Our prisons are overcrowded. Something needs to be done - but releasing prisoners early is not a popular option, as Andy Burnham has discovered.
What doesn’t help is that 37% of those who are released end up back inside. So, maybe the PM should take a close look at a North East charity where only 3% of the offenders it mentors return to a life of crime. It shows you CAN have your cake and eat it, as Chris Jackson reports for us after having his fingerprints taken for the launch of a bakery in Northumberland.
Middlesbrough is still in the national headlines, but a journalist who has been reporting on the area for years says there’s nothing new in recent events, only the coverage they’ve received. And the stats tell their own story.
Also in this edition, Lockheed Martin cements its relationship with Northumbria University, Siemens in Newcastle strikes a nuclear deal at the home of the historic Parsons site, there’s a lovely story about the remarkable artist who will feature in the opening of Sunderland’s Culture House on Saturday, and who is entering the North East’s Comedy Hall of Fame?
Brian Aitken
Editor
From porridge to cake
By Chris Jackson
When you turn up to the launch of a new bakery in Northumberland you don’t expect to have your fingerprints taken. The heightened security is not to ensure a secret recipe can’t fall into the wrong hands. No, it’s the chefs who mustn’t find their way into the big wide world. This bakery is in the middle of a prison.
The inmates of HMP Northumberland turn out professional looking and deliciously tasting pies, breads and cakes every day, but for the launch they’d prepared a celebration spread to mark the official opening of purpose-built kitchen.
This is a real step up for the Oswin Project which has had a huge success in ensuring prisoners who are released don’t end up back behind bars. The recipe is simple. Give inmates a proper skill, hope, a sense of pride and the prospect of a career once their time is done and they won’t end up part of the depressingly high statistics of former cons who reoffend.
Goods baked at the prison are sold at Newcastle Cathedral’s Café 16. It’s another side to this rehabilitation project where former inmates are employed in the kitchen or front of house. They are also offered support in finding housing and sorting out finances.
Without a job, many prison leavers struggle to stay on the straight and narrow so this scheme offers a structured start to life on the outside.
Fiona Sample, the charity’s CEO, told assembled guests at the launch that nationally 37% of those released from jail end up back in a cell, whilst only 3% of those the Oswin Project mentors return to a life of crime. The proof really is in the pudding. “Why successive governments ignore the evidence is a mystery”, she said, adding that with the prison population nearly at full capacity “no government can try and build its way out of this crisis.”
Until this week the prison bakers worked in a cramped kitchen that also served officers and visitors, but now with their own dedicated state of the art workspace the number of Oswinners, as Fiona likes to call them, can expand with an additional 20 places, bringing the total to 30.
Being off your wing for most of the day and with a real sense of purpose is probably incentive enough, but the kitchen walls are adorned with positive customer feedback from the café in the outside world. How else are you supposed to send compliments to the chef?
The disused building within the prison has been refurbished with the full support of HMP Northumberland Director Vicky Robinson who hailed ‘Baking Out’ as a brilliant initiative and a fantastic addition to the other purposeful activities on offer to inmates. The Oswin Project runs a farm shop just outside the walls where the public can buy vegetables grown within the grounds and of course the delights from the new kitchen.
Cakes, quiches, traybakes and breads are also sold wholesale to businesses nearby and whilst there’s no imminent danger of them expanding like Greggs, this project shows that if you use your loaf you can get the perfect result.
Chris Jackson filed a report for The QT on Cafe 16 in 2024 which included an interview with Mickey, a habitual liar (by his own admission) who was convicted with the help of his own gran - then realised the debt he owed her. His life was turned around after getting a job at the cafe. You can hear that fascinating interview here.
Martin locked in
Probably the biggest North East tech story of late comes by way of Lockheed Martin signing a new long-term research agreement with Northumbria University, reports Jamie Hardesty in his latest Newcastle Tech Digest newsletter.
The move builds on an existing £15m commitment to the North East Space Skills and Technology Centre (NESST), as the partnership will see the two work together on areas including space-based optical communications, energy and space weather.
University-industry agreements aren’t exactly in short supply but with the money behind this one, the long term commitment and a significant new physical asset in NESST, we may well see new ideas, innovations and companies come to life because of this, he says. You can read more here.
Tall order
It was only by a 4-3 majority, but Hadrian House in the centre of Newcastle will be demolished to make way for a 21-storey accommodation block for Northumbria University students. Developers described the £60m scheme, including a second 14-storey tower, as a “generational opportunity” to kickstart the regeneration of the eastern gateway into the city centre.
‘Only the headlines are new’
Middlesbrough has barely been out of the news for the past couple of weeks - for all the wrong reasons. Cleveland is one of the UK’s smallest police forces but has the highest crime rate in England and Wales.
The recent high-profile disorder began when two police officers were killed in a head-on collision with a car travelling the wrong way on the A66. Five young men in the car also died.
“For many people outside the area, huge question marks remain about what’s actually going on thanks to arrests, counter-attacks, car rammings, a deadly house fire and burned out cars at a supposed ‘vigil’, said Leigh Jones in The Lead. “But as somebody who’s reported in-depth from the area for years I can say there’s no novelty to recent events, only the coverage they’ve received.”
Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost over the last five decades, and the workers lived in places like South Bank and Grangetown, where the national media’s attention has been over the last fortnight - as you can see from this revealing article by Ed Thomas, the BBC’s UK Editor.
Towns across the UK have suffered in the wake of de-industrialisation, with similar social problems to those seen in Teesside - “but while deprivation exists in all towns and rural areas, it’s there in pockets, while across Teesside the depth and spread of deprivation is unlike anywhere else in the country,” said Leigh.
He cites the Government’s latest statistics which show 31% of children live in poverty. In the Middlesbrough and Thornaby East constituency the number is 44.1%. According to the Government’s index of multiple deprivation, Grangetown is ranked the 99th most deprived area in England out of 33,755. South Bank is number 60.
“Whenever I’ve reported from these areas, I’ve been met by friendly, open people who are keen to share their stories. The burning cars and buildings being rammed are part of a picture of anti-social behaviour that includes dirt bikes and quads being driven through streets and across fields that people have been putting up with for years.
“It’s taken a tragedy - and the deaths of two police officers - to pile enough political pressure on Cleveland Police to actually take action against offenders. More than 20 people have been arrested since the crash in relation to offences linked to organised crime. It suggests the police have the intelligence relating to offending in Teesside, but not the resources to do anything about it.”
More is needed
Cleveland Chief Constable Victoria Fuller said deprived areas in northern England have gone “unseen and unheard” for too long and said £2m in emergency funding from the Home Office is welcome - but “won’t buy enough police officers”.
“We deal with issues akin to inner-city crime but the budget doesn’t match. We’re robust in our policing style, we’ve been tackling organised crime. But we need the help; we need support on a scale significant enough to increase officer numbers.”
The chief constable told The Times she needed to recruit 270 officers to return to pre-austerity levels. Drug misuse, high unemployment, mental health problems and low educational attainment were fuelling crime and disorder.
“These are complex, multi-generational issues that will not be solved by policing alone,” she said. “It won’t be solved overnight - and certainly not with £2 million.”
Schools close early
Several Middlesbrough schools will close early again today as a funeral for another of the A66 crash victims is taking place. Cleveland Police said a funeral on Friday passed without incident and with minimal traffic disruption.
A quick word
The Siemens Energy plant in Newcastle, the site of the historic works founded by engineer Charles Parsons in the 1800s, will manufacture steam turbines for Rolls-Royce’s flagship small modular nuclear reactors. Energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, who visited the facility on Thursday, said that the deal showed “what our golden age of nuclear looks like in practice”. Irish rock band Fontaines DC’s first stadium tour will include a date at St James’ Park in Newcastle on Thursday July 1 next year. Tickets go on general sale at 10am on Thursday here. Durham’s month-long Big Autumn Clean, an initiative with the council and Durham Wildlife Trust, has begun with a litter pick at Crimdon beach, with 52 volunteers collecting 35 bags of waste including a tyre and a carpet. Some of the region’s best-known comedy names will be celebrated at Newcastle’s Tyne Theatre and Opera House on Thursday at the inaugural North East Comedy Hall of Fame. The first group of inductees includes Viz co-founders Simon and Chris Donald, Stan Laurel, Brendan Healy and the team behind Sunday for Sammy. Sunderland’s council cabinet is expected to approve a £13m spend on a new council depot on Cygnet Way at Rainton Bridge Business Park to store bin lorries, gritters and tonnes of salt.
Audrey’s art comes home
“I think you will become one of the greatest painters of the age,” wrote the headmistress of Bede Girls’ Grammar School to a promising pupil called Audrey Amiss.
Audrey was born in Sunderland in 1933, the daughter of shopkeepers Arthur and Belle, and she showed an aptitude for drawing and painting when she was very young.
Her headmistress’s perhaps rash prediction might not have been fully realised but the fact it’s now preserved in the archives of the Wellcome Collection in London, tells you Audrey’s was no ordinary life, writes David Whetstone in Cultured. North East.
Another clue is that a display of Audrey’s work will be among the first things we see when the long-awaited Culture House Sunderland opens in the city on Saturday.
Called Kitchen Sink Realism, it’s the inaugural exhibition at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) in its new home (previously it was at the National Glass Centre and before that above the old City Library on Fawcett Street).
It’s a brilliant idea for an opening show, says David - who has lots more on a remarkable woman whose lifestory is the basis of the film Typist Artist Pirate King which came out in 2022, with actress Monica Dolan playing Audrey, Kelly Macdonald cast as her psychiatric nurse and Gina McKee as her younger sister, Dorothy.
The North revisited
Chris Killip arrived on Tyneside in 1975 to work on a two-year project. He stayed for 16 years and went on to be a founder member, exhibition curator and adviser of the Side Gallery in Newcastle, and its director from 1977-79.
He also took pictures, lots of them, writes Tony Henderson in Cultured. North East. From the demise of the shipyards to the miners’ strike, Chris Killip’s lens captured the upheaval, the divisions and communities.
Now a new book Chris Killip: North has been published in a fresh interpretation of the photographer’s work between 1975 and 1986, featuring many previously unpublished pictures.
Just a thought
If you had a wee bit of spare cash right now, it might be worthwhile checking out who makes balaclavas and investing a few quid in the company.