Work for Serving Prisoners

Catherine Atkinson Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine Atkinson (Derby North) (Lab)]

In my early years as a barrister, I sometimes came across defendants who knew the criminal justice system better than me. Their antecedents—their list of previous convictions—was pages long, showing multiple stints in prison. I used to do both prosecution and defence, and I remember some defendants even sharing with me their top tips as to what might be the strongest arguments for bail or the best mitigation points in sentencing, because they had been through the process so many times.

I also saw offenders sentenced to custody for the first time, taking their turn in what is far too often a revolving door of prison. Sometimes, they were sent to prison far from home. It is so common to see offenders lose family ties, their housing, their job and any sense of purpose. After weeks, months or years, they would come out having achieved nothing, often with little or no money, no job and little confidence or self-worth.

[Paul Davies (Colne Valley) (Lab)]

I compliment my hon. Friend on her excellent speech. Does she agree that improving literacy in prisons is a powerful tool for rehabilitation and reintegration? Literacy equips prisoners with essential communication and comprehension skills, laying the foundation for further education and vocational training. By fostering reading, writing and critical thinking abilities, inmates become much better prepared for employment opportunities within prison and upon release. That not only enhances their self-worth and confidence, but reduces reoffending by opening pathways to stable work. Does she agree that investing in prison literacy is an investment in safer communities and more productive lives?

[Catherine Atkinson]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Investing in education and work is a key part of preventing reoffending.

Frustratingly, without rehabilitation the alternative is a return to the easiest path—one of crime. We then see the revolving door of prison take another turn. Without intervention, one in two prison leavers reoffend within six months of release. Some 80% of offending is reoffending, and reoffending costs the UK an estimated £18.1 billion per year.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady on bringing forward this debate. When I heard what she was going to speak about, I wanted to intervene: first, because it is an admirable subject, and secondly, because I fully support what she is trying to achieve. I hope that the Minister will come back to her along those lines. Does the hon. Lady agree that rehabilitation must take place in prisons, that part of rehabilitation is about giving the prisoner confidence that they can do something of value and worth, and that training in a new skill can do more for rehabilitation than group therapy sessions? That is the way to give an ex-inmate or prisoner the opportunity to do better, and that is what we should be doing.

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[Catherine Atkinson]

It is not a bona fide Adjournment debate unless the hon. Member has intervened, so I thank him for his intervention and his insight. I fully agree with him.

As well as having seen countless examples of prison having not worked, I have met former offenders who have escaped the revolving door, often through work. Many have stories like Mark’s. Mark spent 15 years in and out of prison on five separate occasions, but—with the support of a project called Jericho House in Derby—he is now clean, stable and gainfully employed.

[Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)]

The issue of work in prison is something we have considered on the Justice Committee. Separately, I have recently visited prisons, where I had the opportunity to talk to prisoners. Does my hon. Friend agree that meaningful work in prisons can not only erase the boredom that can lead to drug use but give prisoners skills that they can use to find employment when they are released from prison? It enables them to reintegrate into society, thereby reducing the risk of reoffending.

[Catherine Atkinson]

I agree, and I want to see work in prison start as early as possible—not just at the end of a prisoner’s sentence but during it. I was proud to stand on a manifesto pledge to get offenders into work. That offenders should work is a conclusion that is intuitively obvious to me, having been a barrister, and that is also empirically supported. Rehabilitation without getting into work is rare. For those who have offended, and considering the impact on the rest of us, working is far better than sitting in cells most days.

[Linsey Farnsworth (Amber Valley) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I agree entirely with what she says about the importance of meaningful work or purposeful activity in prisons. On that basis, does she share my concern that the court backlog means that there are thousands of prisoners on remand who are not required to do purposeful activity and are often sentenced to a walk-out, essentially—going back into our communities without having had the opportunity of working in prison to help with their rehabilitation?

[Catherine Atkinson]

I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution and for making that powerful point. That is why the Government are doing so much to reduce the backlog.

Work in prison also comes with a host of second-order benefits, such as improving prisoner behaviour, filling skills gaps and boosting the economy. I do not underestimate the scale of the challenge in turning around our prisons; nor do I seek to claim that we could get all prisoners in prison starting to work tomorrow. I pay tribute to the work of our current Home Secretary, who when Justice Secretary got to grips with the crisis she inherited of prisons near to complete collapse.

Over the 14 years of Conservative Government, prisoner participation in education, employment and vocational qualifications dropped sharply. As the previous Government were coming to their end, His Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons condemned the “appalling” neglect of how prisoners spend their time; far too many were locked in cells without meaningful activity. In category C prisons—closed prisons, but with lower security than those in category A or B—nearly a quarter of prisoners reported getting less than two hours unlocked each day.

[Sarah Russell (Congleton) (Lab)]

My local women’s prison is HMP Styal, and my hon. Friend will be aware of the Clink Charity, which does work in developing people’s skills in hospitality. Its ability to operate in HMP Styal collapsed completely because, as there was such a shortage of prison officers, the women were locked up for so much of the time that it was simply unable to provide the service. In other prisons, the charity is being forced to retender for contracts on a commercial basis. It is a not-for-profit that was set up to do that work. I encourage the Minister—I wonder whether my hon. Friend agrees—to review whether contracting in the Ministry of Justice is really working as we need it to in that regard.

[Catherine Atkinson]

I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution. There is some really fantastic work being done, which I will come on to, and it is essential that we find ways of enabling even more of that, because time stuck in prisons does not improve behaviour; it makes it worse. In the last year of the Conservative Government, we saw assaults on prison staff increase by 23%.

The £15 million investment in body armour and Tasers announced by the Deputy Prime Minister in recent weeks shows that he is giving prison staff the tools they need to do their jobs safely, but anything we can do to reduce the chances of violent incidents deserves our full support—that includes meaningful activities such as work in prisons—because those on the frontline in our prison system deserve our full support.

Prison officers at HMP Ranby told me what a difference it made to the behaviour of prisoners when they were doing work—when their days had purpose. As well as the improved behaviour that work for prisoners leads to, nearly a fifth of the earnings of prisoners who work out of prisons on licence goes to the Prisoners’ Earnings Act levy, which supports victims of crime. We have a Government committed to investment and reform and taking a long-term view of what is needed for a justice system that works. Our Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, Lord Timpson, was a businessman who throughout his career enabled offenders to turn their lives around and break the cycle.

I have sought to be candid about how bad things are in some of our prisons, but I also want to talk about some of the brilliant work already happening, which can be built on and scaled up. I praise the hundreds of employers who are pointing the way forward. In Derby, we have Pennine Healthcare, an employee-owned medical equipment manufacturer, and its successful experience of employing prisoners has led to its long-term vision for rehabilitation-focused employment opportunities, for itself and potentially across the sector.

Pennine supports a release on temporary licence scheme. I was proud to welcome the former Justice Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Sir Nicholas Dakin), to its headquarters in Derby. I went with him to HMP Ranby to see where Pennine is establishing a workshop, which it calls Project Phoenix. It will operate as an extension of the Derby site, and it will also prevent manufacturing from being offshored to competitors 7,000 km away in China. It could not have been more positive about the motivation and work ethic of the prisoners working for it.

That is a practical solution to meet some of the workforce challenges facing UK manufacturing, at a time when many employers share with me the difficulties that they can have in recruiting people with the skills that they need. It could create a pipeline of trained workers who can have jobs that they know how to do available to them when they leave prison. The difference that could make to offenders’ chances of avoiding another turn of the revolving door of reoffending is clear.

I am the parliamentary champion for the Rebuilding Futures Alliance—the RFA—whose mission is to break the cycle of reoffending by creating smarter pathways into work, often in rail. The evidence is extraordinarily compelling in showing that employment reduces reoffending.

[Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)]

I visited His Majesty’s prison in Hatfield in my constituency—I have among the highest number of prisons in the whole country—and it was absolutely amazing. The governor there had been creative and innovative in his thinking about rehabilitating the prisoners, working with Tempus Novo. By bringing that charity in, reoffending rates have reduced substantially, giving people hope and a second chance. That is great for their families as well, which we need always to remember, and it makes economic sense. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to get behind those kinds of initiatives to stop reoffending?

[Catherine Atkinson]

That is another fantastic initiative. I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Impressively, some of the partner agents and partner charities working with the RFA have achieved reoffending rates of under 5%.

I was told at HMP Ranby that the most popular work with prisoners was for the rail industry, though sometimes a prison struggles to find long-term rail-related work for prisoners. The RFA is working to help address that. That is particularly important in a sector such as rail, which really needs more skilled workers and is anticipated to lose 90,000 workers by 2030.

The RFA has a tracking system that allows it to see how prisoners and placements progress. The Prison Reform Trust reports that, for years, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service

“has not published figures on the number of prisoners working in custody, due to the disruption to data quality.”

We need more data and we need it to be tracked.

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

The hon. Member makes an important point about data. A colleague of mine said that when they visited a prison they asked what the reoffending rates were and the governor could not answer because reoffending rates were not being tracked. Does she agree that if prisons had an incentive to watch their reoffending rates, they would be more keen to make sure that the rehabilitation programmes made a difference and that they were not seeing the same faces time and again?

[Catherine Atkinson]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. That is one of the reasons that the RFA has created its tracking system: to have tangible evidence of the efficacy of the work that we intuitively know must be successful in preventing reoffending.

The businesses that I have met that are utilising release on temporary licence schemes or have workshops in prisons often act from a really strong ethic and a strong sense of social responsibility. There are also economic benefits and evidence—a clear business case—for providing work in prisons. I thank the East Midlands Chamber for its work with businesses in this area. I was told by their chief executive, Scott Knowles, that

“those employers that can successfully navigate the administrative burden to employ prisoners or offer placements on temporary licence, frequently comment that these members of the team rapidly become their most productive team members.”

A lot of the work taking place in prison is not for the private sector at all. Some 90% of the work at HMP Ranby is for the public sector, in a range of things including building beds, lockers and furniture for use not just in other prisons but in the wider public sector. That means that it does not have to be bought in, providing significant savings to the public purse as a result.

The success of schemes such as those that have been mentioned and those at HMP Ranby raises an important question: how can we scale up the model across more prisons and employers? The goal should be to reach a point where, upon release, prisoners can return to their communities anywhere in the country and find employment that builds on the skills that were developed inside.

[Lauren Edwards (Rochester and Strood) (Lab)]

I completely agree that all the evidence points towards the need to invest in prison training and employment programmes to reduce reoffending. Doing so is good for society and for the public purse, but does my hon. Friend agree that we should reform the system to support shorter, more modular learning in our prisons, in line with the Government’s approach to the growth and skills levy? Rochester prison in my constituency runs a successful stonemasonry course, but the length of time it takes—18 months—makes it difficult for prisoners to complete it, due to shorter sentences, prisoner moves across the prison estate, and early release.

[Catherine Atkinson]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. Having a range of options for people is really important, but she also makes it clear that shorter sentences can prevent rehabilitative work being done, which is why it is so important that we are trying to move to a presumption against shorter sentences.

A range of things can be done, and there needs to be a co-ordinated effort to ensure consistency and opportunity across the prison estate. Perhaps that could involve asking different Government Departments to look at the goods and services that they procure from prisons, to ensure that there is that option, or building on the brilliant work being done on procurement to ensure that employers who provide meaningful work opportunities to prisoners see the wider benefit, thereby reinforcing the Government’s commitment to rehabilitation and reducing reoffending.

There is a popular myth that the poorer the quality of a prison, the greater the punishment, but that has been well tested over the last 14 years. His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons suggests not only that purposeless prisons are harmful for prisoners, but that that harm could extend to wider society. We cannot isolate, bore or humiliate someone into being rehabilitated. It is far better that they are able to make amends through work. The idea that giving more people—perhaps people who have never had it—access to good work might strengthen society comes naturally to me as a Labour MP, because Labour is the party of work. Without it, boredom, frustration and despair can thrive.

Work in prisons benefits prisoners, yes, but it also works for those who risk their life and their safety as frontline prison officers and probation officers. It works for companies, and not just because they are keen to do their part for society. It can help us to meet the skills challenges that industry faces, to onshore manufacturing jobs, and to create more funding for victims through the Prisoners’ Earnings Act 1996 levy. Job or jail? If we truly want to break the cycle of crime, and give people in my constituency of Derby North and across the country the safety and opportunity that they deserve, this is how we begin.