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A coffee business employing ex-offenders is being forced to find a new home after managers revoked the contract under which Redemption Roasters prepared beans in The Mount prison in Hertfordshire.
Prison Service managers had tried to quadruple the fee Redemption Roasters pay to produce coffee on the premises, according to the company.
When the business queried the change the Prison Service revoked its contract, it said, forcing the company to find another site by February 2025.
Since the contract dispute arose in early July, the new Labour government has appointed Lord James Timpson, former chief executive of the Timpson family-owned shoe repair chain, as prisons minister.
The government is seeking to reduce the number of prisoners who reoffend in a bid to ease overcrowding in prisons in England and Wales, one of its first major challenges.
Prison leavers who find a job on release are far less likely to reoffend than those who do not, research shows.
Redemption Roasters, which works to rehabilitate offenders by providing barista skills training, will have to relocate their coffee roasting operations outside of prison for the first time because of the contract cancellation.
Ted Rosner and his business partner, Max Dubiel, founded the company, which now has 10 coffee shops across London, as part of a drive to provide hospitality jobs for prison leavers.
For the past four years, the company has been roasting its coffee in The Mount, near Hemel Hempstead.
Redemption Roasters seeks to employ prison leavers and runs “barista academies” in several facilities to prepare offenders for coffee shop work — 23 per cent of its retail staff are ex-offenders.
Rosner said The Mount called itself “the prison of opportunity” because of its dedication to the rehabilitation of inmates but that its recent move seemed to “violate that principle”.
Managers at The Mount told Redemption Roasters that the rethink of its contract terms was part of a review of all The Mount’s commercial partnerships.
Rosner said that after Redemption received notice of the intended hike in charges, the company queried the Prison Service’s rationale.
Emails seen by the Financial Times show that prison managers thought a review of the fees paid by Redemption was overdue and that the company had not provided enough opportunities for prisoners leaving The Mount.
Redemption countered that it offered in January this year to pay higher fees but managers did not accept this. They have argued that the Prison Service consistently failed to find potential trainees at The Mount who met its suitability criteria.
The Prison Service confirmed that Redemption’s contract had been terminated after a review of all commercial relationships at The Mount.
“Their response was to reply saying our agreement is terminated and please vacate the space by February,” Rosner said.
The service said that Redemption was “one of many employers” that worked with the service to deliver “important rehabilitation workshops”.
“We will continue to work with them at other prisons so offenders can continue to secure employment on release, and turn their backs on crime,” the service said.