Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that offenders find employment on release.

Supporting offenders into meaningful employment is a vital aspect of our approach towards ensuring that those who have committed a crime provide an effective contribution towards society and break the cycle of re-offending. Most offenders arrive in prison with very low levels of educational attainment, very high levels of substance misuse and often no or very poor histories of employment. Working with our Community Rehabilitation Companies, we seek to tackle each of those issues via a variety of interventions to equip people with the basic foundations to allow them to secure and hold down a job on release.