Bakery teams-up with brewery to help ex-offenders build new lives

Video report by Lauren Ostridge

A bakery in Bolton, dedicated to helping former criminals find employment and rebuild their lives, has teamed-up with a brewery to try to cut re-offending rates.

Pies made by H.M.Pasties are now being sold in pubs owned by Joseph Holt - a Mancunian brewery with its own history of turning lives around.

Lee Wakeham started H.M.Pasties in 2019, having been jailed twice for robbery as a younger man.

The idea was to give employment opportunities to those, with a criminal record, trying a find a crime-free path in life.

He said: "I did a lot of bad things when I was younger but, at heart, I wasn’t a bad person. Just a lot of things had happened to me.

"Prisons are full of a lot of people who, if they hadn’t been traumatised when they were a child and hadn’t processed that, probably wouldn’t have ended-up in prison in the first place.

"We want to take those people and, over a period of time, change their attitude and change their mindset so that - when they do go on to work somewhere else - they’re going to be able to sustain that job and maintain a career."

Master brewer, Jane Kershaw, says her firm has long worked to give opportunities to those leaving prison and starting anew.

"Since about 2018 we’ve been working with prisons in the North West and we do placements," she said.

"When they’re released on day release they’ll come and work for us in front-of-house or back-of-house roles.

"It’s about giving people a second or a first chance and I think we’ve got a really lovely fit that works with the prisons."

Joseph Holt say they are selling 3,000 of the pies each week.

They, and Lee, are hoping to cut reoffending rates one pie at a time.