Gradually the Starmer intentions and attitudes take shape. The cabinet is much as expected, but elsewhere the PM made unusually productive use of that oft-discredited mechanism, the Lords. So here’s Richard Hermer, an experienced KC, as attorney-general, Sir Patrick Vallance as science minister and, most strikingly, James Timpson as the minister for prisons, parole and probation.
Recruiting Timpson could be political and practical genius. This is the chief executive of a five-generation family business: 2,000 stores and 119 franchises carrying out shoe, watch and phone repairs, cutting keys, engraving, dry cleaning, and printing photos. He refers to his 5,600 employees as “colleagues”.
Timpson, the company, is based in Manchester and deeply embedded in the nation; it’s hard to find anything more reassuringly useful, workaday, efficient and familiarly British. Timpson co-chaired Theresa May’s council for small business, scale-ups and entrepreneurs. His writings about workplace morale, flexibility and welfare breathe a rare spirit of ethical capitalism, head, heart and collaborative energy. He makes profits, values his employees and fixes things. What more helpful spirit for neurotic post-pandemic Britain?
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Above all, who fitter for this ministry? Timpson pioneered giving jobs to ex-offenders, chaired the Prison Reform Trust and founded an advisory board linking prisons with employers. His success inspired companies such as Iceland and Greggs to do the same. He expresses a good-humoured, unsentimental practicality, avoiding the traps of left-liberalism: mawkish performative pity or vague helpless blaming of “society”. He likes work, knows the dignity and satisfaction it can bring and how a loss of purpose is crippling.
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It is worth mentioning that he (like his brother Edward, the former MP and children’s minister) grew up in a philanthropic family that fostered 90 children and adopted others. From childhood he saw the effects of dysfunction and poverty.
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Our prisons are a vengeful, often unredemptive mess. They are also full: the population will soon reach 100,000 souls, too often condemned to squalor, boredom and the risk of radicalisation. A quarter reoffend after release. Reformers, including Timpson, often cite the estimate that only a third of inmates actually need to be locked up, a further third could be better employed doing efficient community sentences as they do in the Netherlands, and the rest mainly need support through mental illness or personal chaos.
Timpson admits to encountering problems and reoffences at first, but now says hardly any ex-offenders in his stores get into trouble. They are, he finds, “usually more honest, more loyal, stay longer and are likely to get promoted”. Not that he is a starry-eyed sentimentalist: “In crude terms, we don’t recruit men under 25 from prison because they’re not mature enough, won’t stay, or get back into their old ways. But meeting people in prison, you see how they get to a point where they just want a job and don’t want to disappoint their families again.” Women, interestingly, are different, and he employs them from age 19.
He once summed up his general attitude to staff, wherever they come from, with two demands: “Look the part and put the money in the till.” In return, his policies are benign: time off for family crises and events, workplaces made welcoming and even fun, routes to promotion. His training procedures (some inside or for day-release inmates) are interesting too: some go right up to degree level but, in cases of low literacy, Timpson developed practical routes and picture-based manuals.
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The company’s “upskilling” record is impressive. Its dry cleaners offer free suit-cleaning to people in need before job interviews. Everything Timpson says and does has been humane, practical, cheerful, profiting all sides. I have visited prisons over years: surrendering phones, being searched and sniffed for drugs, wincing at clangs and clinking keys, sitting in visiting halls with inmate acquaintances or just supporting educational prison-arts initiatives from opera to needlework.
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I admire these, not least for their determination to pull in outside audiences and make us contemplate the harsh unseen world we pay for. I have been inspired by some prisons, depressed by others, and developed a great respect for the undervalued profession of prison officers, particularly those joining in with their charges (one notably played Officer Krupke in West Side Story).
There have been conversations. I never forget one performer in the London Shakespeare Workout shaking his head, saying, “Leontes, what a plonker!” and relating it to his own past. Whenever I look at our disgraceful statistics and demographics of those most likely to end up in prison I think of a man in Brixton describing his “enhanced thinking skills” course and how it revealed to him that actions have consequences.
He bore the marks of one who had never been offered that guidance in childhood and struggled with literacy while observing, rather wistfully: “They say there’s good stuff in books.” Suddenly combative, he asked: “Why d’you come in here? Not your job, is it?” Taken slightly aback, I found myself saying: “It sort of is. I just hate the waste of people.” He laughed. Got it.
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It doesn’t take enhanced thinking to see that it is neither humane nor practical to spend £50,000 per head, per year, to make innumerable and potentially harmless people greyer, angrier, more depressed and likelier to relapse.
So good luck and goodwill to James Timpson. He has much to contend with, from public prejudice to the Treasury. But he’s a man who sees when things need fixing, and sets about it. A promising appointment.
