James Timpson has been lauded for his maiden speech to the House of Lords after he was appointed Prisons, Parole and Probation Minister.
The ex-Timpson CEO took to the floor after he was handed a key role in Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet, with UK prisons in a state of disarray and desperately overcrowded.
His family-owned retail business has a long-standing commitment to helping retrain ex-offenders and giving them jobs in its stores.
Its latest annual results revealed it had invested £542,000 in such schemes in the last financial year.
Timpson also chaired the Prison Reform Trust and founded an advisory board linking prisons with employers, sharing his extensive experience of working with ex-offenders and running workshops inside prisons.
Speaking in the House of Lords, the new Cabinet minister said:
“I found over the years that when you care for people, they care back.
“It is an approach I intend to bring to this job, in how I support the thousands of frontline prisons and probation staff working hard in the system every day to keep the public safe.”
Watch the speech in full below:
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