For civil servants working across justice, welfare and regional economic growth, the statistics on reoffending are hard to look past. The Ministry of Justice estimates that reoffending costs the UK around £20.9bn a year. With the prison population at record levels and probation services under sustained strain, every person who reoffends adds directly to a system that is already struggling to cope.
The evidence on what reduces that pressure is clear: according to the latest published data by the Ministry of Justice, fewer than 20% of people who were in employment six weeks after release went on to reoffend, while those who were unemployed were almost twice as likely to do so.
Employment is not a peripheral part of rehabilitation; it is one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways of reducing demand on prisons, courts and probation services. Creating employment opportunities for former prisoners not only helps to cut reoffending and eases pressure on the criminal justice system, but it also supports the Government’s wider ambitions for economic growth in every part of the country. By connecting people to sustainable employment, these programmes help create high-quality jobs, address local skills shortages and unlock talent that might otherwise be overlooked.
Knowing that employment reduces reoffending is not the same as making it happen at scale. That is the gap Serco's Pathways programme, delivered in partnership with social enterprises like Offploy, has been built to close.
Stewart Gruffydd-Jones, head of social impact at Serco
Our Pathways programme sits at the heart of our social value ambition: to improve social mobility by removing the barriers that keep too many people out of work. That ambition is deliberately broad. Those barriers take many forms. A criminal record is one, but so too is homelessness, growing up in care or long-term unemployment.
In this piece, I want to focus on one cohort: prison leavers. Having a criminal record is one of the hardest barriers to overcome - and one of the areas where the gap between good intention and real-world outcomes is widest.
Prisons are getting better at preparing people for work with purposeful activity, education and vocational training. The custodial side of rehabilitation has had sustained policy attention, and prison operators like Serco work with many employers based in the communities where our prisons are located. At HMP Fosse Way, for example, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons praised the impressive range of partnerships with local employers, as well as the prison’s innovative ‘departure lounge’, which provides practical support and guidance to prisoners in the crucial period immediately before release.
These initiatives help ensure that the progress made in custody can translate into meaningful employment opportunities in the community.
However, a person can leave custody with a qualification, a CV, and a genuine intention to work, yet still face significant practical barriers when trying to secure employment. Many employers understandably need to manage risk carefully, and in some recruitment processes a previous conviction can make it harder for candidates to progress, even where they may have the skills and suitability for the role.
That gap, between being "work-ready" and being "employed", is where most rehabilitation investment currently goes to waste. It's also where we've chosen to focus this strand of our Pathways employment programme.
What "tailored support" actually means in practice
Pathways is built around two things most employability programmes do not do.
The first is employer policy. Rather than simply presenting candidates and hoping existing HR processes will work, we have looked at disclosure and what risk really means for a particular role. For example, where blanket exclusions may have previously prevented good candidates from being considered, this has been tested and explored in more detail.
The second is lived-experience mentoring. Mentors support people beyond the point of appointment, helping them navigate the early weeks and months of employment, when confidence, trust and retention are often most fragile. Most mentors have their own experience of the justice system, which means they can have conversations a conventional caseworker cannot.
Sustained employment rarely fails on the day someone starts a job. It fails in the weeks and months after, when the initial goodwill has faded and nobody is checking in. That is precisely where this mentoring is designed to sit.
To date, Serco’s Pathways programme has supported 79 people with criminal records into employment through this model. We have achieved more than 290 so far this year across all the groups Pathways supports, including veterans, care leavers, people experiencing homelessness, and people with criminal records. Our target for 2026 is 500 Pathways recruits: a deliberately stretching goal.
SME partnerships that advise both sides
We can’t do this alone; we are bringing our scale and experience to convene other organisations to help address some of the barriers faced by both employers and candidates. Much of the employer engagement that shifts hiring decisions happens through smaller organisations. Pathways works with SMEs and specialist employer partners who are close enough to their own recruitment processes to change them quickly.
Serco is working with Offploy and our supply chain to understand the role of both the employer and the candidate and propose appropriate reasonable adjustments and risk management. Most programmes advise one side of that relationship. Ours is built to advise both, because a placement that only works from the candidate's side rarely lasts.
This is also where Serco's supply chain commitments under the MoJ's SME and third sector action plan become tangible: not a reporting line about subcontract spend, but a genuine channel through which smaller, specialist partners shape how candidates are matched, supported and retained.
Scaling employment opportunities
The true significance of the consultative approach we have taken lies in its scalability. Pathways provides a model that can be replicated across thousands of roles and multiple sectors, creating a sustainable route into employment for people who might otherwise be overlooked.
By combining policy reform, risk-informed vetting, guaranteed interviews and specialist mentoring, the programme ensures that candidates are assessed on their skills, potential and suitability for the role. While there are some positions where individuals with criminal convictions cannot be considered, there are many others where risks can be appropriately assessed and managed through robust safeguards. In these cases, Pathways enables candidates to be considered on their own merits, helping employers access a wider talent pool while maintaining high standards of safety and integrity.
We hope to extend our impact by encouraging other sectors to get involved too. We are founding members, alongside ReGenerate, of the recently launched London Employer Alliance, backed by the Cabinet Office and the No. 10 Partnership Office, bringing major employers together to open sustainable employment routes for people facing the greatest barriers to work across London.
As a British business and an employer of over 30,000 people from Cornwall to Shetland, we believe our approach demonstrates how organisations can widen access to overlooked talent while delivering tangible social impact, reducing barriers to employment, and supporting more people with convictions into sustainable careers.
To learn more about Pathways, visit: https://www.serco.com/uk/pathways