Can London be turned around like a troubled company?
Judi Bevan meets Tim Parker, the controversial private-equity player who slashed jobs and boosted value at Kwik-Fit and the AA, and is about to apply his skills at City Hall
Working at the Treasury after Oxford — and trying to live on £3,700 a year — swung him towards the merits of free-market capitalism. He got a grant to study business at the London School of Economics. ‘I wanted to lead something. I’ve always been good at organising things. Business school gave me the tools to run a company.’
In 1981, Britain was still in the depths of recession and no one was about to hand a 25-year-old a company to run. The next best thing was a job as personal assistant to Sir William Barlow at Thorn EMI, then a ragbag of electrical and electronics companies. He spotted a vacancy at one of them, an engineering business called Blakeslee in Chicago, and went to sort it out, which he did by selling the component parts to their managements. Back in the UK, he was sent to turn around Crypto Peerless, a small catering equipment company in Birmingham; he took it from break even to £800,000 profits in two and a half years.
‘It was old-fashioned metal-bashing; I love that stuff,’ he says with surprising passion. Metal-bashing played Cupid when he met his Belgian wife, Thérèse, at a catering equipment exhibition in Dallas; they have two sons and two daughters.
Parker’s first private-equity deal was Kenwood, a kitchen appliance maker in the Thorn EMI group which he ran for three years and then led into a buy-out backed by Candover, with the management taking 20 per cent. They paid £52 million for it in 1989 and floated it for £104 million in 1992. When the then chairman of C&J Clark read about this achievement, he sent for Parker and asked him to rescue the shoe company, then struggling against low-cost competition from the Far East. Did he ever lose sleep about putting people out of work? He sighs and talks about the importance of treating people decently and explaining why job losses are happening. ‘The other thing is that in an efficient econ-omy, redundancy is not always the end of the road. This is not the 1970s.’
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Simon Hall
July 17th, 2008 11:57amWell perhaps Tim Parker is not concerned about taxes that people in London have to pay but I am. The tax burden from local councils is unfairly high - it is time to review the way in which the blunt council tax is calculated.
Damian Hockney
July 17th, 2008 3:36pmThe new administration at City Hall talks about cutting costs but does not answer where the money is going to come from to do all the things it says need doing. Tim Parker may not be bothered at the ever increasing taxes in London, but a main plank of the Tory campaign was the 'unacceptable' massive increase in the Mayor's 'precept' over the previous 8 years. Are we in for even more? Cutting a few staff at City Hall is tokenistic and does not represent one tenth of one per cent of the whole budget.
D Short
July 18th, 2008 2:21amHow can this person claim that he's never heard people in London complain about tax, but then go on to talk about the 'hard-pressed' taxpayer?
Shome mishtake, shurely?