Author: Archive

Department store John Lewis may well be the off-the- shelf ‘privatisation, but not as we know it’ solution that Allan Leighton has in mind.

The partnership, set up by John Spedan Lewis in 1929, is a private company whose shares are held in a trust for the benefit of its employees, or ‘partners’ as they are known. Like workers in the Royal Mail, they receive a share of profits – in the case of JLP, every year. This year they got 14 per cent of their salaries, a total cost to the company of pounds 106 million out of profits of pounds 216m.

The trust is controlled by the trustees – the chairman, deputy chairman and partners elected by the partnership council, a group of directly elected employees who hold the chairman to account twice a year.

Postal unions are vowing to block any moves to privatise or sell off part of the Royal Mail. The deputy general-secretary of the Communication Workers Union, Dave Ward, made clear the union would fight any plan to privatise or part-privatise the state-owned group.

Ward said that as Labour’s manifesto stated there were no privatisation plans, the union would raise the question of Tony Blair’s trustworthiness if the Government altered its position. ‘We will oppose this completely. If they press ahead with this it will become one of the big political issues of this term.’

His comments came after a week in which plans for an employee buy-out, with shares held in trust for workers, had been widely reported.