44% of small businesses would hire an ex-offender 

A new survey from 1st Formations reveals that almost half of small business owners in the UK say they would hire an ex-offender.

The result is based on 1,055 respondents to an original 1st Formations survey sent to tens of thousands of small businesses across the UK and from a wide range of sectors, such as tech, e-commerce, finance, education, construction, hospitality, property, and retail.

“It’s wonderful and heartening to see so many small businesses say that they’d hire ex-offenders,” says Graeme Donnelly, CEO and founder of 1st Formations, the largest company formation agent in the UK. “There are several companies like Timpson, Tesco, Pret a Manger, Co-op, and Boots who are willing to give people a second chance. Giving people a future, especially an economic future, is the best way to prevent them from returning to crime.”

James Timpson

This week, the newly elected PM, Sir Keir Starmer, announced his cabinet, which included a very significant development for the UK prison system: the appointment of James Timpson, CEO of Timpson Group and former chair of the Prison Reform Trust, as the prisons minister.

The multi-millionaire shoe repair businessman may seem like an unusual choice. Still, Mr Timpson is an unusual type of businessman, with a long-established reputation for radical and progressive workplace policy.

The family-owned business, which is among the UK’s top 10 highest taxpayers, boasts an “upside-down” management style that puts its 5,600 employees in charge. If a customer is unemployed and needs their job interview outfit cleaned, Timpson will do it for free, or ask them to make a small donation to charity instead of paying. In 2021, Timpson told workers they could claim prescription charges for hormone replacement therapy on expenses.

Most importantly, 10% of the Timpson Group’s workforce are former prisoners. When James Timpson took charge of the company in 2002, he met an inmate called Matt on a visit to a prison in Manchester. The two of them hit it off, leading Timpson to employ Matt after his release, who then became one of the firm’s most successful branch managers, thereby inspiring Timpson to make the hiring of ex-offenders a formal part of the company’s recruitment process.

“I’m proud to work for a company that’s showing the world there’s more than one way to run a company – or a country,” says an anonymous employee of one of Timpson’s branches in central London.

Prison reform

Mr Timpson is a long time advocate of prison reform who has previously warned that, in a country “addicted to sentencing”, a third of the people currently in UK jails are there unnecessarily.

“It’s a real privilege and I’m looking forward to improving the system for hard-working staff, turning more lives around and cutting crime,” Timpson wrote on X this Tuesday.

As of May, the UK prison population was 87,505, with an official capacity of 88,895. The UK has Western Europe’s highest rate of incarceration, according to the World Prison Brief database. The country is currently in the midst of an overcrowding crisis, following the failure of its prison construction initiative to keep in step with the UK’s stricter sentencing laws, which have ballooned the number of prison convictions.

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In February of this year, the Conservative government formally used a crisis measure to ease prison overcrowding, by temporarily transferring inmates to police cells, following a decision to consider releasing some prisoners 70 days before their sentences were due to end.

PM Starmer has described the state of Britain’s prisons as a “monumental failure” of the last government, promising reform. To tackle prison overcrowding, the UK Labour government is currently considering plans to release offenders after they serve just 40% of their sentence. Individuals who have been jailed for violence, sex crimes or terrorism will not be included in the scheme.

It remains to be seen whether Timpson’s appointment as Minister of State for Prisons, Parole and Probation will shift the UK’s criminal justice system from retribution to rehabilitation.