Bread, not blood, on their hands

A bakery run by a Cambridge graduate is teaching ex-cons new skills, including providing bread to some of Scotland’s fanciest restaurants.

Freedom Bakery, in Glasgow’s East End, provides well-known eateries with bread rolls.

The social enterprise was set up by Matt Fountain, who grew up watching his stepfather struggle to establish a life after being released from jail in Kent – and who he had visited in prison, aged 12, and begged never to go again.

Matt studied history of art in London, spent a year in Glasgow and attended Cambridge.

He returned to Glasgow and had the chance to do a PhD at Oxford, but opted not to.

Instead, he decided to invest his time and energy into helping people, including convicted murderers, reintegrate into society.

In 2014, he was granted permission to use a small kitchen in HMP Low Moss, Glasgow.

Matt planned to make and sell bread and put those prisoners through a recognised qualification for the baking industry, SVQ level 2 in craft baking.

By 2017, he was working with prisoners in notorious Barlinnie and pairing them with qualified bakers to help them obtain a qualification.

There are currently 16 employees and a third were recruited from jails.

Matt said: “It’s a mixture of long-term and shortterm sentences, including drugs-related offences, fraud and, I’m afraid to say, manslaughter and murder.”

Matt felt out of place in Cambridge and failed to find enjoyment in it.

After struggling to get a job after graduating from Cambridge, he felt at a loose end. “I thought if I had an Oxbridge degree it would help me in life,” he said.

“I came to the conclusion that I should be doing something useful and I set upon this idea to raise money for the charity Shelter by cycling around the UK.”

That led to the idea of starting Freedom Bakery.

Matt said: “The ideal was to make sure it was really good so it would leave a lasting impression on the person eating it, so they would understand where it came from and think positively about who made that bread.”

He described prisons as “a microcosm of humanity with both good and evil”.