How great leaders secure their legacy

Great business leaders are remembered not by how they made their money but how they gave it away. the rockefeller family is known as a philanthropic foundation, not an oil cartel.

the Nuffield Foundation lives on, while William Morris’s car company has long disappeared in the mess of British Leyland. and so it will be with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the like.

Jeff Fairburn is not in the rockefeller or Nuffield league, but £130m is enough to found a decent middleweight British charity, big enough to give distributions of at least £5m a year.

It would for example be larger than the endowment of a typical Oxbridge college. and there lies the golden opportunity for Mr Fairburn.

the outcry at the size of his bonus at Persimmon is mounting.

aberdeen Standard Investments has rightly called it ‘grossly excessive’.

Other major shareholders are pitching in. the point here is that the bonus scheme, though approved by shareholders, was ludicrously constructed, and the company’s chairman and head of the remuneration committee have already resigned.

So while the money legally belongs to Mr Fairburn – there is no question about that – and while he has promised to give “a substantial amount” of it to a charitable foundation, this is not enough. He has to give it all away. Simple as that. the foundation in his name becomes famous, and as a result his family, comfortably off by any standards, will bask in his glow for generations to come.

Hard to love British Gas

tHe gas bill landing on the doormat is not one of those uplifting moments. Yes, we need gas, and we accept that we have to pay for it like we have to pay our tax.

But it is not like a meal in a favourite restaurant, not something we enjoy doing.

and that is the nub of the problem for Centrica, the parent company of British Gas. It has 24m energy customer accounts, which is huge. think how difficult it would be to build a customer base like that. add in electricity and the company supplies one-third of British energy needs.

But many are simply buying on price, and when some other company comes along with an apparently better deal they flip.

Others may have bought some service, then find that the reality does not live up to the fancy sales brochure (google ‘British Gas reviews’ and you’ll see what I mean).

Chief executive Iain Conn has a mission to try to change this: to make the company loved. He would argue that some progress has been made, in that the number of complaints has fallen for two years running.

He also says that 80pc of the million or so customers they have lost in the past year are ones they wanted to lose as they made no money on them. It is working hard too on technology and it seems to have some success in its european partnerships.

But providing a better service to customers while sacking a quarter of your workforce is a bit of a challenge.

We should wish Centrica well. a lot of us would rather buy our energy from the grandchild of the old gas board than some French or German public utility.

But love British Gas? er, no.

A minor revision

ONe of the oddities of British economic reporting is that small changes in data are treated as matters of great importance. So the slight downward revision of fourthquarter GDP growth from 0.5pc to 0.4pc was greeted as evidence that the UK was being hit by Brexit uncertainty.

actually, one main reason for the revision was the inclusion of data on North Sea oil production. the closure for a period of the giant Forties field hit energy production. as for uncertainty hitting the City: one of the strongest sectors was financial and business services, with growth at 0.9pc.

In any case all these figures will be revised again for many years to come. as the Office for Budget responsibility noted last November, the early 1990s recession was not nearly as serious as thought at the time, while the recovery since 2010 has been much faster than initially reported.

all that earnest dismal stuff about double dips and triple dips was complete rubbish.