In December last year, then housing secretary Robert Jenrick asked the great and the good of local government and property to investigate how we might revive city centres after Covid. The “urban recovery taskforce” — including former Manchester council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein, Whitbread boss Alison Brittain and John Lewis managing director-turned-West Midlands mayor Andy Street — went off and delivered its report in April.
It was a thoughtful 18-page document. Among other things, the grandees recommended running campaigns to restore confidence in urban areas, creating a Covid-secure benchmark for workplaces, encouraging government to take a more strategic role in regeneration, and tackling fragmented ownership in town centres. I know this because someone involved gave me a copy. You wouldn’t know it because Jenrick’s department didn’t bother to publish the report. The taskforce was quietly disbanded before he was replaced by Michael Gove in September.
The question of what to do about all the hair salons, nail bars, nightclubs and pubs that rely on office-worker footfall returned to urgent status last week. Boris Johnson’s nonsensical Plan B Omicron edict that staff should work from home while hospitality venues stay open — lampooned in a Sun front page suggesting they work from the pub instead — will hammer town and city centres once again. The cynical decision to empty out offices without ordering leisure and retail premises to close means their calls for mini-furlough schemes and loans can be ignored.
In London, footfall stood at just 53 per cent of its pre-Covid level even before this month’s events. Transport for London lurches from bailout to bailout, with mayor Sadiq Khan threatening to mothball a Tube line to ease its finances.
If levelling up is to be more than a vacuous slogan — Johnson’s equivalent of David Cameron’s big society — ministers need to engage with business. But the story of the urban recovery taskforce is a depressingly familiar one. Last week, as Johnson was busy declaring himself “sickened and furious” by allegations of a party at his own home, business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng chaired the final meeting of No 10’s Build Back Better Business Council, which is being killed off. After Johnson’s Peppa Pig speech to the CBI, some members were informed their services would no longer be required. Downing Street is said to be planning a shake-up of its business advisers next year. Kwarteng was an appropriate person to administer the last rites to No 10’s council: one of his first acts at the business department was to axe the industrial strategy council.
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There is a general sense that this government holds business and urban areas in contempt. Gove’s delayed white paper on levelling up, from the parts of it leaked, seems to focus on devolution gimmicks such as merging councils and creating American-style governors for rural areas. Yet he won’t get far without the energy and financial heft of the private sector. It is ready and willing: as we report today, a group of interested business leaders chaired by National Grid’s Sir Peter Gershon is, off their own bat, looking into how Britain can build the next wave of “unicorn” tech ventures valued at more than $1 billion.
Most businesses want to grow: it is in their DNA. The desire to help with the recovery is there — if only this capricious government would harness it properly.
LV equals lesson in communication
No one emerges with much credit from the saga of LV’s failed deal with private equity firm Bain. After a year of botched communications, the 178-year-old mutual insurer saw its proposed £530 million sale vetoed by only 52,561 of its 1.2 million members. On a 15 per cent turnout, that rebellion was enough to stop LV reaching the 75 per cent approval threshold it needed.
LV now looks likely to fall into the arms of Royal London, a fellow mutual that has shown itself to be less cuddly than previously thought by circling LV, trying to disrupt its transaction. The terms Royal London is offering aren’t clear. Members may or may not get a better deal than Bain was offering.
To say that chairman Alan Cook and chief executive Mark Hartigan should walk the plank for this is obvious. More interesting is the lesson others can draw from the debacle. Neither of the two most senior people had been at LV for long when they decided to flog it. Both seem to have misunderstood its culture and the value members placed on mutuality. They might at least have surmounted the second point had they communicated clearly throughout, articulating the rationale for LV’s sale and their reasons for choosing Bain. They had plenty of advance warning about the coming storm via a steady drumbeat of negative stories in The Times. But by sticking their heads in the sand, they eventually allowed that to turn into an inferno in the Daily Mail. By the time LV woke up to the disaster, it was too late to change the narrative.
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Elliott’s new clothes
An American chief executive who came under attack from Elliott Management once described the experience of researching the hedge fund online as like “Googling this thing on your arm and it says, ‘You’re going to die.’”
Elliott’s approach has always involved something of a confidence trick. Its very appearance on a share register can shock management. So the hedge fund should be concerned that none of its recent sorties seems to be bearing fruit. At Glaxo Smith Kline, it has struggled to gain traction, despite the drugs giant’s longstanding performance problems. At energy group SSE, its call for a break-up has been firmly rebuffed. And last week’s salvo at housebuilder Taylor Wimpey looked half-baked and vague. At this rate, boards and long-only investors might start to question whether Elliott really is wearing such fearsome robes.
oliver.shah@sunday-times.co.uk
mailto:oliver.shah@sunday-times.co.uk