Big Issue founder John Bird has said the time has come for him to run a prison.
The Big Issue founder, who credited his spell in prison with teaching him to read, told the House of Lords that he “would do a better job than Group 4!”
The remark came as Bird urged the government to keep momentum going and push social enterprises into the mainstream in 2017.
He called on the government to commit to helping social enterprises – businesses with a social or environmental mission – become a widespread alternative to orthodox economics.
In his rallying cry for the sector, Lord Bird said he wanted to see “a social enterprise industry that actually gets to the parts of society that big business cannot get to.”
He asked the UK government to follow the Scottish Government’s lead in setting out a 10-year strategy to look at ways in which social enterprise can be encouraged to operate in every single area of the economy in every single part of the country.