Fred Sirieix: ‘If you come out of prison, you’ve got to have something to get you started’

In the kitchen at The Escape – the staff restaurant at London prison HMP Wormwood Scrubs – you would not guess there was a panel sat outside that includes First Dates maître d’ Fred Sirieix and Lord James Timpson, Minister for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, plastic knives and forks in hand, ready to hand down culinary judgement.

Where you might expect stressed-out chefs chaotically trying to plate up dishes a la The Bear, the mood instead is focused, determined, but also pretty jubilant. Teams of three, in swimming pool blue tees with ‘Call me chef’ emblazoned on the back, throw together crisp Caesar salads, decadent portions of lasagne (one team going all out by adding a side of golden, homemade garlic bread) and delicate ramekins of apple crumble and silky custard.

“This, to me, is what it’s all about. How do you reduce reoffending? You do it by giving people skills so when they’re out, they can stay out, and that means you’ve got fewer victims,” says Lord Timpson, who, when we speak, is three Caesar salads and three lasagnes in, and very much looking forward to his three pots of custard to come.

Yes, the teams of chefs are in fact prisoners who are taking part in a ‘Chefs Unlocked’ event, part of an initiative running across six British prisons, that will see inmates competing to impress culinary experts and hospitality businesses – including Hilton, Greene King Academy, Marston’s Academy, Wagamama and Starbucks.

The programme is run in partnership with The Right Course, which Sirieix, along with Simon Sheehan, started in 2015. It “is basically a charity to open and run restaurants in prisons for the benefit of the prisoners,” explains Sirieix.

“They run the front of house, they cook, and the restaurant is run for the prison staff, the prison contractors.” The aim is to teach prisoners transferable skills, and on release, help put them in front of employers and support them getting into work – shown to reduce the chances of reoffending by nine percentage points.

“If you come out of prison, you’re far away from home, you don’t have a place to stay, you’ve got to have something to get you started. So that’s what we do, and we love it,” says Sirieix.

“There’s lots of different employers who recognise that prison leavers can make really good colleagues,” says Lord Timpson, who has long been hiring prison leavers in his own business. His mum was a foster carer, “so we had lots of foster children who lived with us when I was really small, and a lot of them were there because their mums were in prison,” he remembers.

“We used to go to prison quite a lot and wait outside while mum took the babies inside.” As a result, he’s always been “interested in second chances and why people are in that position”. Later, as a business owner, he was invited to visit a prison.

“The guy that showed me around, he was 19 years old, and he’d gone to prison because he got into a fight on his 18th birthday in a pub. He couldn’t go to university, all that sort of stuff, and I thought, ‘He’s brilliant’. So I said, ‘Listen, what’s your plan to get a job when you’re out?’ And he said, ‘Don’t have any. No one will take me on’, so  I said, ‘I’ll give you a chance’. And he’s still with the Timpson business now.”

He’s frank that “not everybody in this prison will be right” for The Right Course or the hospitality industry, but for those who are, “they recognise that this is an opportunity for them to turn their lives around. And this gives them not just a skill, but also gives them the confidence that they can do it, because a number of them will have been in and out, in and out, failing and creating more victims. But we need to stop that, and the way you can stop it is by giving them skills.”

Sirieix says it’s a no-brainer, for prisoners and hospitality businesses. “There’s a skills and staff shortage in the UK. We had, 25 years ago, maybe around 280 catering colleges. Now we have about 110, 120,” he explains.

“We’ve got a captive audience here who can be taught how to work. And so it will both help the skill and staff shortage in hospitality, which we have a huge need of, but also, it will stop people from reoffending.”

“The guys who are here, when they come out, if they do good and they are great, other employers will say, ‘Look, it’s amazing. These guys are great, what they do in The Right Course is really good,’ and we’ve got more of them,” he continues.

“The best thing is when somebody comes out, they finish here, we get them a job, they’re working and three months later, they say, ‘I’m having a great time. It’s changed my life’ – that’s what we do it for. We do it only for one thing: the outcome.”

And I can tell you for certain, the lasagne was excellent.