Capita founder tries to turn criminals into entrepreneurs

Rod Aldridge is using his business skills and wealth to give reformed offenders a fresh start

Eight years ago, Mark Johnson was living on the streets of central London, sleeping in the doorway of one of the austere townhouses just south of the Strand. A drug addict with a conviction for violent robbery, he was getting by as a petty thief.

Today, Johnson walks the same streets in a smart pair of shoes, having turned his life round. One of the doorways he used to sleep in is now home to the Aldridge Foundation, the charitable trust set up by Rod Aldridge, founder of Capita, the outsourcing business.

In the 18 months since he left Capita under the cloud of the “loans to Labour” scandal — he admitted making a secret, personal £1m loan to the party — Aldridge has dedicated his life to tackling Britain’s social injustices. He decided that the criminal-justice system was a good place to start.

Aldridge is combining his business skills and personal wealth with Johnson’s ideas and experiences. Together, the two are setting out to reform the nation’s attitudes to dealing with former criminals, believing that business and entrepreneurship could hold the key.

“Once you’ve made a mistake, even at a very young age, it’s very difficult to get a job,” said Aldridge. “Certain professions, you can never get into. One person I met through this scheme had gone to university and wanted to be a journalist — he had been turned down in every situation he had been in. Another person applied for a university place and was told to come back in 10 years.

“To me, that’s not right. If you have paid your price, if you have made the step to want to change, you have to be given the chance.”

The Aldridge Foundation is not the only body trying to give offenders another chance in the workplace. National Grid launched a pilot scheme in 2000, in which 50 young offenders from Reading prison trained as forklift-truck drivers.

Some 1,000 people have now passed through the system, which has been extended into other firms, including engineers such as Amec and Balfour Beatty, the logistics group DHL, and Fountains, the forestry company. Only 7% of the scheme’s members have re-offended, compared with a national average of over 70%.

“The scheme has never been a charitable thing,” said Mary Harris from National Grid.

“We couldn’t find enough forklift-truck drivers so we had to look harder. The people we are employing through this are all as good or better than the people we find through normal methods. If that wasn’t the case, it simply wouldn’t make sense.”

Johnson got his chance through the Prince’s Trust. He emerged from a rehab centre in 2001, free from drugs for the first time since the age of 11.

In an earlier attempt to get back on the rails he had trained as a tree surgeon, but because of his drug habit he couldn’t hold down a job. With the aid of a £3,000 grant from the trust he set up a tree surgeon’s busi- ness in Dorset, called Treewise.

He made it his policy to employ other former offenders and soon had a thriving firm, two houses and a new car. The trust began to get him involved in helping others to follow his lead.

He sold the business last year to concentrate full time on his new role as an adviser to the National Probation Service — and on his career as an author. His autobiography, Wasted, is now a bestseller.

“The message we’re trying to get across is that if I can do this, then anyone can,” said Johnson.

The Aldridge Foundation has just funded a special print run of 2,500 copies of Johnson’s book, to be placed in every prison in the country. It has also given £200,000 to Johnson’s mentoring programme, which links up older, reformed criminals with young offenders to help them get back on their feet.

Johnson and Aldridge are also running seminars with former offenders to find ways to reform the justice system.

“When you look at this process, where 72% of offenders are re-offending within a year — or 84% in the case of the younger offenders — you can see that the process is not right. Until now, nobody has paid any attention to the views of the people who go through that process, to see what needs to change.”

Aldridge has already come up with some basic points to address. “The statistics show that 66% of people going to prison have no job. They also show that 75% of people have no job to go to when they leave. About 30% of people coming out of prison have nowhere to live. It’s not rocket science to see that if you have no job and nowhere to live you will go back to offending.”

Aldridge is evangelical about the powers of entrepreneurial thinking. He is sponsoring two city academies — in Lancashire and Brighton — that specialise in entrepreneurship.

He also plans to set up a back-office facility that could be used by any budding entrepreneur to support a new business — not just former offenders. He is in talks with accountancy firms about setting up a small operation with 10 or 15 staff in northwest England that could handle tax and Vat returns, payroll and other ser- vices on a not-for-profit basis.

Both Aldridge and Johnson believe that prisons are full of entrepreneurs. It’s just that those entrepreneurial talents have been misguided.

“I know people who can’t read or write but, as soon as you put money into the picture, they’ve got it,” said Johnson. “Take a drug dealer — just look at how much business skill he has. He is managing cash flow, managing supply and demand and coming up with imaginative means to transport his stock. Complete creativity — yet we overlook his talents, his real talents. We just need to find incentives. Why are we not looking at this?”