Lee’s piping hot project helps ex-offenders get back into work

It all started with a young man from Devon longing for a proper pastie; the kind he’d grown up eating in Plymouth.

In Manchester, his adopted home, Lee Wakeham found he couldn’t get a good pastie “for love nor money”, so he started making his own. Then, in 2012, he took a batch to a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee street party and noticed how the locals loved them and asked for more. An idea was hatched.

Today, Lee, 49, is the managing director of HMPasties Limited, and co-founder of the HMPasties Foundation, a National Lottery-funded charity that helps ex-offenders back into the workforce by employing them at its pie and pasty bakery in Oldham. The business has gone from strength to strength. In 2020, the year HMPasties was founded, its annual turnover was £87,000. This year, it will be more than £750,000 and Lee is hopeful it will hit about £1.4MMillion next year.

HMPasties has recently won a contract to supply Liverpool FC with its match day pasties, and it operates a stand outside Manchester City’s ground. Other high-profile customers include Joseph Holt, Stockport County FC, Warrington Wolves, The University of Manchester and Jodrell Bank.

Lee said, “I’m really looking forward to the next 12 months. It’s been a struggle for sure, but this will be our breakthrough year.”

It’s fair to say Lee is no stranger to struggle. His determination to help ex-offenders stems from his own experiences as a young man who often found himself on the wrong side of the law.

Lee said, “I grew up in foster care. I’ve never met my dad and don’t know who he is. I grew up with very abusive foster parents who beat me regularly. I was sexually abused by my foster father. All my clothes were hand-me-downs. It was just awful.

“I was full of anger and attitude. I had the ability to fight because I could take a beating – I'd spent my whole childhood being beaten. I was getting into lots of fights and stealing to survive.”

Lee was still a teenager when he went to prison for the first time. His second stint inside came after he was sentenced to 18 months for a string of violent robberies. He moved to Salford to make a fresh start but ended up in prison again after being sentenced to three years for wounding with intent.

Lee underwent therapy in prison and began to understand how his torturous childhood had shaped him. He said, “When I left prison, I realised I needed to do something else with my anger. I’ve lived a successful, crime-free life since then.”

He was 23 when he got out of jail. A factory job putting screws into floodlights got him back into work, but it wasn’t until he joined The Salford Prison Project – a National Lottery-funded project aimed at breaking the cycle of re-offending – that he found his calling.

Lee started HMPasties in January 2020 and admits the business almost went under during the pandemic. He said, “That was a very, very difficult 18 months. I spent lockdown working on my own, living on my own. I’d make as many pies and pasties as I could during the week and drive around on the weekend delivering them to people at home just to keep the brand name alive.”

Today, HMPasties employs 11 people, a quarter of whom are ex-offenders. Lee said, “They’re usually on licence towards the end of their sentence or they’ve left prison and are struggling to get work. All they need to do is show an interest in working with food and a willingness to complete the training courses we need them to do.

“A lot of people go on to full time work from here. What we do is help people get into the routine of going to work, the mindset that’s needed to make work sustainable. We’re not producing bakers or food manufacturing experts. It’s all about the soft skills you need in the workplace – things like cooperating and working as a team.”

Potential bakers are often identified during visits to prisons. Lee said, “I go to prisons, talk about my life and do a pastie baking session. The guys will roll the pastry and crimp the pasties. We usually get one or two people from these sessions that are interested in working for us.”

Support from The National Lottery has played a vital role in the HMPasties story. When it won The People’s Projects – a scheme that gave the public a chance to decide how more than £4MMillion of National Lottery funding should be used in their community – the ensuing publicity allowed it to attract additional funding and support.

Lee said, “We would not be here without it [National Lottery support]. We got about £16,000 in the early days when we were a pilot project set up within a charity and all the promotion from The People’s Projects was vital – we were on TV every night for two weeks. It gave us a profile we would never have had otherwise.”

27th August 2025