively in the following two quarters, rising again to 826 in the three months up to September last year.
Three of those visits, according to the Chief Inspector of Prisons for Scotland Wendy Sinclair-gieben, included an inmate with stage four cancer who missed a trio of “critical” appointments, leaving her “deeply shocked”.
“Over my tenure there have been issues with fluctuations in the prisoner transport providerwith, in my op in ion,u na cs cot land’ s ceptable drops in performance leading to human rights breach es that I have repeatedly raised with the prison service and at times with the Cabinet Secretary for Justice,” she said before the public audit committee yesterday.
The chief inspector raised concerns every year between 2020 and this year relating to how the contract was being carried out.
“In 2023, I raised the issue twice andi have never seen such poor performance as by the end of 2023 – it was truly shocking,” she said .“You had appointmentsin some prisons that were more routinely cancelled than they were met and you had real problems.”
She added: “As a result, I think it's a significant challenge to human rights, a financial risk.” The contract, Ms Sinclair-geiben said, has not worked “since inception”.
“It hasn’t provided the service to the court and non-court appointments that you would want to see,” she said.
“So therefore, there must be a flaw either in the commissioning of the contract, or the contract itself or the management of the contract – there just must be, otherwise it would have been resolved and worked.”
The chief inspector acknowledged that GEOAMEY was doing well in other jurisdictions but told the committee the contract in Scotland was very different to elsewhere.
A spokesman for the contractor said: “GEOAMEY is committedto providing a reliable, trusted and effective service to our justice sector partners and those in our care.
“The Audit Scotland report stated clearly that the geoamey contract was run to acceptable levels until the Covid pandemic changed the operating model and severely impacted our ability to recruit.”