Murnaghan 26.02.12 Interview with Sir Stuart Rose
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now joining me to take a look at today’s business sections of the Sunday papers, I’m glad to say we’re joined by former executive chairman of Mark’s and Spencer’s, he is of course Sir Stuart Rose. Good to see you Stuart, good morning.
STUART ROSE: Good morning.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Thank you very much indeed for putting your nose to the grindstone and looking through some of these papers for us. Let’s start straight away with this, I mean it’s a really live issue at the moment, isn’t it, this workfare or work experience and Chris Grayling and others have been saying in the government that they feel there is an orchestrated campaign going on here to traduce these slave labour conditions and that there are activists behind it all. You picked this story out of the Mail on Sunday that’s saying that the police are being encouraged to get involved.
STUART ROSE: Well I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really reading what I’m reading because we’re in the country at the moment, we’ve got a budget next week, we’ve got the economy which has been through terrible times, we’ve got a need to get people’s confidence going, get the country back to work. We’re offering young people the opportunity to really understand what the workplace is about and it appears that there is some plan to sabotage this which I think is nonsense.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: You’ve had a lifetime career in retailing and some of the language that’s being used, particularly when it is referred to Tesco’s, oh it’s just shelf-stacking. I mean you know, even I know, it is far more complex than that even if you are working your way up from the bottom.
STUART ROSE: But it’s not just that, it’s more importantly about getting people into the routine of working, making sure they are up in the morning, making sure they’re presentable, make sure they arrive on time, make sure they know what it’s like to have a properly constructed work programme around the place and shelf stacking is just a part of it. When I started off in my retail career and I started as a management trainee in Marks and Spencer’s forty years ago and I was put to shelf stacking and indeed to sweeping out the warehouse for a day, I did the job I was supposed to do because I thought this was something I needed to learn if I was going to progress.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Yes, but presumably you were paid for it, some of these youngsters aren’t being paid.
STUART ROSE: Sure, but if you are currently actually drawing unemployment benefit and you are looking to get into the workplace and somebody says to you, look, come along here, we’ll give you some experience and you have got a week apparently to be able to withdraw from it if it doesn’t suit you, why would you not do it? If I was the parent of one of these people I’d say, look go on to it lad, get in there, get stuck in. So I really do find it quite baffling and I think it’s very, very sad with the high level, I think it’s twenty odd percent we’ve got of unemployment around the age of 18, that young kids now are being led to believe that big business is actually exploiting them which is nonsense.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: And that’s what that article is touching on isn’t it? We know a lot of businesses, a lot of organisations are saying we don’t want to get involved having indicated that they would do. Do you think that they are being intimidated?
STUART ROSE: Well I think that they are and I think that one or two of them have shown a little less than backbone if I might say so. I think you have got to stick with it. If there are one or two issues of administration in the process that need sorting out, then let’s sort it out but it seems to me quite straightforward. You can come in, you can get work experience and if you like it you can stay here and possibly get offered a job, if you don’t like it after the first week you can go away. I don’t get it, what’s the problem?
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Sounds so simple when you put it like that, Stuart. Let’s look at your next paper, it’s in the Telegraph, the front page of the business section, Bamford tells Prime Minister to save manufacturing. Well we’d all like to manufacturing saved and expanded.
STUART ROSE: You know, what we’ve got in the UK, and I am an optimist about the UK economy. Obviously we have got some trends that have happened over the last ten or fifteen years, whether it’s in my old sector, and I will come to that story possibly in a minute, about the manufacturing gone offshore in clothing. Well similarly we’ve lost our capacity to do metal bashing as we used to do metal bashing. Anthony Bamford has done this report, it seems to be again common sensical but it seems to be that we need a joined up story, how do we get for instance schools and colleges to encourage people to go into metal bashing? Apparently it’s boring. Well I went to the Rolls Royce factory some two or three months ago when Sir John Rose was still running Rolls Royce and I saw people with eyes shining, young apprentices, at the excitement of building aero engines, proper 21st century metal bashing. Well why can’t we really do that?
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well why can’t we? I mean back to you on that. There’s a budget coming up, is there anything that can be done about there at the macro level, tax breaks, whatever?
STUART ROSE: Anything that the government can do to encourage industry, small, medium sized industries and large industries, to actually grow, to take people in and it goes back to the previous story, to encourage youngsters whether it’s on a free basis, whether it’s on a subsidised basis, whether it’s through the colleges, whether we need to give colleges special subsidies, whether we need to give businesses special subsidies, whether we need to find some way that we can encourage these people but I do believe actually at the grassroots level there is a bit of a feeling still in schools and colleges that it’s not very sexy, if I might use that word and it is very encouraging therefore, just to jump a little bit, that the Prime Minister this week has suddenly got up and said, actually we must blow the trumpet for business because we know nothing better than the creation of wealth and that’s what gives us schools, colleges, universities and whatever else.
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: For the time being, Sir Stuart Rose, thank you very much indeed for talking us through some of the business pages there.
