MY £900BN POWERHOUSE
Legal & General boss’s big investment plans
WHEN Nigel Wilson was a teenager doing a summer job at a factory near his home on a council estate in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, he didn’t just make the tea and run errands.
Not our Nigel. After a couple of weeks, he had overhauled the way the work was done, ‘so they could get stuff taking them eight hours done in two’.
This precocious display of managerial skill was not greeted with unalloyed delight, though.
‘They moved me on to the nightshift so the unions wouldn’t go mad. They were worried people would lose their jobs. But it was great for me. I would work for two hours, have a nap then go home.’
What happened to the factory? ‘Oh, it eventually closed down.’
The anecdote is a telling one. Wilson, now 61 and chief executive of insurer Legal & General, is still driven by that youthful urge to improve, however entrenched the status quo.
Unfortunately, the story also says plenty about the state of the British economy and its stubbornly poor productivity. Wilson’s tenure at L&G is about what happens when these two forces collide – when reforming zeal meets institutional inertia. So far, and quite remarkably, Wilson seems to be winning.
‘Britain’s productivity problem is because we have underinvested in everything in the last 40 years. But it doesn’t have to be like that.’
Perhaps his willingness to take on the Establishment comes from the fact he has never been part of it.
He hails from a modest Northern background and clawed his way to the top through grit and intelligence.
After Ferryhill Grammar School and Essex University, he went to MIT in Boston, then to McKinsey, the creme de la creme of management consultants. He slotted into senior executive posts at retail group Dixons and United Business Media, former owner of the Daily Express, before joining L&G in 2009 as finance director.
Insurance – normally a byword for boring – seems an unlikely home for a dynamo like Wilson. Nonetheless, he took the chief executive’s job three years later and since then the share price has risen by more than 80 per cent.
He’s now threatening to make the industry uncharacteristically interesting, thanks to his evangelical crusade to invest more of the £900billion of savers’ money at L&G in Britain’s infrastructure – the buildings, roads, railways and institutions that make up the fabric of the nation.
He even believes he can make our once proud Northern cities great again. L&G has invested in a string of projects in the North, including Media City in Salford and a big development in Newcastle-uponTyne that aims to become a new hub for scientific research.
‘We want to invest £15 billion in infrastructure. You can’t be in the stands clapping all the time, you need to get on the field and play. The world is awash with money and the UK is a great place to invest. I am not making an idle promise. We want to revive our cities.’
Is he concerned about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn getting into power?
‘I don’t know him well enough to have an informed view. I have had no engagement whatsoever with the Labour Party recently. We had quite a lot with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.’
He looks momentarily downcast, but the clouds soon clear.
‘Anyway, we are getting much more engagement with the mayors, council leaders and they are driving the change, not Westminster. There is a Left-wing mayor in Salford and a Right-wing mayor in Birmingham, but it doesn’t matter about that – they just want to get things done.’
Under Wilson, L&G has invested billions in building new housing, so far mainly flats for students and dwellings for older people in city centres. He has also set up a loan fund to back small and mediumsized firms in Britain and across Europe.
‘Our goal is to lend £3billion by the end of 2018. In the UK, we are brilliant at start-ups but not enough of them grow successfully.’
This is, of course, not his money but ours – our pension savings. But he believes people would save more if they knew their nest-eggs were helping to support local economies.
‘In a few years we will have an app, so you can look on your phone and see that your pension money has gone into the flats where your daughter lives or the railway you use to travel to work.
‘It’s a virtuous circle. You invest your pension savings in local communities. That creates jobs, so people spend money locally and in turn that enables entrepreneurs to build local businesses.’
Wilson cannot abide even the slightest whiff of negativity. He has the air of an unstoppable force of nature who demolishes obstacles by sheer force of will.
In his early 60s – an age when many executives are office-bound, with paunches that bear witness to too much beef and claret – he has the wiry physique of a lifelong runner.
He still runs and has recently taken up Pilates, attending classes twice a week at 6am. ‘No, I don’t get up at 4am, it’s not quite as early as that,’ he says.
‘Stamina and resilience are two very important qualities, because things go wrong every day, it’s pointless to get angry or irritable about it.’
As the father of five daughters, he is a champion of women in the workplace and has set a target of having 50 per cent of top positions at L&G filled by females by 2020. ‘It’s not just because I have daughters, it’s because promoting more women has led to better performance at the company. It’s just meritocratic,’ he says.
Having swept into the staid insurance sector like a tornado, it is perhaps not surprising that Wilson has his detractors.
Critics say his strategy of investing in infrastructure will come to grief. Their thinking is that such assets are ‘illiquid’ – hard to sell in a hurry – and could lead to policyholders being forced to take losses in a crisis.
And Wilson’s strategy is heavily reliant on the UK economy, though he is branching out overseas.
But, despite the carping, Legal & General recently told the stock market it expects 2017 to be a record year for profits.
Either way, true to form, Nigel has no truck with nay-sayers: ‘I haven’t got time for it. I think let people have a little whinge then that’s it. We need to stop moaning and groaning and just get on with it.’
In the UK, we are brilliant at start-ups but not enough of them go on to grow successfully
Promoting more women has led to better performance at the company...it’s just meritocratic