Politics Home Article | Rehabilitation succeeds when services work together

Mike, 37, has spent most of his adult life shuttling between prison, hostels and emergency support. His story is not “challenging” – it is predictable. Put someone with unstable housing, untreated addiction, poor mental health and no meaningful relationships into a siloed system, and the outcome writes itself. 

When Mike walked out of prison for the last time, the difference was not a new programme. It was a person. Tommy – a St Giles Wise Community Link Worker – met him at the gate, secured safe housing, sorted his induction with probation, and got his mental health and addiction support moving before the chaos set in. In the first 72 hours, when most people fall straight through the cracks, Mike had someone by his side. 

As the chaos receded, something else became possible: purpose. Tommy arranged a voluntary placement with a homelessness charity. It became paid work. Today, Mike supports others facing the same barriers he fought. He now contributes to national conversations on criminal justice – evidence that people change when the system around them lets them. 

What made the difference? 

Not a 12-week intervention. Not a target. Not a form. 

It was continuity and someone who had lived it. Tommy had been supported and trained by St Giles Wise after his own imprisonment. He knew how systems worked – and where they didn’t. That trust is what statutory services struggle to replicate, and what commissioning frameworks rarely value. 

Revolving Doors estimates 30,000 – 50,000 people live similar lives to Mike’s, responsible for around 130,000 offences each year. They are not “hard to reach”, they are easy to ignore in a system designed around single issues rather than whole lives. 

This is the gap St Giles Wise is built to close. Our partnership brings together over a century of experience and more than five years of delivering side by side. We combine lived experience, Relational Mentoring and local partnerships with data across fifteen interconnected needs – from housing and income to mental health, addiction, family and employment. The model works because it reflects reality: people don’t experience their lives in departments. 

We also see the cost of getting it wrong. Much of Mike’s offending – and millions of pounds of public spend – could have been avoided with earlier, integrated support across justice, health, housing and welfare. Prison should be reserved for those who genuinely need to be there. For many, it is simply the holding pen for unmet need. 

As the Ministry of Justice recommissions rehabilitative services, this is the opportunity: move from fragmented provision to a national system-integrator approach that joins up the public, voluntary and community sectors around the person. Not more programmes. Not more churn. A backbone that connects what already exists and makes it function. 

St Giles Wise is ready. We have experience, evidence and community partnerships to reduce avoidable custody, strengthen community alternatives and help people who cost the system the most – and have the most to gain – build stable futures.