For those unconvinced that prime minister Keir Starmer really wants to fix Britain, look no further than his appointment of James Timpson as prisons minister. Timpson, chief executive of the eponymous family business best known for shoe fixing and key making, is not an MP and has been parachuted into the job by Starmer with a peerage and a seat in the Lords.
We’ve seen this done recently, but in a cronyist Conservative way that diminished the reputation of politics. Rishi Sunak lobbed David Cameron into the Lords so he could appoint him foreign secretary. But there is a big difference. Cameron was the discredited former prime minister who had enabled Brexit, helped destroy the country, then “scuttled off” to France to put “his trotters up” (in the words of Danny Dyer).
As for Timpson, he is a businessman and chair of the Prison Reform Trust, with an outstanding track record of supporting ex-offenders in work and a commonsense radicalism in his approach to justice. What makes the appointment so surprising, and hopeful, is that his vision of justice is quite at odds with the “bang ’em up and build more prisons” rhetoric that the Labour party was spouting in the buildup to its landslide general election victory.
The Prison Reform Trust does what it says on the tin: it campaigns for reform of the prison system. Rather than jailing more people, this means jailing fewer of them. It means not giving custodial sentences for petty offences to parents who shoplift to feed their children or to people with drug and mental health problems who should be getting support in hospital or the community rather than being jailed, when their problems invariably get worse, sometimes to the point where they take their own life (in the 12 months to September 2023, 92 deaths in English and Welsh prisons were self-inflicted). It means not introducing a bill that could criminalise homeless people for smelling.
Britain’s prisons are dangerously close to capacity. At the start of May the prison population in England and Wales was 87,505; the official usable capacity is 88,895. Last month, Labour pledged to deliver 14,000 new prison places to tackle the overcrowding crisis if it got into government. But Timpson does not believe this is the solution. Far from it. On Channel 4’s Ways to Change the World podcast in February, he cited the Netherlands as a good example of what prison policy should be like. “They’ve shut half their prisons. Not because people are less naughty in Holland – it’s because they’ve got a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing. People can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their kids bedtime stories – and it means they’re far less likely to commit crime again.”
In that interview, Timpson said a third of prisoners should definitely be jailed, another third should probably not be there and “need some other kind of state support”, while for the final third prison is “a disaster … because it just puts them back in the offending cycle”. Timpson also said that the country is “addicted” to sentencing and punishment. “I think we need a government that’s brave, prepared to take politics out of sentencing, and is prepared to accept that we can’t afford as a country to build £4-6bn worth of prisons to house more people,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Then there is the national disgrace that is the indeterminate prison sentence known as IPP (imprisonment for public protection). Although the sentence was abolished in 2012 after the European court of human rights ruled that it was a breach of human rights, almost 3,000 prisoners are still serving IPPs. As of December 2022, all but 35 IPP prisoners were past their tariff (the minimum term to be served in prison). At the Prison Reform Trust, Timpson has campaigned for resentencing as recommended by the justice committee in September 2022. This would mean that prisoners who have served their tariff would be released. Starmer’s Labour was not brave enough to support resentencing when it was in opposition.
Timpson has put his money where his mouth is – literally. The Timpson group, founded in Manchester in 1865, employs more than 600 prison leavers, making up approximately 10% of the company. In 2019, Timpson told the former Guardian prisons correspondent Eric Allison that only four of the 1,500 ex-offenders he had employed had gone back to prison. An astonishing figure. “If I recruit someone from prison they’re more honest, stay with me longer, more loyal, and more likely to get promoted. If you walk around a prison, you get people who just want a job, they don’t want to disappoint their family again,” Timpson told Krishnan Guru-Murthy on the Ways to Change the World podcast.
As prisons minister, Timpson is now in the perfect position to show the way forward – to fellow ministers, to entrepreneurs, to the populists and bigots who want to see ever more people locked up. And the beauty of the ideas he championed at the Prison Reform Trust and as CEO of the Timpson group is that they are not just progressive, they are also cheap. In fact they save money (hear that, Rachel Reeves!). In 2022, the average cost per prisoner was £48,409 a year. If Timpson is now allowed to put his beliefs into practice, he will transform prisons, the lives of ex-offenders and society at large.
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Simon Hattenstone is a features writer for the Guardian