Final days for Fairburn

JEFF Fairburn’s ears must be burning. The Persimmon chief executive’s reputation has already been shot to pieces by his £75m pay package (cut back from up to £131m by angry investors) but now he finds himself under attack from his fellow housebuilders.

As one senior executive noted, Fairburn is ‘tarnishing the whole industry’ and bringing it into disrepute.

The Persimmon boss’s ability to run a public company which makes profits of £1bn a year, on the back of a huge Government subsidy, has been seriously undermined by his car-crash appearance on the BBC’s Look North programme.

Senior City figures are arguing privately that a chief executive who is unable to handle a media interview and provide a properly argued defence of his rewards and those of his senior colleagues is way out of his depth.

Fairburn’s claims to being some kind of housing genius, who deserves all that he can get, are contradicted by weighty reports of residents in Persimmon housing projects riddled with structural reports.

The chief has hidden out in Yorkshire, barely engages with stakeholders and is deemed by many to be out of touch.

His imperviousness to criticism has already led to one chairman, Nicholas Wrigley, formerly of Rothschild, being sacrificed.

His replacement, betting industry boss Roger Devlin, is, one is told, reading the runes and recognises that there may be no choice but to let Fairburn go.

But it is never going to be easy because of the vast pay- off it could trigger and the potential for a political row, new remuneration hearings in the Commons and another ugly blast from the Labour benches.

But, like some of Persimmon’s shoddy output, the chief executive has passed his sell-by date.

Ringing changes

THE choice of Philip Jansen as chief executive at BT is curious.

Yes, he has experience in telecoms and more recently in digital as boss of Worldpay, but his senior roles have been in private equity and creating value in short order rather than the patient, humdrum work required to run a world-class utility.

Since Jan du Plessis took the helm as BT chairman a year ago, significant progress has been made in carving out an independent Openreach, BT’s wholesale arm which runs the exchanges and wires, and finally there is progress on giving challengers such as Goldman Sachs-backed City Fibre access to ducts and poles.

But competitors cannot be expected to do all the hard work. Jansen’s job is to refocus investment on giving the country ultrafast broadband and advanced connectivity through EE’s mobile 5G networks.

It is shameful that the UK has fallen behind other advanced economies, such as Spain and South Korea, in delivering superfast, reliable broadband. Britain has an undoubted lead in many digital areas ranging from the games industry to fintech and artificial intelligence.

But the UK lacks the bandwidth to take advantage of this and deliver higher productivity. What is required is to refocus investment away from TV where BT lacks the heft or skills to compete with streaming groups Netflix and Amazon, or more established media players.

Jansen is putting his faith in BT by buying £2m of shares. But the BT board had the chance to reset FTSE 100 pay by ending the nefarious practice of loading longer-term incentive shares on top of shorter-term incentives and providing a cash allowance for a pension when, as an already rich man, he doesn’t need one.

Such benefits gold-plate rewards when they are not needed and widen the gap between top executives and everyone else.

Jansen’s potential earnings of £4.8m early on – and around £8m later – will infuriate customers struggling with rotten signals, confusing billing and poor service.

No change then.

Trash talk

WPP boss Mark Read is not sparing predecessor Sir Martin Sorrell’s blushes.

He says the advertising giant was too slow to adapt to changes, had become too complex and under-invested in core parts of the enterprise including creative talent.

Quite a charge list against an executive once lauded by his chairman Roberto Quarta as a communications genius.

No surprise that the shares fell 13.75pc.