James Timpson: the key-cutter taking on England’s prisons crisis

Shortly after James Timpson took over the eponymous key-cutting and shoe-mending firm from his father in 2002, he met an inmate called Matt on a visit to a prison in the Manchester area.

He liked him so much, he hired him after his release. Company legend has it that Matt has gone on to become one of Timpson’s most successful branch managers — the inspiration for the family firm’s commitment to hiring ex-offenders.

Timpson’s appointment as prisons minister in Sir Keir Starmer’s new Labour government has raised hopes among reformers that the UK’s criminal justice approach may tilt now from retribution to rehabilitation.

A longtime advocate of prison reform, Timpson has previously warned the UK is “addicted to sentencing” and that a third of the people currently in jail are there unnecessarily.

His selection appears to be a shift from the “prison works” doctrine that has guided the UK’s incarceration policy for three decades and filled its jails to breaking point.

“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 on Tuesday.

He is an “inspired” choice, Lord Ken Clarke, himself a former justice secretary, told the Financial Times.

“Prison should be for serious and dangerous offenders, and we should stop filling them up with people who are just a nuisance,” he said. “I don’t expect to agree with everything Starmer does, but this was inspired.”

Timpson takes the role at a crunch point: prisons are heaving, reoffending is rife and the turnover that has seen 14 ministers in 14 years has done little to stem either.

“This could mark the sea change in criminal justice policy that those of us of a certain persuasion who have worked in the service have been waiting for,” said Rob Fenwick, who served in criminal justice for 25 years, including as a governor grade official at Bristol prison in charge of preventing reoffending across south-west England.

Timpson served for seven years as chair of the Prison Reform Trust charity and spearheaded the creation of job hubs inside jails to connect inmates with potential employers before they are released.

Since 2019 these “employment advisory boards”, which Timpson first sold as an idea to former justice secretary Dominic Raab, have helped to increase the number of prison leavers getting jobs within six months of release from 14 to 30 per cent, Timpson told MPs last year.

When it comes to his former day job, the key-cutting millionaire has also put his money where his mouth is. Since hiring Matt, he has made it company policy to employ 10 per cent of staff from among prison leavers.

Prisons are full of people who do not want to disappoint their families again, he has said. Recruits from within them tend to be more honest, loyal and likely to get promoted. There are now 600 ex-inmates working at his firm, which has a portfolio of more than 2,000 outlets across the UK and Ireland.

As chief executive — a post he has now relinquished — Timpson had developed a reputation for being humane. He called company employees “colleagues”, made a point of getting to know them, according to one employee, and presided over training and support schemes that are rare in the cut-throat world of retail.

For people recruited from prison, this can include help in the difficult weeks after their release, such as making the first month’s rental payment, and paying for furnishing.

“We do try to help them get on their feet. But it’s not a blanket thing — it depends on their needs,” the company employee said.

Timpson takes over stewardship of the prison estate at a time when the available capacity is expected to run out within days, and the new Labour government is under immediate pressure to avert a full-blown crisis.

Jails, many of them built in the Victorian era, are bursting at the seams, with conditions routinely portrayed as inhumane in reports from the independent prisons watchdog. The service, under immense strain, is failing to provide offenders with “purposeful” activity that would aid rehabilitation, chief inspector of prisons Charlie Taylor said last year.

Timpson believes at least a third of inmates, particularly women, should not be in jail at all. In an interview with Channel 4 in February, he held up the Netherlands as an example to emulate.

“They have shut half their prisons not because people are less naughty in Holland. It’s because they have a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing so people can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their children bedtime stories, and it means they are far less likely to commit crime again,” he said. “A custodial sentence is not always the right thing . . . We need a government that is prepared to take the politics out of sentencing.”

Persuading the general public that is the case, and averting a backlash that portrays Starmer as a soft touch, will be part of Timpson’s challenge.

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The prison population in England and Wales has more than doubled to 87,000 since 1993 when Michael Howard, then Conservative home secretary, declared that “prison works”.

Successive governments have doubled down on this approach, with a brief pause when Clarke was justice secretary between 2010 and 2012.

As a result, England and Wales now have the highest per capita prison population in Western Europe, at 159 for every 100,000 people.

The number of recidivists meanwhile has remained stubbornly high, with about a quarter of people released from prison going on to reoffend.

There is some trepidation, however, within the criminal justice system about Timpson’s transition from chief executive to government minister. Some senior officials are wary that the famously hands-on manager might get too tied up in operational detail.

Yet Tom Wheatley, head of the Prison Governors’ Association, said there were advantages to Timpson’s experience, such as a likelihood to remain in post rather than seek political promotion.

Wheatley said Timpson, whom he knows personally, also showed personal commitment to the importance of giving offenders second chances. “He doesn’t just talk about employment for people on release from custody, he actually does it.”