He promptly wrote a letter to PrintWeek, in which he explained his disgust at the news that a prison was able to go to the commercial market to punt for print work. "Why is it that the Prison Service, funded by the British taxpayer, is allowed to tender against commercial printers?" Baker asked.

The Kent Messenger article said that the prison workshop, staffed by prisoners serving sentences for sex offences, had recently purchased a five-colour £400,000 printing press – which was part of a £500,000 investment from government agency the Offender Services Co-Commissioning group.

A Prison Service spokeswoman clarifies that the contract reported in the paper was won by its national printing team, and that Maidstone will be one of the establishments to work on it. "The majority of the work will come from government departments achieving a saving to the customer," she says.

Finding and keeping a job could also reduce the chances of prisoners reoffending, she adds. "We also want to ensure that working in prison provides an opportunity for offenders to contribute to victims’ services," she explains. "When working with the private sector, all prisons must ensure that the work does not represent unfair competition or create job losses in the community."

In 2008, PrintWeek covered the 10 print workshops that were running in British prisons (see Opinion, right). At the time, the Prison Service described how the work produced at the sites was distributed to all 138 prisons in the UK, and that it also did work for other government departments.

Baker says he does not have a problem with government bodies, such as prisons or councils, doing their own printing work, but says the fact that a prison had won a commercial contract made him angry.

"I thought, ‘what is going on here?’" he says. "Over the past decade, the number of printers in Maidstone has declined dramatically and now they are going after commercial work. I’m sure there’s enough work in the prison services for them to do."

Despite the backlash against this development from Baker and other printers around Maidstone (see Reader Reaction), plans recently announced by the Ministry of Justice suggest that the amount of commercial work done by prison print workshops is to increase.

Last year, in a report on its Breaking the Cycle consultation, which looked into the punishment and rehabilitation of offenders, the Ministry of Justice set out plans to create a 40-hour working week for prisoners.

In the report’s foreword, justice secretary Kenneth Clarke said: "Prisons must become places of hard work and training, where prisoners are expected to work a 40-hour week, with money from their earnings deducted to support victims’ groups."

The paper also mentioned that, at HMP Forest Bank, Sodexo Justice Services was going to launch a social enterprise employing prisoners for 40 hours a week in a professional printshop, with the majority of profits going to victim support organisations, and the remainder going towards the successful resettlement of prisoners.

Kevin Verner, business systems manager for Prison Industries, the unit that integrates prisoners in out-of-cell activity to gain skills and work experience, reveals it will be relaunched later this month as 131 Solutions. No details are available yet, but he says that, where the service competes for commercial work, there are, and will continue to be, strict guidelines.

"They can’t undercut the local market as that would be unfair," he says. "We’ll have to price, at the very least, in line with minimum wage. And we’ll have to look at market rates for jobs so we don’t unfairly take work away from companies."

Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce chief executive Jo James says that as long as prisons are playing on a level playing field with printing companies regarding price, the work of the prison printing workshops could be very positive.

But she also says the best-case scenario would be for private printing businesses, more than prison workshops, to win commercial contracts. "Businesses are finding it tough at the moment and they certainly don’t need any barriers in their way," she says. "If the government is looking to the business community for economic growth, it needs to support that community – which means potential contracts should be awarded to them."

An important reason for giving prisoners the skills and experience of working in a print workshop is that this could help them to get a job on release, reducing reoffending rates. But printing firms point out this plan is flawed because there are not many print jobs around right now.

British Printing Industries Federation research and information manager Kyle Jardine says that the number of employees in the UK printing industry went from an estimated 145,000 at the beginning of 2009 to 140,000 in 2010, down to 135,000 in 2011. It forecasts that this will have dropped again in 2012 to 133,000.

BPIF has in fact been involved in the Prison Service print workshops itself, having helped prisoners to pick up qualifications such as NVQs.

But some feel this is  inappropriate. "I don’t think the BPIF should support this," says Technoprint managing director Mark Snee. "They can’t have it all ways. They can’t claim to represent employees to the government and do this."

And Snee’s feeling about prison print workshops in general are just as strong. "What’s the government trying to do?" he says. "Trying to destroy the last of the private sector? They will eventually end up collapsing the sector. I’m totally against this. We’ll just all pack up and end up going to another country."

30-SECOND BRIEFING