Recommendation 23

HMPPS told us it is proud of the progress made on employment support initiatives with 25% of prison leavers from April 2022 to February 2023 employed after six months, compared with 17% in 2021–22.57 But HMPPS’s plans to evaluate its employment initiatives are still in the early stages and as of May 2023 it had no firm plans to carry out essential impact evaluations. Determining whether recent improvements in prison leavers’ outcomes are attributable to its interventions or whether they may have happened anyway will be a key challenge for HMPPS.58 MoJ told us it is “hard to identify exact causality” in complex systems but it is confident that HMPPS’ employment initiatives in prisons are “making a big difference”.59 Managing increased demand