From the chapter ‘Well-being‘
Iqbal Wahhab OBE, Entrepreneur, philanthropist and restaurateur, and founder of The Cinnamon Club and Roast
It costs us £50,000 to prosecute someone and to place them in jail. In London it costs us a further £48,000 a year to keep one person locked up.[i]
Around 68 per cent of young prison leavers re-offend within a year and are back in prison again,[ii] recycling that number over and over.[iii] But for those who find a job on release, the re-offending rate drops to 12 per cent. With a former partner at Deloitte, I calculated that for every prison leaver in employment on a salary of £20,000, the state saves just short of £78,000 a year. How much money are we draining away and how much are we failing to spark better futures? It is the damaging end result of government failure.
For years, calls for National Insurance or tax breaks for employers recruiting from former prisoners have consistently been rejected by government for fear of being seen as ‘soft’ on crime. Politicians please note: a Prison Reform Trust survey found that only 7 per cent of respondents thought that having more people in prison was the best way of dealing with crime.[iv] You will not lose votes by acting on this. How scared are you of the Daily Mail?
Businesses helping kids feel valued
So far, so bad. Let’s go back a few steps and devise an initiative that politicians and policy makers will find much harder to resist, and consider how we stop children drifting into crime in the first place. How do we get those kids feeling valued from the outset even, in fact especially, if they feel society has disregarded them?
Quietly, perhaps too quietly, small businesses are already actively engaged in the communities around them. A few years ago, the campaigning group peak b undertook a survey of 1,000 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and found that over three-quarters support local organisations – including charities, schools and food banks – despite the everyday challenges that people face running their own enterprises.[v]
Businesses are pushing an already open door in terms of engagement. Mounting evidence shows that consumers want to buy from meaningful brands and purposeful small businesses – those that actively see their role in helping fix our social and environmental problems. Given this, a way to recognise businesses that actively engage with schools and encourage children to open up their minds to the prospect of one day working there, or indeed of opening their own enterprise, would be a win-win opportunity.
I recall being part of Peter Jones’ EntFest 2018 programme – 1,000 school children from all over the country descended on the University of Buckingham, where a group of business folk (including Mr Lindley!) spoke with and speed-mentored kids who had come brimming with entrepreneurial dreams. I remember that at the end of what was an exhausting yet exhilarating day, I remarked how great the levels of enthusiasm were. Yet another of the speakers brought me back to earth. ‘The problem as I see it,’ he said, ‘is that the school system will sap most of them from thinking they can achieve their dreams.’
But I’m hopeful that businesses working alongside schools can help keep those dreams alive. Business leaders could go into schools to tell the stories of how they made it. Pupils could be invited on to business premises to give a flavour of what a world of work looks like and the dignity it empowers people with. The parents of those kids will appreciate what those businesses have done for them, and reward us with their custom where possible and talk about us in their social circles.
An Investors in Children and Young People award
The ask of government here is simple and inexpensive. In 1991 a project was set up called Investors in People – an awards system assessing how well businesses set about making their workplaces as desirable a place to be as possible. It’s a rightly rigorous process and my last business, Roast, became the first restaurant to ever achieve the coveted Gold Standard.
Now is the time to create an Investors in Children and Young People award. Assessment would cover a range of behaviours. Internally it would look at how employers approach childcare provision, flexible hours helping parents find work and manage to look after their kids too, especially for women returning to work. Externally it would assess a business’s activities with local schools, including the offer of work experience and job opportunities through apprenticeships for school leavers.
Winning such accreditation would enhance a company’s profile and also empower the creation of new forms of entrepreneurship where a better focus on children can enhance commercial success.
A case study to prove to point: Crane’s story
Some children are facing challenges many would find hard to imagine. A few years ago, I helped a friend set up a social enterprise called Mum’s The Chef, which enabled mothers from Croydon to get paid work for the first time by putting them through catering school so they could then set up a food delivery business. It was fascinating to see the women in the team so quickly become and feel empowered, but many of them had terrible back stories. This is one of them that I’ll call Crane, a woman in her 20s.
Crane’s mother was a drug addict and had been all her childhood in London. Her mother couldn’t afford to pay for her drug habit, and so, from the age of nine, Crane was offered up to the dealers for sex to fuel her mother’s habits.
For two years, Crane was sexually abused, and then eventually, aged 11, she was hospitalised after being violently assaulted for refusing. From there she went into care and on to a foster home. She tried in early adult life to live independently, but because of a government policy known as the benefit cap, she couldn’t get enough money to pay for her rent. Mum’s The Chef stepped in, gave Crane training and then work in shifts, which enabled her to also look after her children and avoid eviction.
With the pandemic, a Mum’s The Chef’s café could no longer operate, but instead of throwing in the towel, they pivoted by supporting Crane and other mums to obtain council permission to cater from their own homes, and secured them Uber Eats and Deliveroo contracts. One of the mums is now making enough money to go and visit Jamaica twice a year, and Crane has now earned enough to put a deposit down for a home for her and her children to lead a more secure life than she had previously been able to.
The plan is now to regroup these mums to work a new cloud kitchen food delivery business jointly with other victims of abuse, of which there are, sadly, too many.
Getting mothers off Universal Credit and into well-paid work can help to break the cycle of poverty, allowing them the opportunity to hold their heads high, and providing the groundwork for their children to be better placed to flourish. The fact that Mum’s The Chef specifically recognised that shift work and working from home helped Crane and other mums’ childcare challenges, and acted to support them to help their children have that more secure life, is uplifting and speaks volumes for that business.
When that new catering venture takes off and wins an Investors in Children and Young People award, who wouldn’t want to order their next delivery from them? And which other small business wouldn’t want to be the next Mum’s The Chef and share similar recognition, community trust and subsequent sales growth potential?
Notes
[i] MoJ (Ministry of Justice) (2020) ‘Costs per place and costs per prisoner by individual prison’, Information Release, 29 October, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/929417/costs-prison-place-costs-prisoner-2019-2020-summary.pdf
[ii] Beyond Youth Custody (no date) ‘Youth justice facts and figures’, www.beyondyouthcustody.net/about/facts-and-stats
[iii] In the year to December 2020, 8,000 people serving a sentence of less than 12 months were re-admitted. See Prison Reform Trust (2022) ‘Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile: Winter 2022’, https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/publication/bromley-briefings-prison-factfile-winter-2022
[iv] Prison Reform Trust (2022) ‘Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile: Winter 2022’, https://prisonreformtrust.org.uk/publication/bromley-briefings-prison-factfile-winter-2022
[v] peak b (2018) Small Business Community Impact, https://peakb.uk/downloads/peak-b-small-business-comunity-impact-report-sep-2018.pdf