I was arrested on 4th March 2008. Half of me was relieved — whatever had been building had finally broken, and at least the waiting was over. The other half was terrified of what came next.

Days into custody, my wife told me she was pregnant.

I am not going to dress up what that moment was. I was facing a serious sentence, with everything uncertain. And my wife — who knew, as I knew, that I had not done everything they said I had done — told me we were going to have a daughter.

I want to be honest about something else, too. I have done wrong things in my life. I am not claiming to be innocent of everything. But within that conviction there was something specific the courts had got wrong — something I knew was wrong, and something I could not simply accept.

I studied law to understand it. My wife believed in me throughout. And a solicitor believed in the case enough to take it all the way to the Court of Appeal — at his own cost when the legal aid ran out.

We won.

My wife and I are still together. But I want to be honest about what the years in between cost. My daughter spent the first eight years of her life without her father. I cannot give those years back. What I can do — what I have done every day since my release — is try to make it right. To be the father she deserved from the beginning. And to build something that means those years, and everything that surrounded them, stood for something beyond the loss.

I studied law during my sentence to understand the situation I was in. Not for the qualification. To understand what had happened, to read it in legal terms, and to know whether I was right about what had gone wrong.

I was right. But understanding something and doing something about it are not the same thing. What came next required someone else.

A solicitor believed in me. Not because it was convenient, not because the money was there — because he knew I was right and he was not prepared to walk away from that. When the legal aid ran out, he kept going. At his own cost. All the way to the Court of Appeal.

We won the appeal. The conviction was overturned. But what I carried out of that experience was not just a legal outcome. It was an understanding of what belief does to a person who has been told — by their record, by the system, by circumstances — that they are not worth believing in.

It changes everything. It changed me. And it is the direct reason Advance 2 Go exists in the form it does — built not around job matching or service delivery, but around the specific act of finding people who are ready to be believed in and standing beside them until they get where they are going.

When I was released I did not launch a charity. I rebuilt my life properly and in full — and that meant doing what most people leaving custody are told is the hardest thing to do. I got a job. And I kept it. For years.

I worked within a regulated company — not in a casual or peripheral role, but as a sustained, contributing member of a professional team operating within a serious compliance environment. I understood from the inside what professional standards actually mean in practice: accountability, evidenced decision-making, audit trails, and the consequences when standards are not met. I met the standard every day.

My wife was with me throughout. My daughter had already spent eight years without her father — so every day since release has been about being present, being employed, being someone worth coming home to. That is not a small thing. For someone who came out of the situation I came out of, it is everything.

I am not telling commissioners this to claim credit for ordinary behaviour. I am telling them because the people I am trying to help need to know it is possible. And because I am not speaking theoretically. I am speaking from years of living it.

I am launching Advance 2 Go from a position of strength. Not from necessity, not as the only option available to me — but as a deliberate choice, made from a place of professional credibility and full reintegration, because I am now in a position to do something that matters to me in a way nothing else does.

I have a law degree. I have held sustained employment for years in a regulated environment. I have a clean record. My licence is terminated. My wife and I are still together. My daughter is growing up.

I am, in every sense, exactly the person I set out to become in custody. And I have fully reintegrated into society — not as a destination, but as a way of living.

I want to find people who are ready to change. Who can and will change. But who need someone in their corner while they do it — someone who will not walk away when it gets hard, who knows from the inside what the journey looks like, and who genuinely believes in the destination.

I want to help them find their reason to fight. Because I know what having one did for me. And I know what the absence of it does to the people I am trying to reach.

That is not a mission statement drafted in a meeting room. That is what I lived. And it is why I am the right person to build this.