The most interesting and unexpected appointment in Keir Starmer’s government is that of James Timpson, the CEO of Timpson, who is now becoming prisons minister. He’s respected across the political spectrum for his work not just in his family-owned key-cutting chain but for his work finding jobs for ex-prisoners. He started off hiring them after visiting a prison, says he ‘got carried away’ to the extent where one in nine of Timpson’s staff are ex-offenders. He has worked hard to encourage other employers to do more.
His work in the field led him to believe that many people are being wrongfully imprisoned. He has been appointed as the UK has a full-blown prisons crisis, with the system close to 100 per cent capacity and early releases being authorised simply to make room. Yet the forecasts are for thousands more prisoners to be sent to non-existent cells. Make no mistake: this is one of the potential summer crises that the Tories had been worried about.
As chair of the Prisons Reforms Trust, Timpson has very clear and (by UK standards) quite radical views, which he shared in a Channel Four interview four months ago.
I would just look at the evidence. Let me give you an example in Holland… 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.
He also has very firm opinions about how many prisoners are simply in the wrong place.
We have 85,000 people in prison, it’s going to go up to 100,000 pretty soon. A third of them should definitely be there. There’s another third, in the middle, which probably shouldn’t be there but they need some other kind of state support. A lot of them have lots of mental health issues. They’ve been in and out of prison all their lives. And there’s another third, and there’s a large proportion of women, where prison is a disaster for them. Because it just puts them back in the offending cycle.
So the new prisons minister thinks that only a third should ‘definitely’ be there, a third who ‘probably shouldn’t’ – and a third for whom the custodial sentence was a ‘disaster.’ I’m not pointing this out to say that he’s wrong: I agree that it’s best to be guided by the evidence. But all of this points to a massive reform coming. It seems unlikely that Timpson give up his job running his family company unless he was given assurances that he would be able to implement these reforms.
Katy Balls and I have just discussed this on a recording of SpectatorTV (coming out soon) and she pointed out how this liberal vision clashes with that of Shabana Mahmood, who has been confirmed as justice secretary. The below is from Mahmood’s recent interview with Katy:
‘Prisons are overcrowded, we just don’t have enough places,’ she says. ‘This country hasn’t built enough prison places for a long time and certainly not for the last 14 years.’ Labour would remedy this, she says, by building more prisons and locking more people up. ‘If you break our rules, you do have to be punished. Prison has a place.’
I once presented a Spectator Parliamentarian award to Theresa May, home secretary, and Ken Clarke, justice secretary. ‘I lock ’em up and you let ’em out’, she joked to him – except, as ever with May, she wasn’t really joking. Views differ, within parties, about what to do with prisoners. And what to do with sentencing. Let’s go back to Timpson’s Channel Four interview:
We’re addicted to sentencing. We’re addicted to punishment. So many of the people who are in prison in my view shouldn’t be there. A lot should, but a lot shouldn’t. And they’re there for far too long: far, far too long, and that’s getting worse and worse. I meet people in prison regularly who are serving sentences longer than they’ve ever been alive for already. This is common sense being ignored, evidence being ignored, because there is this sentiment around ‘punish and punish’.
A rather different message to the one published in Labour’s manifesto: ‘Victims must have faith that justice will be delivered, and criminals will be punished.’
So what will happen now? Final word to the soon-to-be-Lord Timpson.
We need a government that’s brave. We need a government that’s prepared to take the politics out of sentencing. And we need to have a government that is prepared to accept that we can’t afford to build £4-6 billion worth of prisons to house more people.
Is this the politically naive businessman talking? He has more experience than most, not just through the think tanks and agencies he has been involved with but through his brother Edward, a Tory minister.
It may be that he accepts that locking up crooks does work for others insofar as it reduces crime - even if custodial sentences may not have the best effects for the criminal. The above chart showing a rise in prisoner numbers is matched by a chart showing a decline in crime. Timpson has many other thoughts on prisons, including whether they should be judged by how many inmates are employed upon release. So it is not necessarily the case that he is out to repeat the (fairly disastrous) 2006 Italian experiment and set a third of prisoners free. A studies into that found that each prison-year served prevented between 14 and 46 crimes reported to the police. So a prisons minister may favour early release, but a Home Secretary would need to factor in the likely effect on crime.
We can say that Timpson will have some idea of the difficulty of political reform and seems in no doubt about the urgency on the almost-overflowing prisons. We will likely know fairly soon if a radical prisons overhaul will be the first surprise of the Starmer government.
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