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UK ministers are pressing employers to train and hire ex-offenders in a drive to help prison leavers plug labour shortages and move into stable work when they complete their sentences.
Damian Hinds, prisons minister, said the Unlocking campaign was a “golden opportunity” for companies to fill vacancies and support prison leavers, while helping cut rates of reoffending.
Similar campaigns run by the prison service’s New Futures Network, which connects prisons with employers, have contributed to a sharp improvement in the proportion of ex-offenders who find work within six months of their release. This has risen from 14 per cent in April 2021 — a figure that would have been depressed by the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns — to more than 30 per cent in March of 2023.
But Helen Berresford, director of external engagement at the charity Nacro, which supports people in the criminal justice system, said that while outreach to employers had led to real improvement, there were still “huge challenges” in prisons that were failing to provide opportunities to work or learn on-site.
A report by the chief inspector of prisons, published last week, found that far too many facilities were failing to offer inmates education, training or work, instead leaving them “languishing in their cells”.
In category C prisons especially — those designated for training and resettlement — the inspectors had found “empty workshops, overgrown farms and gardens, broken greenhouses and demotivated and disillusioned prisoners either locked in their cells or aimlessly stuck on the wing”.
Employers who have hired prisoners to work on day release through the Unlocking initiative say they have been impressed by their motivation and work ethic and have found them trustworthy.
But there are still big barriers — in particular, on housing — preventing ex-offenders taking stable work.
O’Neill & Brennan, a supplier of labour and logistics solutions to the construction sector, has hired 180 prisoners over the past two years to work on day release at sites around the country. Barry Mitchell, logistics operations director at the company, said it would be happy to offer many of them full-time work when they left prison, and help them move into supervisory roles or train in specialisms.
“They’re really hard-working and reliable . . . They all want to change their life,” Mitchell said. But the company has found many of its recruits unable to take up a permanent job after their release because they cannot find housing in the right area — to the point where one ex-offender ended up living with his project manager for six months until he could find his feet.
However, with the people trained or hired through the Unlocking scheme numbering only in the hundreds, the programme is unlikely to make any appreciable difference to the UK’s labour shortages.
The prison service said it was “investing unprecedented amounts in education, employment and other support” while creating a new education service within prisons to help offenders gain skills.