Hello all,

I have seen some questions about this previously, both on this site and others, so thought I'd share this information which I hope will be useful to you.

HM Prison & Probation Service have launched a Prisoner ID & Banking Programme (which has been active for just over a year now, I think) that is now available in over 80% of UK prisons. I myself used this programme around six months ago in order to setup a Bank Account ready for my release from prison, which happened about two months ago.

Prisoner ID and Banking programmes – New Futures Network 

This scheme is relatively easy for the prisoner to do - it involves filling out a few forms which then get sent onto the "Prisoner Banking Lead" in their prison (usually a senior member of staff), who provides written confirmation to the Bank of the prisoner's identification, at which point the Bank will open a Basic Bank Account for the prisoner.

A few things to note:

- Prisoners are only permitted to use this service if they don't have an existing Bank Account
- Banks will only offer their "Basic" versions of their products to prisoners
- Most prisons will only allow prisoners to apply for an account via the program in the last six months of their sentence


Generally, the prisoner needs to initiate the process of applying for the Bank Account by submitting a General Application to the Resettlement Team in their prison. Someone will then get in touch with them, giving them the forms (and hopefully offering to support them in completing them) before finalising their application. Please note it can take upto eight weeks for the application to be processed by the bank.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for posting. It looks pretty much like the system that was already in place, but made clearer to help prisoners find their way through. Not much help to older prisoners who need a bank account to receive their occuptional pension, so hopefully prisons will be reasonable when dealing with that. Wait, did I just say I hope that prisons will be reasonable? 😲

=========================================================================================================

If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries. (George Bernard Shaw)

In the prison I was in immediately before my release, there was indeed a few older prisoners who were looking for support to get a bank account setup for this exact purpose. The response from staff generally seemed to be that it was the Bank (HSBC in this case) who set the requirement that prisoners must be within 6 months of their release window to be eligible, and there was apparently nothing the prison could do about it, and no exceptions.

As we all know, it is quite rare for prison staff to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but that's what was said anyhow.

Interestingly, upon reviewing some Freedom of Information requests, I found a request submitted by a third party RE the prisoner banking programme last year. Here's some figures from the programme, which would tend to suggest that actually there is quite a high take-up, certainly more than I expected:

Between January and December 2023 there were 12,383 applications submitted to banks and 9,731 bank accounts opened.
Between January and December 2024 there were 12,545 applications submitted to banks and 10,078 bank accounts were opened.
Between January and-December 2024 there were 23,999 ID applications and 22,198 IDs provided.
Between January and December 2023 there were 18,714 ID applications.
The MoJ does not hold any information in the scope of your request with regard to the number of ID’s provided in 2023. This is because this data was not collected prior to 2024.