Would like to meet…Rod Aldridge

Having founded the Capita Group in 1984, Rod Aldridge is now making his presence felt in the third sector. From establishing his own foundation to chairing the youth volunteering charity v, Sandra Haurant finds out how his move from the private sector has panned out.

Rod Aldridge founded the Capita Group in 1984, advancing the group to become the UK’s market leading provider of support and professional services to central and local government and education.

When he retired as chairman in July 2006, he decided to set up the Aldridge Foundation as a means to carry on the work he had started on public sector reform. His focus with the Foundation over the past two years has been largely set on two main targets: educational underachievement and social exclusion.

To begin tackling underachievement, the Aldridge Foundation is setting up two City Academies, one in Darwen near Blackburn and one in Falmer, near Brighton. “We are trying to make things more positive,” says Aldridge. The academies are in two of the most deprived areas in the country, and will specialise in entrepreneurship as a means of overcoming the types of adversity young people in these areas are likely to face.

The Foundation is also part-funding a project with the Prince’s Trust which will see ex-offenders giving one-to-one support to young offenders in prison. Indeed, the criminal justice system as a whole has become a key focus of the Foundation. Aldridge passionately believes the system is in desperate need of an overhaul. “If the criminal justice system was a business it would have gone out of business,” he says. “The re-offending rates make it clear that the system is not working.”

In some areas, re-offending rates reach as high as 82 per cent, showing that offenders simply enter the system and carry on going through it in a sort of cycle, offending, being put in prison, being released, re-offending and so on. “Money needs to be spent far earlier on in the process,” says Aldridge. “Rehabilitation needs to begin while they are in prison, and when they are released there needs to be an acceptance that these people have served their time and that they need jobs, they need housing. There is not always a readiness for this to be accepted.”

Aldridge strongly believes that the answers to the criminal justice problem are to be found in the offenders themselves. To this end, the Foundation recently brought together 35 currently serving and ex-offenders, who had clocked up between them more than 200 years in prison, for a weekend. The aim was to get behind the problems that had led these people into prison in the first place, and to explore ways in which the system could be improved.

The research found that those more at risk of turning to crime, young people with severe educational needs or who have grown up in care or with one parent in prison, for example, were already in contact with one or more government department from an early age, suggesting the need for a more ‘joined up’ approach to breaking the cycle of crime.

A plan for reform was drawn up, which called for recognition that criminal behaviour was often driven by predisposing factors such as addictions, mental health and special educational needs. It was suggested that a network of peer role models should be set up to act as beacons for offenders, and that offenders should have a voice in their own rehabilitation and resettlement.

“Offenders are a very marginalised group of people – people do not come to them to seek their opinion,” says Aldridge. And yet, he says, these are the very people who may hold the key to breaking the criminal cycle.

Aldridge is also considering promoting the use of social enterprise and entrepreneurship with offenders, perhaps encompassing training and consultancy, but ultimately any plans would be led by the offenders and ex-offenders themselves. “They often have brilliant minds, but have gone in the wrong direction,” he says. “They have taken calculated risks, albeit ones that may not have paid off.”

His approach to the criminal justice problem, and indeed to all his interests, appears straightforward and pragmatic. And it is perhaps Aldridge’s background, which overarches both the private and the public sector, combined with his pragmatism, which gives him the ability to have a sideways view of the charity sector.

Aldridge is also a patron and former trustee of The Prince’s Trust, and the chairman of v, a charity launched in May 2006 to promote youth volunteering. It aims to “inspire and engage” one million new youth volunteers, and has already got 750,000 under its belt.

In this capacity, Aldridge has begun to gain a greater understanding of the way in which the sector functions. And, he says, there is room for improvement.

“My take on the third sector is that it does tremendous work. It is full of very committed people. However, I do feel there are far too many organisations chasing the same money, and there appears to be very little thought on how this can be solved. They chase the money rather than thinking about what’s best for them.”

Through his experiences with Capita, Aldridge has seen first hand how partnerships between the public and private sectors can work, and he strongly feels that a similar approach could be hugely beneficial to the charity sector.

“The third sector is very close to the customer base,” says Aldridge. “But when it comes to practical delivery the capability is not as strong as it needs to be. The third sector and private sector should work together. Their cultures are very different but if you can find a way of making them work together it could be very beneficial.

“I don’t think the third sector has its head around how it delivers services,” he says. “This is not about profit; it’s about how you can deliver a programme. It needs skills. It needs depth. It needs quality.

“There are risks,” he continues. “When do you recruit? How do you cope with peaks and troughs? You need to find a partnership that can help you through.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, considering his experience as the founder and chair of a large outsourcing company, in the form of Capita Group, Aldridge believes that outsourcing their back offices could cut costs and vastly improve charities’ abilities to deliver their services. There is a need for streamlining, he says, particularly: “When you think about the duplication of human resources, payroll, and customer service that occur within charities.”

In his previous experiences with Capita, he discovered that outsourcing these kinds of activities could save 30 per cent of costs. And, of course, outsourcing to firms which have the skills removes the need to recruit that skill set in house, leaving charities free to concentrate on delivering the service they set out to deliver.

And yet, says Aldridge: “Nobody is thinking about centralising their back office. If you outsource your back office you get more economies of scale. Charities should work with the private sector to see how they can bulk up their service delivery.”

Aldridge’s charity v has been working hard at securing private sector funding for its programme, and boasts an impressive list of names from BT through to Tate & Lyle. But, he says: “There are very few illustrations where the third sector and the private sector fit together.”

Aldridge also finds it frustrating that some very successful programmes at local level do not more often reach a far greater scale. “I find that the impact of some of the things which work well does not often make it further than local level.

“Very good pieces of work which might be very local are never felt at national level, which is a shame.” Again, he says, there is a gap here which could be filled by an ability to see how small programmes might be rolled out at a national level so that more and more benefit from positive outcomes.

“I have never come across so much protection of what each organisation has got,” he adds. “There is a lack of thinking about the bigger picture.”

Despite his frustrations, then, is Aldridge enjoying his move into the third sector? “I find it fantastic,” he says. “I love this space of making a difference and trying things and doing things. And I think it is the right time. It’s the right time to be doing this, there is a great deal of government support for the sector.”