Nearly a third of people leaving prison are being employed within six months of leaving custody, government statistics show.

As of this year, 31.1% of offenders were getting jobs, compared to 26% the year before.

The figure has more than doubled since the COVID pandemic when data first started being collected.

Around a quarter of the working-age population in the UK has a criminal record.

Companies that hire ex-convicts include Virgin, Greggs, Greene King and Timpson.

It comes as the country continues to battle a prison overcrowding crisis and the number of people in the UK who are economically inactive – more than nine million adults.

“I applied for a few hundred jobs, never got an interview,” Terry Schwartz, who now works at Timpson, told Sky News. “It felt like an invisible stigma.”

“So, to do something that I enjoy doing and to generally feel like I’m actually contributing… that’s really good”.

Terry says getting a secure job at the cobblers and key cutters has been life-changing as “once you feel like you have no other option, you’re probably going to think about doing crime”.

Since 2002, Timpson has been hiring ex-offenders, who now make up 12% of the company’s workforce.

“Employment is a huge factor to reduce reoffending,” said Darren Burns, the company’s national recruitment manager.

He told Sky News one of the “largest concerns” of other employers that the Timpson group works with is the public’s perception of being served by former criminals.

“I think people always assume the worst”, he said.

“But these kind of ideas around risk are often based in a place of ignorance. The vast majority of people in our prison system will be released at some time.

“People need to ask themselves what sort of people you’d like to serve you in the shop, sit next to you on the train, on the bus. The answer is – you want people who’ve been rehabilitated.”

The former chief executive of Timpson, Lord James Timpson, is now prisons minister.

He has previously said the country is “addicted to sentencing, addicted to punishment”.

Earlier this month he told Sky News: “What has been lacking over far too long is an addiction to rehabilitation because we need to have fewer victims. We need to have reoffending down – 80% of offending is reoffending.”

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The charity Regenerate works with employers to help criminal record holders get into the workplace.

“The UK jobs market suffers from a very high number of vacancies, just under a million,” co-founder of Regenerate, Ed Boyd, told Sky News.

“Lots of businesses are struggling to fill those vacancies. What loads of companies have found is that there’s hidden talent that exists within disadvantaged groups, such as ex-offenders.”

Annie Gale, head of social impact at Cook, which employs ex-offenders, said their prison leaver programme “is about using business as a force for good in society”.

“I won’t say it’s easy, it’s challenging,” she told Sky News.

Annie said the programme is “costly” and admits having ex-offenders in public facing roles “can cause concern, depending on the nature of the conviction” but says “doing good business is about more than just turning a profit”.