In 2014, Steve Freer and Val Wawrosz, two prison officers at HMP Leeds with sixty years’ experience between them, decided they had had enough of seeing the same faces returning time aftertime to jail. Too often they found the children of prisoners also turning up on the wings as inmates. They set up Tempus Novo, a charity dedicated to helping ex-offenders to find work and reintegrate into the community on their release. Since then they have placed more than 1,222 into jobs with companies including Maersk, John Lewis and GXO. Only 39 have ended back in prison, a 97 percent success rate.
The secret, Freer says, is a personalised approach and ongoing relationships. Wawrosz says:
"What we do is get ex-offenders who want to change their lives, we get employers who want to help change people’s lives and we put them together. We support both parties, not just the ex-offender but the employer as well for twelve months. When we place somebody into work we make sure that everything’s in place for them. We make sure they can get to work, we help them with their ID and bank account. Then the night before they start our caseworker will be ringing asking, ‘Have you got everything ready for the morning? Do you know what bus you’re catching and what time you have to leave?’ It’s holistic support."
At the same time the charity contacts the ex-offender’s line manager to make sure everything is going well. Freer says:
"We are there pretty much 24/7. You deal with people and you have built that relationship up so you don’t want them to fail. The government is always, how quick, how cheap and how big? Tempus Novo took the opposite approach. We looked at what was working, we looked at what wasn’t working and we learnt from it. We built a system where each case worker has a maximum caseload of 50, which is probably a third of what a probation officer tends to work with."
The emphasis is on sustainable employment.
"We won’t work with just any company that thinks it’s bums on seats and cheap labour," Freer says. "These are proper good jobs with progress, backed up by the fact that 20 percent go on to get promoted."
The scheme costs £3,000 for each year-long placement, compared with £52,000 for a prison place.
Freer says: "We’ve now got companies who, because of the quality we provide, pay us £3,000 per person for everybody that successfully gets out of their probation."
This article was originally published in The Times Crime & Justice Commission Report (see page 50). We're delighted to see one of our partners featured in this report - an important piece of research put together as the catalyst for policy change!
