The new man in charge of collecting your TV licence

Business Profile: Chairman has quietly built Capita to become the acceptable face of privatisation

Be warned: if you do not have a television licence, Rod Aldridge is coming to get you. From today, the mild-mannered chairman of Capita is the man responsible for collecting the licence fee for the BBC, and his bonus depends on cutting the number of dodgers. Students, in particular, are going to feel it in the pocket.

"It's a fact that a lot of students don't pay and there are different parts of the country where fewer people pay than in others, so we will be raising the profile more than anything," he says. "Only around 92 per cent pay, and we want to improve that. We'll see how it goes, but if we collect another 3 per cent, there'll be another £60m the BBC will have to spend on programmes. There's an advantage for them if we're successful, and there's an advantage for us if we're successful."

The BBC are paying Capita at least half a billion pounds to collect the licence fee for 10 years. Some 1,500 staff, mainly in the Licensing Unit in Bristol, who went home on Friday as employees of Consignia, are starting work this morning on the Capita payroll.

It is a familiar pattern for the company, which has grown by taking over an increasing number of the functions and the staff of local authorities and other government agencies. Mr Aldridge might be the acceptable face of privatisation, if only his company wasn't so deliberately anonymous. Capita's tentacles already touch the lives of an estimated 33 million people in the UK – more with the start of the licence fee contract, its biggest ever – but few would recognise the name, even though it has been in the FTSE 100 since March 2000.

Capita administers the pay and expenses of thousands of local government employees, the pensions of state sector teachers and the share registers of many companies. There is a good chance your council tax bill is sent out by Capita, who will collect the cash too. Were you to make a claim on an Abbey National home insurance policy, it is Capita you would be dealing with. When I e-mailed BBC2 to complain there wasn't enough tennis in Today at Wimbledon, it was Capita that logged the message.

In the private sector this process of delegating functions to an outside company is called outsourcing; in the public sector it is often called privatisation.

Mr Aldridge is something of an apostle for the process. "When you take things out of a much more bureaucratic and structured environment and put it into a new environment such as ours, you can change things faster, because people act differently. If organisations were doing it themselves the money that we can spend on change, on technology, would have to be competed for within the organisation and they probably won't get it. They can't change fast enough, and you will have problems with some of the services."

When the unassuming Mr Aldridge started his career in the post room of East Sussex council in the Sixties and began training as an accountant, he seemed destined to ascend the greasy pole of local government administration. So what changed?

During a nine-year stint at the Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy, the public sector accountants' body, Mr Aldridge helped develop a software system to help local authorities introduce the Conservative government's plans for organising their employees into "direct labour organisations". By 1984, the resulting consultancy work formed the basis of the company that was to become Capita, and by 1987 Mr Aldridge was ready to lead a management buy-out.

"I didn't know what a management buy-out was. I saw a book about MBOs when I was waiting in a meeting. It was quite an aggressive position to take because I was trying to persuade a public sector institution to sell something they would value for the purposes of funding the institute. We wanted to do it because we felt we couldn't develop the business in the way we wanted.

"The MBO would never fail, because of the determination not to let that happen. It was in a marketplace I knew and other people knew who were with me. We made the transition from public to private sector very naturally. The differences between them are all in the head."

Mr Aldridge makes great play of his public sector experienceand insists the company does not make its profits, up 33 per cent to £53m last year, by making former public sector employees redundant. The redundancy rate among employees transferring to Capita is about 1 per cent, he says, and all terms and conditions are honoured.

But he takes his time to decide if he will answer my question about his personal politics. After a long pause: "My background is a working-class family, my father was a union secretary for 35 years. I believe a lot in education and addressing social exclusion. My feelings are much more towards a New Labour agenda than anything else, although I'm not a party donor. My father was made redundant at 50 and it taught me a lot about what happens to a family when the breadwinner has no job. A lot of my determination comes from him, because he then went about building a business."

The amount of work central and local government and their agencies could outsource is at least £50bn, Capita reckons, and with most of that still to be put out to tender, Mr Aldridge says he is not fussed about turning potential work down. For instance: "We don't want to run a hospital. I think what will happen in health is all the support services will begin to be delivered in different ways, and that interests us. We're interested in their IT, human resources, finance, property management, those sorts of things."

And again: "We don't take over failing services, such as schools. We haven't gone the aggressive end. When something is poorly run, we've learnt that there are reasons for it being poorly run. There are usually issues around how the staff are managed, around their calibre and there may be political points around it."

That said, the company is readying itself for the running of Ken Livingstone's congestion charging scheme in central London, which begins next year. Despite critics lining up to take potshots at the scheme, Mr Aldridge is confident.

"What can go wrong? The technology is tried and tested, the ability to pay is obvious through a network of retail outlets, telephone and through the web – that's already in place. If you don't pay, you get a bill, it's not rocket science."

RODNEY ALDRIDGE OUTSOURCING APOSTLE

Career history: Worked for local councils in East and West Sussex, Brighton and Crawley before joining the secretariat of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) in 1974. Led a buy-out of Cipfa Computer Services in 1987 and floated the company as Capita in 1989. Currently executive chairman.

Age: 54. Married with four chilldren.

Pay: Total package of £438,847 in 2001.

Hobbies: Golf, with a handicap of 16. Has begun going to the gym to work on his upper-body strength, following the example of Tiger Woods.

Charity: Trustee of the Prince's Trust. "My big agenda is around education and addressing social exclusion. The trust opened my eyes enormously. I chair a programme called xL, a programme of clubs introduced into 430 schools for young people who have dropped out of school."