SERCO grew from a little-known firm to one the biggest privatisation contractors.

Serco now has a £3 billion turnover, largely thanks to public-sector contracts.

The firm has grown despite scandals — and with close relations to officials and politicians.

Movement through the “revolving door” between government and business has always gone along with the firm’s growth.

In 1998, Serco was around a 10th of its current size.

One of its first breakthroughs was a contract to run the Canadian Air Force’s Goose Bay base in the cold north of Newfoundland.

The privatisation was widely criticised as Serco slashed staff and wages, provoking a strike.

Serco was forced to negotiate with the angry workers when hungry bears overran the base, attracted by the rubbish that hadn’t been cleaned up thanks to the strike.

Goose Bay might have been a rocky start, but it got Serco a big purchase in the privatisation game.

And it came with one key appointment.

Questions in Canada’s parliament revealed that Mac Campbell, a former director general for Canada’s Department of Defence at Goose Bay had become a Serco manager.

Over the following 18 years Serco grew massively.

The firm now runs prisons, immigration detention centres, military bases and PFI hospitals among many other public services.

It has also run into scandals, like the prisoner tagging fake figures, the Cornish NHS failures and the grim state of Yarl’s Wood detention centre.
Serco made other key appointments on the way to success.

In 1998, when chasing defence contracts, it gave Air Marshal Sir Roger Austin, a former deputy chief of defence procurement, a job on its “Strategic Forum.”

Lord Filkin, a Labour junior minister in Education and the Home Office left government in 2005.

He became a Serco director in January 2006. Austin and Filkin have moved on, but the firm continued making key appointments.

Alan Cave was the “delivery director” of the Department for Work and Pensions in charge of the massive Work Programme for the unemployed.

In 2013 he left to join Serco — which had hundreds of millions of Work Programme contracts — as its “account director to the central government.”

Serco has also appointed other politically linked directors: Labour’s Baroness Ford, regarded as a friend of John Prescott, served as a Serco director from 2002-7.

Rupert Soames, a grandson of Churchill and brother of senior Tory MP Nicholas Soames, was made chairman and helped the firm get out from under the tagging scandal.