The prison service is open for business, says the boss of the famous shoe repairer, and he’s proud to say that 36 prisoners have been recruited in the past year. Michael Taylor went to meet him at HMP Forest Bank.
With his big grin and enthusiastic demeanour, James Timpson would turn heads in most high streets. But we’re in Her Majesty’s Prison Forest Bank in Salford and he’s copping a fair amount of banter. Manchester City might have won the FA Cup (he’s an avid fan) but Timpson attracts comments and calls to “giz a job”. He takes it all his stride, as he’s heard it all before.
Timpson’s shoe repair business operates a workshop inside the prison and he’s a passionate advocate of working to rehabilitate offenders; he’s been doing it for eight years. He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, which widened his infectious grin even more than City lifting the FA Cup.
“A lot of companies put work through prisons but don’t want to talk about it because they worry about what their customers might say. But the prison service is encouraged to be open for business. Commercially this is good for us,” he says, but admits it started as a well-intentioned act of community outreach. “We give them a job, put them in a uniform and give them a chance. If they don’t rise to it, we kick them off. This isn’t very cuddly, it’s very practical,” he says.
Timpson is relaxed around the prisoners. For me, it’s a totally new experience, so his easy presence is reassuring. It is full of surprises: the inmates are wearing their own casual clothing, there are female officers, the prisoners wander around in restricted areas. HMP Forest Bank is a category B prison, operated by private provider Sodexo Justice Services. The prisoners I meet and see are nearly all young white men from Greater Manchester.
If they want to get on, they have to work for their privileges. I met young men who are nervous about talking about their situation – one tells me he’s in for knife crime, as he uses a sharp tool to repair the stitching on a pair of riding boots. Another, with heartbreaking honesty, relays how he’s never paid tax in his life, never held down a job and been in and out of prison all his life. Another was caught robbing a house when he was “off his head”.
It’s an unspoken and little-known fact that prisons are some of the biggest workshops in the British economy and the 80,000 prisoners in the system are a source of labour. The prison service is the UK’s biggest laundry and the second-biggest printer. For a multitude of reasons many companies don’t want anyone to know they use the prisons, but in this way and in so many others, Timpson is different and is proud of it.
The Timpson Training Workshop at HMP Forest Bank opened in 2010 and 36 prisoners have been interviewed and gained employment with Timpson. The company also has a similar set-up in Styal women’s prison with his Max Spielmann business. Their involvement works on two levels – the workshops train offenders for a chance to work for the company when they are released; but also jobs that take a long time, such as welting – intricate hand stitching of leather uppers, bags and briefcases – are completed inside. The business also has schemes in other prisons, for other parts of the business.
“There have been disappointments, and the worst ones are those that start so well,” he says. Life on the outside can be a shock to the system. But Timpson says there have been plenty of disastrous recruits using conventional channels too, so to have 75 per cent of former prisoners still working for the business after a year is a success.
Timpson, like his father John, is fiercely proud of what his business has achieved and very much maintains the ethos – it was founded as a shoe retailer by James’s great, great, grandfather William Timpson in 1865, then expanded into repairs in 1903. The business is run on lighthearted, folksy wisdom and a system called “upside down management” where the shop managers have freedom and autonomy as long as they “put money in the till and look the part”. In 2010 the business took £135m in its tills, and notched up profits of nearly £8m. They employ 2,600 people.
Although at the head of a business like this, Timpson still speaks with searing honesty and a firm lack of sentiment to the prisoners in the workshop. And he certainly doesn’t expect any deference. While there’s been a recognition that what he has done has an important social function, he’s honest about what’s he’s getting out of it – the prisoners get paid just £12 a week. He hopes the prospect of a job with him at the end of it all will repay his faith with loyal service.
“The prison population is split in three. A third are mad and bad, a third have problems with drugs and health. The final third are just people who’ve messed up – that’s who we’re interested in. We’re taking the cream. It’s the only place in the world where we can blatantly discriminate,” he says.
“Look at it this way: the biggest employer of former offenders is the National Health Service, then Tesco. They just don’t know it. Because we recruit inside the system, then we get a thick file on these people. We know everything about them from the day they were born.
“Eighty per cent have had no father figure. Eighty per cent failed at school. They are mainly young. Look around,” he says, “there aren’t many elderly people in prison, partly because being a criminal is exhausting, it’s hard work and they realise it’s no life at all. When we take them on they feel like they’ve had a second chance and there is no upper limit to what they can achieve.
“They are often excellent sales people. Some of them had six or seven mobile phones to run their ‘businesses’ – it was like being a trader in the City of London. Being a criminal requires a certain work ethic.”
Also in: July 2011
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