Work for Serving Prisoners

Lee Pitcher Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[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.