A deflating experience

Let me introduce you to a business my wife came across during a fraught journey down the M1 the other week.

Welcome to the world of roadside recovery.

My wife suffered a heart-in-mouth blowout while driving our children down to friends and a recovery firm contracted by the Highways Agency took her car to a motorway service station. They charged her £145 for the pleasure.

On the steep side, may be, but it is a charge allowed by the Highways Agency contract, which does not like to see vehicles stuck or tyres being replaced on the hard shoulder. Indeed, one of the first things the Agency tells you is that you’ve got two hours to shift yourself.
Understandably, my wife was stressed out by the whole experience, had two children to care for and asked the recovery man for help to change take the damaged wheel off and put the spacesaver spare on. So he did. It took just over three minutes.
And they charged her £80.
To begin with, he said they wanted paying in cash and kindly pointed out a cash till which she might like to fetch the money from. Eventually, after liaising with 'the gaffer', they accepted a credit card. Which is what she’d used to pay for the Highways Agency fee in the first place.
Cash or credit, a rate which equates to £1,600 an hour for taking one wheel off and putting another one on is, I’m sure you’ll agree, very nice work if you can get it. Better, indeed, than many corporate lawyers charge.
And much better than the professional tyre depot in Northampton which eventually took the flat tyre off the wheel, fitted a new one and balanced the wheel for good measure. They took 22 minutes and charged £65. For parts AND labour.

For some reason, I find the tyre depot far easier to recommend than the Highways Agency-approved Crouch Recovery.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I contacted Crouch Recovery to inquire about their scale of charges.

They kindly agreed to reduce it to £60, which takes that theoretical hourly rate for wheel-swapping down to a miserly £1,200. They protested that they had to cover the costs they had invested in equipment and training. I pointed out that since the wheel-swap was discretionary and not part of the Highways Agency contract their costs had already been covered in the £145.

There was no response to that. There is none: it is an unreasonable charge because it bears no relationship to the service delivered.

The message here is simple. If you travel through the M1 in the East Midlands, make sure you’ve got your own breakdown cover. Otherwise it won’t just be a tyre that deflates.

There is a postscript to this. My wife took a call from the Highways Agency last week asking for some feedback about the way the service had been delivered by their appointed agent.

As the French might say, la vengeance se mange très-bien froide.

Another country



Henley: good for rowing and shopping



A few weeks back I blogged about the difficulty that lurks behind the theory that our High Streets would be so much better if only they were full of independents rather than the same old chains.

It’s an entirely understandable lament based on concerns that High Streets all over the country are at risk of looking the same wherever you go. Choice without choice, so to speak.

But the idea that you can somehow regulate these Clone Towns out of existence is flawed in my view.

Chains proliferate because people like using them. People prefer the lower prices they tend to offer. And, as I discovered in Alnwick in August, a street full of independent retailers isn’t necessarily an attractive one. It can be utilitarian, drab, even off the pace.

Yet there are places where independents not only thrive but make very good money, and I was in one of them at the weekend.

I knew Henley when I was a lad, having grown up just outside Reading and rowed on the Thames at Henley for the school boat club. It was an affluent enclave even in those days, benefiting from a mix of old money and London commuters.
Multiply that by any factor you care to name now. As you drive through the downland in Berkshire and West Sussex you see carefully managed countryside dotted with paddocks, maneges and gravelled drives leading to characterful piles. It seems like Olde England, but is too carefully cultivated for that.
Put simply, there is not only no recession in this part of the country, it is in fact motoring along as if economic life is perfectly normal and rudely healthy.
Henley town centre, which gravitates gently down towards a river frontage and past the old Brakspears brewery buildings, is dominated by independent shops, restaurants, cafes and galleries. Many are so slick and well-presented that you would easily mistake them for a hip, new chain.
They combine classy fascias with clever window displays showcasing upmarket goods, often without price labels – a sure sign of high-end disposable incomes.

It is also a sign of independent retailers who know how and where to make good money, who understand the power of brand and display, who are good at sourcing fashionable quality, who know their market well, who know how to provide an experience rather than a simple sale.

I suspect Henley is also a well-managed retail centre capable of saying no to things it doesn’t like, with independent retailers making enough money to afford the rents on prime locations. Some national chains were there, but they were having to play by Henley’s rules.

An affluent town in the healthy South East is a total contrast to Alnwick. Places like Henley are microcosms of the now considerable gulf in wealth and economic performance between London and the South East and the rest of Britain. It is, I'm afraid, another country.

But they also tell another tale about independent retail, suggesting that it can thrive in exclusive catchments, but will always struggle elsewhere.

For independents to make a significant comeback in smaller towns and cities – especially as you travel further north – they would need local or national government support of one form or another, through either property-related incentives or help with marketing and training.

But that won’t guarantee success. I go back to what I said about Alnwick: for an independent retailer to genuinely thrive, it has to be extremely hard working, commercially savvy and uncompromisingly committed to succeeding.
People like that are rare. And those that do decide to go down the independent retail route may well be tempted by the internet rather than the High Street because it’s a cheaper way to trade.
Retail is about customer demand, not political ideals. In this climate in particular, it’s also about hard economic facts of life.

The Goodwood School for Real Racers

When I was a kid I followed motorsport in a big way, watching Formula One on TV, visiting the British Grand Prix and the International Trophy when they were at Silverstone and the British round of the European Formula 2 Championship at Thruxton (which was just down the road from where I grew up in Berkshire).

I used to read Pete Lyons’ Grand Prix reports in the weekly mag Autosport, also lapping up page-after-page of reports about sportscars, touring cars, rallying and club racing. On top of that I also bought Motor Sport, the monthly magazine ‘which gave its name to the sport’. Its obsession with pre-war racing was a bit too much for me, but Denis Jenkinson’s Grand Prix reports were brilliant for the way they punctured some of the commercial egos who stalked the sport (he referred to the Players-sponsored Team Lotus as Team Shambles)

These days, the idea of shelling out £150-200 to sit a quarter of a mile from the track ‘watching’ a Grand Prix is the wrong side of silly street for me. I still watch it occasionally on TV, but long for the days when the sport looked and felt like racing rather than a corporate brand strategy developed in a wind tunnel.

Which is what took me down to Goodwood in West Sussex at the weekend. This is the time of year when Lord March stages the second of his increasingly successful representations of motor sport the way it was. July sees the Festival of Speed, where drivers past and present fling all sorts of metal (and carbon fibre) up a hillclimb outside Goodwood House. And September sees the Goodwood Revival.

It’s called Revival for two reasons. One is that it brings back into use a legendary racing circuit which waved goodbye to racing in the late 1960s when Freddie March (the current Lord March’s dad) decided he could no longer carry on ploughing money into modernising the track. The other is that the event is a celebration not just of motor sport in decades past but of life in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s.

So it mixes road and track cars and bikes from those decades with Second World War aircraft, displays of motoring memorabilia (presented as they used to be), and invites the crowd to enter into the spirit of things by dressing in period costume (which thousands did, some to impeccable lengths).

Best of all, it brings these priceless motoring icons within touching distance of the paying public. You can walk within inches of classic sports racing cars worth millions (I made a bee-line for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s Ferrari 250 GTO) and rub shoulders with drivers and riders (Sir Stirling Moss was busy signing autographs). Unlike F1 drivers doing their corporate duty (something Lewis Hamilton is honest enough to admit he loathes), they turn out because they love it.

And ‘it’ in this case is Racing. The rare metal they drive may be worth fortunes, but they hammered round the track as if they were chasing a championship-deciding win – sometimes with eye-wateringly expensive consequences.

For my money the most impressive spectacle came at the start of the Whitsun Trophy, a race for mid 1960s Le Mans-style sportscars. Standing at Madgwick, the circuit’s first corner, we saw a 30-strong field take off like the Charge of the Light Brigade and hurl itself at the bend.

Leading the field were two Lola T70s, cars which hid F1-style chassis technology under a sports car body driven by massively powerful Chevrolet V8 engines. These monsters attacked the same piece of track with a commitment which meant only one was going to get round it. Sure enough, one went spinning across the tarmac, with other Lolas, Ford GT40s and Ferraris scattering in all directions.

The one thing which gave me hope that Formula One hasn’t completely lost touch with what it is meant to be was the fact that one of the scattering cars was being piloted by Adrian Newey, the designer whose genius has left Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel untouchable.

He thrashed round in an impressive manner, lunging up the field in a beautiful 1965 GT40 which he keeps for those weekends when he’s not busy out-thinking everyone else in motor sport.

But F1 would have to gulp down a pack of simplification pills if it was to get anywhere near the spectacle we saw at Goodwood. We were closer to the action, the cars weren’t glued to the tarmac in the way today’s winged wonders are, and the drivers were out for some serious fun.

They – and the Goodwood Revival - are what motor sport should really be about: Racers.

Are big bonuses in big firms small beer?

It’s September, and politics is slowly but surely getting back into full swing. Hence the national media has largely lost interest in ‘riots’ in the regions.
So today we’ve seen a renewed debate about whether the Government needs to inject a few quid into the economy and a report by the High Pay Commission suggesting FTSE 350 directors have been lunching on big bonuses while their companies have been going nowhere fast.
The debate about the economy will run and run, but reports which suggest the rich are getting richer while the rest of us struggle is more likely to lodge in the public psyche because it plays to that well-known prejudice that life’s not fair.
Two points about the Commission’s report.
One is that the High Pay Commission isn’t actually a Commission in the naturally understood sense. While Commissions are traditionally set up by government to hold open inquiries into matters of serious public concern, the High Pay Commission is infact a one-year project set up by a London think-tank called Compass, which styles itself as ‘promoting left-wing debate’.
Those origins are reflected in the Commission’s membership and experts panel, which doesn’t include any high-profile business owners or business organisations, and is comprised mainly of academics, consultants and writers concerned with equality and civil society. It also has strong media connections, including former Guardian and BBC journalists.
Nothing wrong with that – everyone is entitled to a view and I’m guessing it’s unlikely the FTSE 350 would collectively invite public inquiry into how much its executives trouser each year in handsome bonuses.
All the same, the name is a bit misleading without explanation.
My big beef is that this self-elected, well-connected body puts so much emphasis on a sector which is unrepresentative of business at large.
So we’ve had another day of headlines about business which encourage the public to think that the commercial world is full of nothing but ruthless fat-cats who are out to screw you for everything they can get.
And that’s an unrepresentative cliche. The High Pay Commission would score some more relevant points if it asked the UK’s vast army of private business owners what they think of their Stock Market cousins. They’d get some pithy responses, I can tell you.
But missing a trick is not the point.
Most businesses are run by people who work their socks off, take considerable personal financial risks, and do it because they are motivated by a desire to make it on their own rather than squirrel away enough readies for a yacht in the Med.
The High Pay Commission may be making some valid points. But stopping FTSE bosses lining their pockets is unlikely to make life better for the public at large. The media focus on it is all a bit London-centric.
Right now, a Commission into what government could and should be doing to provide a cogent business support service for small firms would be far more useful and far more relevant to where our economy is at.

LEP faces a turning point



George Cowcher: a key voice on the LEP

At some stage in the autumn the board of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Local Enterprise Partnership, officially called D2N2 but otherwise known as a LEP, will meet to discuss its priorities.
While it has a lot of priorities at the moment, it has no budget and no full-time staff. So those priorities are going to be slimmed down.
There’s something else it is drastically short of, too: widespread support in the business community. Granted, some of the biggest corporate names have given it time (Bombardier’s Colin Walton leads the board), and Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce chief exec George Cowcher has been its main voice.
But there are widespread concerns that the LEP has simply not penetrated the psyche of your average business in the two counties.
I know from conversations I’ve had with civil servants that there are concerns that the wider business community has not bought into the LEP concept on any level.
I’ve seen a report drawn up by consultants which also says there is evidence that businesses don’t ‘get’ what the LEP is about.
In an article in the Post on Tuesday, Glenn Crocker, the chief executive of Nottingham’s BioCity, will say that many see the LEP as a “toothless irrelevance”, though he also says very clearly that he does not believe it should be written off.
There are three problems here.
One was identified by George Cowcher himself: businesses have got to wake up to the fact that the days of the East Midlands Development Agency, which had £150m a year to spend on the regional economy, are dead and buried. Businesses, organisations and sectors which relied on an emda funding stream have got to stand on their own two feet; there will be no grants to chase.
Mr Cowcher also tacitly admitted the second: the LEP needs to work much, much harder at raising its public profile. The £50,000 odd it has been given by government to support the development and maintenance of economic data is all well and good, but what purpose does it serve when the LEP is largely silent between board meetings?
The third is the contradiction at the heart of government economic policy. It wanted rid of emda because, in addition to wanting to save money, it did not believe a government agency should be leading business by the nose. Its view, which does make long-term economic sense, is that a sustainable economy is built around businesses which grow naturally.
But, as we’ve already seen, the central message from the organisation which has stepped into this void boils down to this: ‘We’re not emda’.
And if the mantra now is that businesses should help themselves, why will they vest time and money in the LEP? Look at what happened in the first round of bidding for the Regional Growth Fund (what was that about the death of regional economic policy?): one Notts business, Molecular Profiles, secured funding by making a bid itself. Not one of the 38 bids from the LEP - a body set up by government - was accepted by that government.
That may be because the local authority economic development people who give their time to the LEP were stuck in an emda mindset, wanting money for infrastructure, buildings and projects when the government was looking to back businesses creating jobs quickly.
The same problem cropped up in other LEP areas. So why was the process allowed to go so wrong for so long? All it has done is eat away at potential enthusiasm for the LEP concept.
The consultancy report I referred to earlier does make a powerful case for the existence of an organisation which furthers cross-county economic development activity and whatever government thinks about regional policy, it does believe business should have a powerful say in that.
Whether you feel strongly about government intervention in the economy or not, it seems common sense for businesses and local authorities to talk about what’s happening to the local economy, and for them both to make decisions based on solid evidence about the size and shape of the commercial landscape they operate in.
If the LEP is to mean anything, then it needs to be much more visible. It needs to hold events, to talk publicly, to get in the face of government, to produce the odd report – albeit within a sharply focused brief which avoids duplicating what other bodies already do.
There is another event in the autumn which could prove pivotal for the future of the LEP. It is the day when Government announces the results of the second round of bidding for the Regional Growth Fund (and don't ask when because no-one knows yet).
This time, £900 million is available across the country, and I know the LEP has made some hefty bids related to both business support activity and the tourism industry.
If those bids succeed, then the LEP has its sense of purpose.
If they fail again, then it’s surely back to the drawing board - for the Government as well as the LEP.

EU couldn't make it up

My phone rings. It is someone-or-other from the European Union.
Am I interested in a story about how much the EU will be spending in our region up to 2020 and would I like to talk to people about how they are going to spend it?
Of course - there could be some opportunities for local businesses in this. So a chance to look at how the money would be spent locally would be great.
It's never that simple with the EU, though.
To find out about how money will be spent in the East Midlands, they want me to go to a three-day event.
In Brussels.
"But if you're spending money locally, wouldn't it be better to talk to someone here, on the ground, to see where it will be spent?"
Bafflement. Silence follows.
"So it is best I say you are not interested in the story?"
No, I'm definitely interested, I said. But I explained that I couldn't spare three days for one story, never mind one in Brussels.
This did not compute. How could someone not want to go to Brussels...to speak to Commissioners...at an event?
I did think about throwing something in about the irony of a story about a local initiative being done abroad, but it would have been lost in translation between one version of English and another.
In any case, we were clearly inhabiting different universes already.
"OK...so you can't do the story."
"Yes, I can do the story but can we not talk to someone here or over the phone?"
"Erm...it's for this event...OK we leave it there."
C'est la vie.

Sickies, slackers and an Age of Entitlement?

Business has never been easy, but these days it is punishingly tough. In many companies there are fewer people doing more and more, and increasing costs eating away at standstill prices.
While I’m on the cynical side of when-the-tough-get-going strategies (because that’s what you should be doing anyway), there’s no question that work these days is about working harder and longer without additional reward. Can it be anything else in this climate?
Apparently it can. There’s a suggestion that at least a few people think a four-day week, cruising through the day and dashing for the door at 5.30 are all you need to do to bring home a good wage.
Who are they? According to George Cowcher, they are our future. What the chief exec of Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber is referring to is a generation of kids, some of whom seem to think that work means money for the taking.
Now, I normally take a pretty sceptical view of those who shake their head and mutter dismissively about ‘the young people of today’ or suggest it wasn’t like this in my day etc.
But George Cowcher isn’t that kind of bloke, and he was referring to the hard evidence consistently flagged up in a survey of small businesses in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
His starting point was the continuing puzzle of consistently improving exam results versus the consistently poor standards of literacy and numeracy displayed by people who turn up for job interviews.
That, he believes, may be down to the generation of kids who went through schools before a heavy emphasis was placed on those key skills. Exam passes are one thing, practical everyday skills another.
But the apparently poor work ethic is less straightforward. According to Mr Cowcher, at its worst this manifests itself in people who think it’s OK to throw sickies on Mondays because they’ve overdone the pop at the weekend. But it also extends to graduates who think a degree is the automatic route to a handsome pay packet…even when they can’t keep a phone conversation going and rely on a Word spellchecker for their communications skills.
“It is surprising in this climate,” he told me. “But there is a cohort which doesn’t see work as the major driver in their life and wants something for nothing.”
There is a debate here to be had about whether a decade of economic growth, easy credit and the rise of the consumer economy has led to an era of entitlement, an age when people grow up thinking that a high standard of living is something you are entitled to rather than something you have to work your socks off for.
It may be that we’re going through a period of adjustment, and those that go through the educational system from 2007 onwards will emerge with a more realistic expectations about the relationship between rights and responsibilities.
In my experience, there have always been people who think the world owes them a living and moan loudly when it isn’t served up on a plate. And debates like this have a habit of occurring in cycles.
But you can also criticise individual businesses for the way they took their foot off the gas - and their eye off the ball - during a bubble that was never likely to last.
The surprise for me was someone like George Cowcher – an experienced operator who usually chooses his ground very carefully – delivering some unequivocal criticism.
Does he have a point?