Martin Vander Weyer
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The key question in both cases, of course, is whether they are running significantly stronger businesses than their predecessors. It’s easy enough to tick that box for Hester, since the previous RBS regime left the bank in ruins. In the case of Royal Mail, however, the wider public is less interested in balance-sheet strength than in quality and price of service. And what they see is a limping dinosaur in retreat, missing delivery targets, pushing up stamp prices, closing village post offices, yielding to militants in its workforce, and failing at every turn to maximise the competitive advantages of its brand power and infrastructure. On that assessment, Moya Greene and her colleagues are still paid far too much.
These issues will come into sharper focus now that the resurgent stock market has put privatisation of Royal Mail and RBS back on the agenda. Business Secretary Vince Cable is reportedly promoting the idea of an RBS share gift worth up to £400 to every taxpayer as compensation for pain suffered these past five years — a new form of quantitative easing, you might say, with the merit of relieving ministers of the embarrassment of owning RBS, ahead of the 2015 election and sooner than would be the case if they waited for conditions to ripen for a conventional share offer or sale to a single buyer. What’s more, if a portion of RBS were given to citizens, the residual state-held portion should rise in value by virtue of increased activity in the shares. So it’s not such a daft idea, but it would look like a blatant pre-election bribe — and one that would inevitably favour the Tories as the party of popular capitalism, rather than the Lib Dems. So if George Osborne starts to show enthusiasm, watch for a swift U-turn from Vince Cable.
Meanwhile, business minister Michael Fallon has inherited a filing cabinet stuffed with feasibility studies and covered with dents where previous incumbents have kicked it in frustration. It’s the one labelled ‘Royal Mail privatisation’, and it bears the boot-prints of, among others, Lords Heseltine and Mandelson. This is an industry with shining examples of postal services in Germany and Holland that have transformed themselves into successful global businesses, having adopted privatisation models pioneered in Britain for the sell-off of other kinds of consumer-facing public services. It’s astonishing that the Communications Workers Union and its Labour chums have been allowed to thwart every proposal to date (even with the promise of generous share giveaways to postal staff) for a partial sell-off, trade sale or commercial partnership with a European operator. Royal Mail will only ever shape up as a real business when one of those options is finally allowed to happen; let’s hope Mr Fallon finds the key to the cabinet.
David Cameron has been in India again this week promoting trade links, deflecting questions about visa restrictions and hoping to sell a job-lot of Eurofighter Typhoon jets. Despite pitfalls of bureaucracy and corruption, India has always seemed to me to offer more fertile ground for British business than China, and I applaud the Prime Minister’s efforts. I also hope he finds time to pop into one of the kiosks of Geosansar, the venture I mentioned in my New Year review of socially useful advances in banking technology. I make no apology for mentioning it again, because it is a perfect example of positive Anglo-Indian connections. In partnership with State Bank of India and others, this Hyderabad-based social enterprise is dedicated to bringing services such as savings accounts and money transfers to the unbanked masses of India in a simple, accessible, low-cost form. Its network is growing so fast that it recently opened 9,000 new customer accounts in a single day. And the driving force behind it is an LSE graduate who lives in Finchley: he is Nish Kotecha, a former investment banker who long ago I interviewed for a job at Barclays. When we met for lunch the other day, we were both mildly confused by the choice of venue — which turned out to have been booked by a secretary in Hyderabad unfamiliar with London eateries but using a satellite app to plot a midway rendezvous. Technology doesn’t always provide perfect answers, but it certainly makes the world smaller.
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