How we use our Resources

At Reprieve our motto is to hold every pound in trust for the prisoners we represent. Every member of staff believes in the importance of reserving as much of our funding as possible for the purposes of bringing freedom and due process to the prisoners we assist. We never take payment from clients – indeed none of the prisoners we assist can afford to pay for legal representation.

Our ethos at Reprieve is about fairness, justice and transparency. We have 3 pay grades at Reprieve. Our Executive Director Clare Algar took a 6 figure salary cut to come and lead our team – she is paid £44,000. Team directors are paid £38,000 and all other staff, including lawyers, are paid £33,000. This structure is not completely flat, but at least means that no employee is making a huge amount more than any other. Reprieve’s founding Director Clive Stafford Smith is currently living off a grant he was awarded and so donates his time pro bono to Reprieve. Every person working at Reprieve could earn more money working elsewhere – staff work here because they believe in Reprieve’s work.

Leveraging gifts in kind

We are extraordinarily lucky to receive a great deal of support from law firms.
• Free Office Space: Reprieve occupies premises donated rent-free by law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. We estimate that this saves us £182,000 a year.
• We receive all paper and stationery supplies free of charge from Freshfields, as well as having full use of their reprographics and printing department. We estimate that this saves us £13,000 a year.
• We work with many other law firms and chambers in the UK, outsourcing pro bono legal research and investigation projects and thereby vastly amplifying our output.

Volunteers

• To date Reprieve has placed 250 volunteers in 14 different offices across 7 states. The total number of hours worked by volunteers equates to over 64 years of full-time work.
• In 2011 Reprieve was assigned 6 volunteers through the Vodafone grant scheme, out of a total 500 volunteers assigned to charities across Britain. Each fellow received £2,500 in order to carry out their volunteer programme – an enormous boost to our capabilities.
• We usually have 10 – 15 volunteers in our office at any one time, more in the summer. Again, this allows us to undertake huge amounts of work at no cost to us.

We have a turnover of £1.7m per year and because we operate in the way we set out above, we are able to function at a very high level with that turnover – we believe that we give ‘very good bang per buck’!  We have 25 full time staff and we travel all over the world.

Please do contact us if you would like any further information.