BHS row won’t go away, Sir Philip
SEEING Sir Philip Green step off his latest £100million yacht on a Greek island and threaten to throw a Sky News camera into the ‘f ***** g sea’ is all good fun if you’re not him and, more particularly, not one of 11,000 staff facing the axe at BHS in a few days and 20,000 pensioners facing fears over their future.
The pictures, splashed across the screens and newspapers, keep the pressure up on Green to ‘sort’ the £571million deficit in the pension scheme at the bust store chain he formerly owned, as he promised to MPs. As Labour’s Iain Wright MP, co-chairman of the committee probing the BHS debacle, said: ‘We don’t want this story to go away.’
Green does and he can make it so by stumping up more cash than the £80million-on-a-promise he has offered. His critics have drawn sharp contrasts between the speed with which he can move on deals when it suits him and his sluggishness over the settling of BHS’s pension issue.
Everything in pensions takes time, not least the Pensions Regulator, but Sir Philip must realise this is not going away and that if he ever wants to sail into an island idyll in peace again he needs to get his chequebook out sooner rather than later.
FORMER Prime Minister Sir John Major’s period in office has come in for revision recently: he presided over the beginnings of stabilisation of the economy with Ken Clarke at the Treasury (admittedly only after the disaster of Black Wednesday – revision can only go so far); he fought a limited, but successful war in the Middle East. He also did something truly transformational: he started the National Lottery, whose boss we interview on page 91.
Since it began in 1994 it has raised £35billion for good causes – perhaps the most prominent of which is sport, a personal love of cricket fan Major. The fortunes of our elite Olympic athletes have been transformed and the lottery has ploughed £5billion into grassroots sport, too.
The National Lottery is meant to be the UK’s only national lottery but now it has rivals: the Health Lottery and People’s Postcode Lottery have queered its pitch. The Government and the Gambling Commission have been looking at how to deal with the interlopers for years now and seem no closer to making a decision.
But the intention of Parliament in passing the National Lottery Act 1993 was clear: it was to create a single, national lottery because that is what Parliament agreed worked best to raise most money for good causes in a properly administered way. The National Lottery operator Camelot and lottery players deserve to know if the Government is still committed to that vision.