IT HAS been a great spring for Rod Aldridge, silver- goateed boss of Capita, the back-office service provider: the smooth launch of London’s congestion-charging system (admin provided by Capita), the renewal of the government contract to run teachers’ pensions (Capita again), a set of annual results showing turnover up 30% to nearly £900m and profits up 36% to nearly £100m.

What more could a man want? Well, the Royal Bank of Scotland/Sunday Times Business of the Year Award, of course, which Aldridge picked up on Tuesday.

“Yeah, it has been good,” he says, sinking down into a sofa in his modest first-floor office in London’s Victoria. Aldridge, 55, the defiantly unposh, former council accountant who left school at 16 and now runs one of the fastest-growing plcs in the country, does not seem the sort the sort to bask in his own glory. With his greying hair pushed back on his large head, a cautious smile and a considerate manner, he seems more embarrassed than anything.

Others contend that the modest demeanour cloaks a very clever man. If you were being eaten alive by him for lunch, you’d hardly notice until the dessert didn’t come. It was you.

That is a technique that has helped Aldridge to build up a £45m personal fortune and Capita to pull deals out of the public sector worth much, much more: running the paperwork for council services, collecting the licence fee for the BBC, implementing the winter fuel- payments scheme for the government. Nowadays, Capita is everywhere.

But put it to Aldridge that some think his modesty is just a useful deal-clincher in a sensitive environment and he shrugs.

“No, I think what you see is what you get,” he says. The biggest smile is reserved for Private Eye’s renaming of the firm as “Crapita”, so-tagged because standards at the firm are — allegedly — not as high as often promised. He just grins good-humouredly. Does nothing wind him up? “Some of the things we do are not easy and not popular,” he says, clasping his hands. There are bound to be mistakes, it’s how you deal with them that counts.

And the key to Aldridge, according to those who know him, is that he is a quick learner. Last year’s furore over delays in checking teachers’ records at the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) — a 10-year Capita contract worth £400m — taught him that he had to start a dialogue with the media. Estelle Morris, then education secretary, made it plain she thought the problems were Capita’s fault. Aldridge, always loath to criticise a customer, demurs but says: “We should have engaged more with the press.”

He didn’t make the same mistake with London’s congestion charge (a five-year Capita contract worth £280m).

“We de-risked it by showing a lot of journalists the technology,” he says. Really? Yup, and explaining just where Capita’s responsibilities stopped. It was an exemplary launch. The starting date never wavered in 18 months — how many IT projects of such complexity and scale can boast that? Now Aldridge is looking proud. He takes a lot of good- natured stick from other bosses about the charge — “as the man responsible for implementing the congestion charge”, he told Tuesday’s awards ceremony at The Savoy hotel, “I am not used to being clapped” — but it wasn’t his political initiative, Capita just made it happen.

He does confess to feeling quiet satisfaction when, on the first morning the charge came in, he walked down Victoria Street to his office at 7am with barely a car on the road. “A bloke on the pavement just turned to me and said, ‘it’s working, isn’t it?’ and I thought, ‘yeah, it is’.”

But would Capita have bid for the project if he’d hated the concept of charging? He fudges that one (“we’re of mixed views here on it”, laughs one colleague).

What is extraordinary is that Capita seems fearless about what it will take on, public or private. The company’s usual method is to absorb any current employees, introduce new efficiencies (yes, redundancies), invest in new technology and then often bolt on other work to increase economies of scale.