My blog

Category: Features

  • Harvey Soning on the importance of not going to university and learning on the job

    Harvey Soning

    My education wasn’t what you’d expect. My grandparents on my mother’s side came from Russia and Poland – that was in 1912. Within two years my grandfather was conscripted into the First World War. He spoke very little English but learnt very quickly in the trenches – mostly swear words.

    On the other hand, my father’s parents were here a generation before and were quite anglicised. My father’s father – a second generation immigrant – was an entrepreneur who built one of the first cinemas in the country in Staines. One month he had money – the next he didn’t: in that sense, he was a typical entrepreneur. In 1945, my Dad came out of the Air Force Bomber Command with £300 and went into the retail business. He became a successful businessman with a property portfolio.

    At the age of 14¾, I had the most diabolical school report: I was drawing aeroplanes and battleships when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork. We lived in Willesden at the time and my father said enough was enough. The headmaster said the best thing my father could do, was to send me to an aircraft factory in Cricklewood and see if they would give me a job and draw aeroplanes for the rest of my life.  Fortunately, my father phoned George Farrow, of Peachey Property, his friend in Kent, and said: “I’ve got this boy Harvey, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with him”.  George said: “Send him to me and we will make a man of him.” Peachey Property was based in Petts Wood, Kent, and so it was quite a commute: Willesden Green to Charing Cross, then Charing Cross to Petts Wood. I was paid £24 a week, of which £15 went on the fares even in those days. That’s how I got into the real estate industry.

    My education was, as they say, on the job. It was January 1st, 1960, when I started.  There were no bank holidays not the three-days-a-week in the office like there is now; it was full-on office work. The Corps of Commissionaires Sergeant used to clip me round the ear quite hard to make sure I had a clean desk –it’s how I was brought up and trained. You had to be the first in and last out: eight in the morning to eight o’clock at night.

    You could almost say that the old work ethic has now been all but destroyed and in the same way the mobile phone is destroying the art of communication, but this is the world we’re living in. In the 1960’s, London was being rebuilt. The smart money was buying the plentiful bomb sites, especially in the City and the East End.

    Despite the long hours, I got the property bug. Shelter is fundamental to human beings, whether that be a cave or modern home. We all must buy food and clothes – so retail is inevitable – and the retail has a supply chain, so you need warehousing and factories and so on. All of which makes real estate one of the most important factors of human life on earth, after food and water.

    It was on my 15th birthday that I started working in real estate. I have always admired the architecture and the sheer guts of these people to put these buildings up, From the early entrepreneurs such as Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855) and John Nash (1752-1835) who built this country, and then latterly for Irvine Sellar and Renzo Piano who built the Shard in the midst of a recession.

    Of course, you mainly read of the successes, but there have been lots of disasters as well.   More people have lost fortunes than the few who have succeeded. There are tens of thousands of people in this country involved in real estate as agents, architects, builders, and developers. I go to cocktail parties at Christmas, and look around me and think: “Wow, how do all these people earn a living in the Real Estate Industry”.

    I started life at Peachey Property Corporation who seconded me to estate agents for experience. I stayed there until the late 60s – a good 10 years – then I joined a company called Guardian Properties in which my father was a shareholder. Unfortunately, that went the way of many other real estate companies in 1974, which was the first crash after the Second World War. It was a secondary banking crash that brought down public-private real estate companies. At that point I thought: “Sod this business of working for other people” and I formed James Andrew as a commercial estate agency. I certainly didn’t think it was going to last for 50 years!

    I had £5,000 and named the company after my two eldest sons. I immediately received a desist letter to stop using the name because there was already a company with the same name in existence. I couldn’t afford new notepaper – you had to write letters to each other in those days, so I reversed the names. One of my first clients was Gerald Ronson who is still a client after 50 years, Sir Martin Sorrell followed a few years later. We have some very loyal clients including Sir Lloyd Dorfman, a Sovereign Wealth Fund, and a major Japanese Institution, who have been with us for 35 years.

    I don’t think setting up a business has changed all that much since we came out of the dark ages. Human beings are great at invention – whether that invention takes the form of technology, medicine, electronics, or some other commercial enterprise, and look at the tech businesses that have grown in the last 20 years. It’s the human drive. You have got to prove in a very small way that what you are trying to do actually works – and I would advise doing that with as little money as possible.

    The 1980s was amazing to witness. You have to hand it to Margaret Thatcher and her advisers as well: she had a great vision. When you met Thatcher, she was always straight to the point: no pleasantries about family life or anything like that. Right away the facts came out: she had a great brain.

    After what her successors have done to the economy, we’re now in a different world. We are still suffering from austerity and Covid 14 years after the last financial meltdown. There has always been tax, the only consolation being if you are paying tax, you are making a profit; tax runs the country. Has tax been a disaster for the real estate industry? Not really.  Corporation tax hasn’t moved too much either way with the changing of the governments. For private individual rates have not been the problem it’s the removal of allowable expenditure. Local taxation whether it be residential or commercial property is starting to hurt more and more, especially if you have a vacant property where there is no income. I am pleased Entrepreneurs’ Relief is still 10%-20%, depending on the circumstances, and CGT on most transactions.

    I would prefer to see entrepreneurial relief, at even lower levels to encourage new start-up businesses, as we talked about before. I think there should be at least a 5-year period before any tax on start-up businesses is charged. The government should also be providing more money for young entrepreneurs; we certainly need to encourage young people in this country to create the growth the economy requires.

    We need more bursary schemes for students and apprenticeships.  I am involved in a bursary for the Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors.   We have been very successful and have got 30 youngsters going through university that would have had no chance of being involved in higher education or know about the real estate and construction industry. It’s a great country of opportunity.   We need governments to encourage people to try and progress themselves out of the mire.

    Harvey Soning FRICS, is the founder, Chairman and CEO of James Andrew International

    Ambassador to the Royal Air Force Museum

    Founding Member of the Natural History Museum Foundation

     

  • Opinion: 2024 will be the year of the jobs elections

    Finito World

    Around election time, everybody always quotes Jimmy Carville’s dictum: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This is fine insofar as it goes, but it still begs the question of what makes a winning economy.

    The answer isn’t as clear-cut as one thinks. Both Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden face re-election in 2024 and both can point to certain improvements in their respective economies, with inflation significantly reduced from its peak: nearing five per cent in the UK, and three per cent in the US.

    So far so good. But voters can be forgiven for looking at these statistics and refusing to cast automatic votes for the incumbents. That’s because the price rises we experienced along the way are now embedded in the economy. Everything from your weekly shop to your Netflix subscription is more expensive – and ongoingly so.

    On a day-to-day level, what the consumer wants isn’t so much lowering inflation as deflation. Only deflation makes an individual cheer as they leave the supermarket, but few economists think it’s the solution: it makes CFOs squint sceptically at their spreadsheets, mulling what to do about the niggling fact they’re now making less money. Their only recourse is to spend less, which lowers growth.

    That’s why 2024 is likely to be the year of the jobs elections. If falling inflation is actually the optimal position but doesn’t feel great for consumers, then more will depend on psychological factors in the economy related to people’s experience of the workplace.

     

    For a start, how painful all the price rises really are will depend on whether your employer was kind enough to meet your financial anxieties with a salary rise. To their credit many have, but workers usually attribute salary rises to their own brilliance and in 2023 many regarded these as a necessity: besides, a salary rise is meant to put you in a better economic position – not to be a symptom of treading water.

    Secondly, your overall mood will depend on how you feel psychologically about your work and career. Ronald Reagan famously asked during the 1980 Presidential election which he would go on to win handsomely against the then incumbent Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off?” We tend to answer this in the affirmative if we’re fulfilled at work.

    When the likely challengers Sir Keir Starmer or Donald Trump ask this question in 2024 what will the response be? In the UK, it’s unlikely that the demons of the Truss interregnum will have been laid to rest.

    Between now and election day, homeowners will all the time be coming off fixed rate mortgages into a higher interest rate environment, and they are unlikely to blame their own failure to secure a better paid job for the pain they will be feeling. They’re more likely to blame Truss and her successors.

    The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has done a good job of steadying the ship, but people don’t vote in droves on that score: they might tacitly respect a degree of competence, but they’re unlikely to be in a celebratory mood.

    Besides, unless you had a very large salary rise, or secured a better job than the one you had before, it’s unlikely that you’re going to have much spare change out of the rise in the cost of living (including mortgage costs), and the likelihood you will have been caught up in some sort of ‘fiscal drag’ – that’s to say, you’re probably in a higher tax bracket than you feel you should be. If you are, then you’re part of a £45 billion problem, which the government is hoping you won’t notice. What they’re hoping is that you will notice the £15 billion cut from National Insurance.

    This is why Sunak and Hunt – and to a lesser extent Biden – are in such an electoral pickle. There simply isn’t enough good news in the economy to offset the bad. Most economists agree that the situation is solveable only with better growth, but both economies are lower on productivity than they should be – in the UK, it is a miserable 0.3 per cent less than what it was during 2022.

    Of course, the dip in productivity has its own story to tell about the pandemic and its aftermath. With hybrid working now the norm, many workers are less productive and happy to be so if it leads to a superior work-life balance. As much as this might be very lovely, there remains the deeper question as to whether it’s a financially sustainable happiness.

    To look at the slow growth figures is to suppose that it isn’t: it might be that the strain we all feel in relation to prices is intimately related to the sense of relief many feel at not having to commute so often.

    There is a sense, then, that something has to give. Liz Truss has shown that we can’t cut taxes in an unfunded way without the bond markets intervening. Sir Keir Starmer and the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves may find that with the tax burden at a historic post-War high they have less wiggle-room than they to raise taxes and increase spending. The bond markets are not in a good mood.

    We can already see signs that Reeves understands all this: her much-touted £25 billion Green commitment has now mysteriously vanished, in acknowledgement of the fact that the cost of it injures the very people Labour need in order to win a handsome majority, which is clearly in reach.

    That has its own story to tell in terms of sustainability jobs: if even Labour has come to believe that there is no way to afford a Corbynesque injection of money into the renewables sector, then either the green agenda is gone by consensus for the time being, or Labour is more exposed on its left flank that it realises.

    Even when it comes to immigration – traditionally considered a separate subject to the economy – the apparent failure of Sunak’s Rwanda policy means that the conversation has moved onto jobs. Specifically, anyone who is trying to tackle the problem at all is now looking at what constitutes viable skilled labour entering the country and what doesn’t. Former prime minister Boris Johnson is already arguing that an annual salary of £40,000 is a sensible threshold at which to secure a visa, though he doesn’t say why he failed to introduce such a policy while he had the chance to do so as prime minister.

    This opens up onto broader questions about what jobs UK nationals are prepared to do and what they won’t. This in turn opens up onto the gigantic question of welfare reform, so far left largely alone by Conservative governments since the streamlining exercise of Universal Credit.

    Whether we like it or not, this election year is an opportunity to look in the mirror. It is as if the old challenge which JFK uttered in his Inaugural Address 60 years ago is about to be laid down all over again: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Perhaps the world is always raising that question, for the simple reason that the global economy is competitive and we can’t afford not to answer it. But in 2024, it is being raised with particular urgency – and especially with regard to our working lives.

     

  • Gillian Keegan on Maths to 18, apprenticeships and why Sadiq Khan is good for Conservatives

    Gillian Keegan

     

    Now that we’re coming into a General Election year, I feel confident that we’re going to see Rishi Sunak’s strength and leadership come through and prove the doubters wrong.

    So how do we win? I think it’s very important that we provide a great focus on business education; we need to work harder on encouraging young people in setting up their own businesses.

    Rishi Sunak’s Maths to 18 policy is sometimes misrepresented, but it’s of huge practical importance to understand about working capital and the administrative side of business, all of which obviously goes back to the importance of mathematics as a core subject.

    There’s an entrepreneurial element to the policy which has been missed in too much of the commentary. What we need to champion is the acquisition of knowledge about the pragmatic side to life.

    That’s why citing our educational achievements is going to be a big part of our strategy for the next election. Many of our universities have now set up entrepreneurial centres, and the government is already thinking about ways in which we can help entrepreneurs: they’re the lifeblood of our economy.

    But I do accept that when it comes to Maths to 18, it will be absolutely crucial how we sell that policy. Young people already know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform their lives within their lifetime – in fact, it’s already doing so. What we have to do is to demystify that and sell it as something that’s going to help you in your life. This stuff is going to be changing how our houses work, our jobs, and our education: we have to make sure it’s something that people don’t see as a threat. When the Maths to 18 policy was raised, everyone imagined it amounted to making it compulsory to take the subject at A-Level. That’s not what we’re talking about, and we need to make sure we bring everyone along with us according to a proper understand of what the Prime Minister is really championing.

    As I look ahead to the next General Election, I sometimes think that the current London Mayor Sadiq Khan is doing rather a good job for us. Take the free school meals policy that he’s introduced. It sounds fantastic on the face of it, but it costs a fortune and is only for the course of a year. Also, nobody in City Hall seems to be thinking about how you deliver it. This is where Labour is always weak: in the crucial realm of reality.

    By stark contrast, the Conservatives have been very pragmatic: Rishi Sunak knows how to get things done. So, for instance, we have an international student strategy which we’ve developed over the past couple of years which targets international students, and seeks to recognise that our education system is one of our biggest exports.

    I recall vividly one trip to Egypt where everybody was talking about how fantastic our education system is: at King’s College London, we train most of the world’s defence leaders, as well as most of the senior army figures. Of course, we all see the immigration figures, but I’ve put the case firmly that immigration can be vital to the economy and to the health of our world-class universities. It’s a question of balance.

    Another area where Rishi Sunak has been highly strategic is on creative industries, where the government has put a range of policies in place to recognise that this is our second biggest sector. We’ve tried to make sure that student loan finance is available in the short term and in smaller chunks. On a separate front, we’re also seeing an increase in nursing and medical schools, as well as full time or part time apprenticeships: but we need to change the culture around recruitment. My local hospital for instance recently returned from a trip to the Philippines to recruit nurses over there; and I explained to them that it’s perfectly possible to recruit them here.

    There’s so much more to do. I have also spoken to recruiters at big companies and corporations: what they find is that a lot of kids do well in school but then lack the social skills and understanding of social interaction suitable for the working world. But a lot of that will come back to the Maths to 18 policy: we need to create a numerate and pragmatic workforce which understands the realities of life.

     

    The Secretary of State for Education was talking at the In and Out Club

  • Simon Callow on his upbringing, life as an actor and the dangers of the art house flop

    Simon Callow

    I am sometimes asked by young people who want to be actors whether I can help – realistically, there’s not much I can do because I’m not Laurence Olivier so I can’t invite people to come and work in my theatre.

    But when asked for advice, I tell young people that it’s a very, very hard life.   If you are considering this route, you must first ask yourself: “Do you need to be an actor?” Unless your life depends on it – unless it’s the only thing that you can imagine yourself doing – then don’t even think about it because it’s a life of rejection and disappointment.

    I lived in Streatham until I was five and then I went to live in Berkshire where my mother was the school secretary for two years, before we returned to Streatham. When I was nine, I went to Africa; we returned eventually in 1962, and I lived then in Gypsy Hill.

    I didn’t think I was going to be an artist until much later. I had no idea but my grandmother had been a singer, and even been on the stage. She was a contralto – one of those deep female voices that you don’t really hear so much nowadays.  But the life was not for her since she suffered quite badly from nerves so big concerts were difficult. However, she did sing at the Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the war in 1919.

    She was a very theatrical human being as was her father – who was Danish and had been a clown in the Tivoli Club, and then became a ringmaster in Copenhagen where he married my great grandmother, a bare back horse rider. He came from a long line of equestrian folk and came to London and became an impresario. So theatre was there but not close to hand.

    As a child I was rather extrovert.  When I was out with my grandmother shopping I would be doing routines and someone said to my grandmother: “This child should be on stage, he is very gifted.” My grandmother was delighted by that idea and told my mother the good news and my mother said: “Over my dead body!”

    When I was in Africa, aged 9 or 12, in Lusaka, Zambia at school we did little playlets but tiny stuff. When I went to boarding school in South Africa at a school called St Aidens in what was then Grahamstown, I did actually act in plays but I have very little memory of it – except there is a photograph of me dressed up as an angry old man shaking my fist.

    When I came back to England, I went to a school called the London Oratory which was in those days in Chelsea but subsequently moved to Fulham and became quite a famous school partly because Tony Blair went there. It was a pretty terrible school and we had no drama at all. I knew nothing about acting at all. But London was all around me, and from my personal experience, I was overwhelmed by the work of the National Theatre and the Old Vic. I wrote a letter to Laurence Olivier who suggested that I might apply for a job in the box office.

    Since that time, I’ve been very lucky in my career, and I do get recognised, especially after Four Weddings and A Funeral. However I’m not Jennifer Lopez and I’m not Brad Pitt so the true burdens of fame aren’t something I’ve had to bear.

    I’ve had my share of setbacks. Not all movie executives or financiers are especially responsive to my art, but then that’s especially normal when people cross over from theatre into film. Take Tom Stoppard, as an example, who has sometimes seen his scripts go unmade: he is essentially a playwright, and he knows what he’s doing. But when executives read a Tom Stoppard script they probably don’t see dollar signs. Instead they think: “This is very clever, this is very interesting but where’s the money and the audience?”

    I have sometimes had to face the fact that I’m not commercial. I directed one film called The Ballad of the Sad Café which was a sort of mildly respected flop. An art house flop is the worst sort of film you can make. You could make an art house success, and that’s very good. You can also make a commercial flop – but if you brought it in on time and under budget then you would still be a safe pair of hands. But an art house flop is an absolute no-no.

    Even so, things are looking up and I have some movies in the pipeline, which are very promising. But the thing about making movies is that it’s very expensive, and people don’t like spending their money – except when they sometimes go mad and think that they are making art like Warren Beatty’s famous flop Ishtar, where everybody spent more and more money because he was Warren Beatty.

    This is all partly why I am quite nervous when I am doing plays with other people: on my own I am my own master completely and even if were to forget a lump of the text I can make it up, and I am now quite good at improvising Dickens and Shakespeare. I note that the solo play is becoming a trend. I see that Eddie Izzard has just done Great Expectations, and that Andrew Scott has done Uncle Vanya as a one man show. The only novel that I have ever done as a one man show is A Christmas Carol which works because it is this amazing magical performance where you can jump from one scene to another: the narrator of A Christmas Carol in our version is a conjurer and that makes sense.

    I am often asked about my next one man show. I’m sure Gore Vidal would make an entertaining evening but I don’t think I would be the person to do it. I am always nobbling writers to write me things and they are always a bit daunted by it. They are adapting at the moment a novel by an American novelist called John Clinch. Clinch he writes two kinds of novels: straightforward narratives and prequels somehow interconnected to already existing novels. One he wrote was called Marley; I happened to review it for The New York Times – and I immediately took an option out on it because I could see huge cinematic potential in it, as well as solo performance potential. I’m on a third draft of it, and getting close to something performable now.

    I’ve now been writing about Orson Welles for over a quarter of a century: I have become a more nuanced viewer of the human scene than I was when I was younger but that’s not surprising. But lately I’ve been thinking about fiction too: there are about half a dozen novels swirling around in my brain and I would love to write them, but I have so many other things that I have still got to do before that. I also want to write about my family – but not in fictional form:  I have just got to get it out of my system.

  • Reviving Varanasi: A Journey to India’s Holiest Place

    Dinesh Dhamija

    I’ve just spent a few days in Varanasi, India’s holiest place, celebrating my brother-in-law’s 70th birthday.

    Coming back to this city and seeing India’s mightiest river brought back all kinds of memories.

    In 1999, 24 years ago, my brother and I said farewell to our father and scattered his ashes in the Ganges. As children, we would come to Varanasi and visit the ghats, the temples and the shrines.

    The difference from those days to the present is astonishing. Just to take one example: the Kashi Vishwanath temple – the holiest of the holy places for Hindus – has been completely renovated and is now at the centre of a wide, calm, beautifully-designed precinct and avenue leading down to the river, allowing pilgrims to worship and visitors to enjoy the extraordinary architecture and atmosphere.

    Spread over 5000 hectares, the project cost $95 million and included the restoration of 40 temples along the route, which had been ‘lost’ over the centuries through haphazard development.

    Varanasi – or Benares (‘City of Light’) as it is sometimes known – is one of the world’s oldest cities. This is one of its charms. There are layers upon layers of history jostling together next to the holy river.

    It had also become a problem. As India’s population rose and ever more pilgrims made their way here, the overcrowding became oppressive, even dangerous. Varanasi is the Hindu equivalent of Mecca: worshippers are encouraged to visit at least once in their lives.

    The transformation of the Kashi Vishwanath temple is an example of 21st Indian development at its finest. It welcomes international visitors, who would previously be alarmed by the chaotic bustle. It elevates one of the country’s great architectural marvels to its proper status. And it showcases a new kind of India: clean, orderly, proud of its heritage and appealing to a new generation.

    Anyone who has spent time in India knows that there are thousands of amazing places to see. But for those who are yet to come here, the stereotypical view is: let’s go to the Taj Mahal. And maybe the Gateway of India in Mumbai.

    Broadening this narrow vision is a great service to India and to its visitors. They could consider visiting the majestic peaks of the Indian Himalayas, the idyllic waterways of Kerala, the Ajanta caves of Maharashtra, the tiger reserves of Tamil Nadu or the ancient, ruined temples of Hampi.

    Many visitors remark on how much has changed in India in recent years. It’s true and welcome. I would say that the transformation of Kashi Vishwanath is one of the most important and profound changes and I’d urge anyone coming to India to see it for themselves.

    Dinesh Dhamija founded, built and sold online travel agency ebookers, before serving as a Member of the European Parliament. His latest book is The Indian Century.

  • Percheron Advisory CEO David Hawkins’ guide to the wealth industry

    Percheron Advisory CEO David Hawkins’ guide to the wealth industry

    by David Hawkins

    When I was at university (Durham 1993-96), the prevailing trend was to apply to accountancy, the law, management consultancy or banking.  

    Whilst I didn’t immediately enter the world of finance, I am quite unique in the “wealth” and family office space in that I started in politics and government relations, with a sojourn in PR, corporate affairs and private equity before working for a HNW (high-net-worth) family for their philanthropy, reputation and business interests – effectively establishing their family office in London. 

    I’m not sure what those of us applying for “banking” were really thinking what the career would constitute, investment banking sounded so grown-up, alpha-male, “greed is good” and en vogue (the mid-1990s saw a huge consolidation of investment banks and the end of “merchant” banks).  

    Private banking and wealth management in contrast seemed distant, purposely opaque and a bit stuffy. It wasn’t an attractive career option because it didn’t really care to explain what it was.    

    Wealth has to be managed – that is the focus of wealth management – and with this term I mean a form of investment management and financial planning that provides solutions to clients with £1 million plus in assets or ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) with £30 million plus in assets.  

    It is a discipline which we can also call private banking and which includes financial planning, investment management, tax planning, luxury assets and some other services such as corporate finance and investment banking. It can also extend to trust companies who hold assets and even the private client law firms who advise, structure and act to protect the wealth of their clients.   

    So breaking this down, it can offer a career as a financial planner – working with clients on their strategy for wealth preservation and growth: which can include retirement planning, tax, legacy and succession and business planning.  Once this wealth strategy has been devised, an investment manager then works day-to-day to deliver returns that the client and their planner has objectified.  Tax planning is a third role and is vital as the tax implications for a HNW – whether dividend, CGT, inheritance, corporation tax or cross-border tax – can be huge.  As HNW’s purchase luxury assets – houses, jets, yachts, art – these need managing, financing and servicing.   

    When HNW’s need support in their business ventures, wealth teams often bring in their respective corporate finance teams of their institutions to support clients in corporate objectives – eg financing a new factory or the acquisition of a digital business.  A trust company holds assets on behalf of an individual, family or business – generally to minimise tax but also to reduce other risks and acts according to a constitution which has been agreed on behalf of the various beneficiaries.  

    Changes have come, but a lack of trust in banks and the wealth sector has driven a long-term move amongst the very rich (UHNWs) towards family offices. The ongoing criticism of private banking / wealth management is the high turnover of staff, that the investment manager operates in his (or their) own interests rather than always for the client, and they were increasingly limited by compliance from suggesting entrepreneurial solutions that suit the client. This has been further aggravated by the fact that clients themselves have been changing: the values of the rising next generation in particular have not been mirrored by their advisor, whilst clients want more bespoke products that banks struggled to keep-up with. 

    All these factors combined have been the catalyst behind the rise of the family office, a privately held company that handles investment management and wealth management for a wealthy family, with the goal being to effectively grow and transfer wealth across generations.  They also have impacted the less affluent as we shall see below.  

    To be an effective single-family office handling your own family’s investment requires a significant sum of cash as staff costs and compliance costs can be very high.  

    The definition of a family office can differ from one family to another – a family office advisor once wrote that to be a real family office – similar to the archetypal established by John D. Rockefeller –  one needs to follow the APPLE model: investment should be Active, Passive, there should be Philanthropy, Legacy-planning and Estates-planning.   

    Family offices may also handle tasks such as managing household staff, making travel arrangements, property management, day-to-day accounting and payroll activities, management of legal affairs, family management services, family governance, financial and investor education, coordination of philanthropy and private foundations, and succession planning. 

    Sometimes families combine costs and can be structured as a multi-family office – professional staff representing a number of affluent families and individuals, often creating their own co-investment products.  

    Given the very discrete nature of family offices, they are very hard to apply for internships or work – however multi-family offices: Stanhope Capital, Schroders Global Family Office Services, Stonehage Fleming are easier to identify and approach for jobs.  

    One of the key areas affecting recruitment into the wealth sector is the widening gulf in values between the rising next generation of clients and their existing advisors.   

    Millennials1 and Generation Z2 have a series of values that has fundamentally shifted from the generation above them.  They are a more socially-conscious generation which seeks businesses that mirror their values, are digitally enabled and allow for ease of use.   

    From this arises two distinct problems for the wealth industry. Firstly, the recruitment of the next generation of staff – when most smart graduates would rather go into a tech start-up, the wealth sector is not selling itself effectively. Secondly, how does the wealth sector engage the next generation of HNWs, the clients of tomorrow, when their staff don’t immediately mirror the values and thinking of their clients? 

    In their study from 2019, pricing consultants Simon Kuchner & Partners surveyed almost 650 high net worth millennials worldwide from six countries (Australia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK, and the US) to examine their attitude towards private banks and wealth management.  

    The report found that all of the participants had at least one private banking relationship in the family and/or at least 500,000 US dollars of investable assets in their personal accounts, with a significant portion of the wealth being inherited from the previous generation.  

    The study also found that 60 percent of millennials were dissatisfied with their present banking and wanted a substantial improvement. The survey found that to attract future customers and build ongoing relationships with millennials, private banks have to comprehensively analyse their processes, assess their current shortcomings and potentially re-build a new bank from the ground up even if this means taking short-term losses for sustainable long-term profits. 

    There were other findings. Private banks also need a fundamental new brand position – old, male, pale and stale won’t cut it anymore – diversity is key and having staff that reflect the new client is key.  

    So private banks need to act fast and develop a ‘WOW’ digital ecosystem that highlights self-service capabilities or they risk becoming irrelevant. Millennials want the option of immediate and bespoke banking services – even so far as online bespoke investment and portfolio choice. To attract this generation, banks have to reposition itself as a millennial-centric bank and highlight the values that millennials look for, which according to the Simon Kuchner & Partners survey is quality and brand.  

    A number of banks have been developing their next gen offering, whilst some of the larger MFOs have been active to. But more needs to be done clearly define why millennials should pay for their financial advisory services. With a clear value proposition outlining what private banks and the wealth sector can offer, millennials are willing to spend more on financial services. 

    If the wealth industry moves quickly it can meet the challenges outlined above: reduce its opaqueness, become digitally-enabled and truly bespoke and so attract the next generation of clients but also of staff. 

    ____________________  

    David Hawkins is the Founder of Percheron Advisory, a firm which works with entrepreneurs, HNW clients and business families with a focus on building resilient and agile operational business frameworks and developing effective family governance structures. 

  • Baroness D’Souza on the encroaching power of the executive

    Frances D’Souza

     

    My really big concern is the increasing power of the executive; this has been going on for years and years. It’s becoming extreme at the moment whereby we are getting bills which have been passed by the Commons which are essentially what we would call skeleton bills. These are really just broad outlines – and all the detail is being inserted by means of statutory instruments and secondary legislation which is unammendable.

    In the Lords our options are limited if the government decides to do that. We can either put down what’s called a fatal motion and vote on it and win. That’s extremely rare and has happened only a handful of times since World War II. The last time we did it was in relation to Universal Credit. This motion was overwhelmingly supported by peers on all sides of the House, include Tories. But it was so frowned upon by the powers-that-be that they commissioned a special enquiry into the power of the House of Lords.

    Of course this whole question goes all the way back over a hundred years to Lloyd George and to the Asquith administration, and the passage of the legislation which curbed the power of the Lords. The Parliament Act means that the Lords can create a delay of a year but it also ultimately means that the government gets its way. That’s right when you consider that the Commons is elected and the Lords isn’t.

    Even so, we’re now at a point where the government is getting all sorts of things past Parliament because of unchallengeable executive orders. I find this truly worrying. The person who did the most on this was Igor Judge, who sadly died in November 2023. He was a convenor in the House of Lords and an absolutely masterly speechmaker. He will be sorely missed.

    The only really effective check on government action are the Select Committees. These at least have the effect of making Ministers wary about what they do because they are going to have to answer to them. That fact alone makes the Public Accounts Committee, the Constitutional Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and so on quite powerful. But in the end these encounters occur after the event and that of course places severe limits on their power.

    You might recall also that Dominic Cummings refused once to attend the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. I had thought up until recently that to refuse to appear before a Select Committee was a sort of hanging offence and that the Committees had the power to command Ministers to attend. That turns out not to be the case.

    That particular episode makes one wonder also whether there should be parliamentary oversight of the appointment of special advisors – or SPADs as they’ve become known. Look, for instance, at the appointment of Richard Sharp as Chairman of the BBC. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of that, the perception was always very dicey: he was somehow involved in brokering a loan for a very needy and irresponsible Prime Minister and then, hey presto, he became the chair!

    This isn’t an isolated instance. The government puts in people who it knows will be safe on their terms: it shows the way in which democracy can be undermined. We cannot escape the fact that the institutions of democracy are increasingly in the gift of the government.

    In a curious way, the Conservatives had the antithesis of all this in the shape of Lady May. Whatever one might think of her premiership, she is extraordinarily respected today as a backbencher: she embodies that sense of public duty which has all but left government. I had a drink with her shortly after she stepped down and I said: “I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning when they’re treating you like that.” She replied: “You can do it if you think it is right.” It is impossible not to respect that.

    I got a different answer with another former prime minister in a similar encounter. I once asked Sir John Major why he didn’t come to the Lords and he said: “I have been so bruised by politics, I just can’t go near it.” Well, who can blame him?

     

    Frances D’Souza is a former Speaker of the House of Lords

     

  • Meredith Taylor reviews Klimt and the Kiss

    Meredith Taylor

     

    Dir: Ali Ray | UK Doc

     

    “To every age its art, to every art its freedom” Vienna Secession.

     

    The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is one of the most recognised and reproduced paintings in the world and its reproduction posters adorn student bedroom walls from Vancouver to Vladivostok.

    Yet this new documentary urges us to look beyond Klimt’s often decorative style at the extraordinary motivations of the celebrated Austro-Hungarian genius whose sensual Art Nouveau creations blend ancient myths with modern eclecticism, and are more valuable today that ever before fetching top prices at international auctions. Klimt’s final painting Lady with a Fan (1918) was sold in June 2023 for £85.3 million, the highest price artwork ever sold at auction in Europe, (according to BBC News).

    Klimt was one of the pioneers the ‘Jugendstil’ movement known in Vienna as the ‘secessionists’ who joined a pan-European trend of breaking away and rejecting the old school along with the British Arts and Crafts and Impressionism movements in France.

    Gustav Klimt’s 19th century Vienna was a time of conflicted sexuality: in society women were corseted and buttoned up but Klimt’s louche feminine depictions are bursting with a feral sensuality that conveys women’s true nature focusing on love, desire and the cycle of life from birth to death. In his private life, Klimt clearly loved and appreciated women and often slept with his models who hung around his studio, often naked, waiting for a chance to be depicted in his iconic images, reflecting an era that was deeply misogynist.

    Meanwhile his elegant portraits of wealthy society hostesses such as Adele Bloch-Bauer and Sonia Knips provided the bread and butter for his lush artistic endeavours that include prints, murals and objets d’art, often elaborated with gold leaf, silver, gilt stucco and mother of pearl. There were also symbolist paintings: Judith and the Head of Holofernes, Pallas Athene, nymphs, water serpents and mermaids. His work also included landscapes and murals such as the famous Beethoven Frieze that adorns Vienna’s Secession Building.

     

    Women also featured heavily in his private life. The artist lived with his mother and sisters and although he never married, his long term partner, the Austrian fashion couturier and businesswoman Emilie Louise Floge, whom he also painted in 1902, shared his artistic vision and dressed in her own loosely-designed feminine creations.

    Klimt developed an ornate often dreamlike style and made use of different mediums to express human truths rooted in nature, flowers and the surreal, but his sketching technique was also superb and rivals that of Picasso in its simple yet sensual marks. The impact of grief, madness, love and death on the female body provided a rich source material and formed the basis of his avantgarde work.

    Filmmaker Ali Ray makes liberal use of interviews with specialists and art curators to flesh out her latest biopic for Exhibition on Film that follows on from her previous documentaries on Frida Kahlo and Mary Cassatt, the American impressionist painter (2023).

  • Steve Coogan and the division between talent and knowledge

    Christopher Jackson

    Steve Coogan recently joined the ranks of the great actors with his portrayal of the odious Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning, the BBC‘s attempt to dramatise its own failures in relation to that grim affair.

    To say Coogan’s performance is superb is to understate the case. He’s able to do more than just impersonate Savile, but his performance is built on the gifts of an impressionist – an excellent eye and ear. In being so good at impersonation Coogan has always known the limitations of that metier. Spitting Image, where Coogan began, always required the elevation of the small but telling detail, because that is where laughter is to be found: in contrast to what’s not absurd.

    Drama is different since it requires truth: the same techniques which might elicit a laugh don’t elicit a sense of awe, terror or wonder at the nature of reality. It’s therefore remarkable that Coogan has also mastered this second set of skills. In his portrayal of Savile, Coogan conveys brilliantly the terrible passivity of the evil and powerful when they know they’re getting away with it: the presiding image is of the DJ, tipping his head back, luxuriating in the knowledge that he won’t be caught. It suggests that just batting away the guesses of interviewers will be enough: with each puff of cigar smoke came the certainty that the truth was too dark and large for outsiders to intuit.

    Then there are other terrible moments when Coogan shows us how, just before an attack, Savile could display a sudden assertion of physicality. In one scene, hard to dislodge from the mind once it has been witnessed, Coogan looms before a victim, suddenly the only fact about a confined space, and we feel how strength in certain predators is concealed in the sort of wiry frame where we might not expect to find it.

    Then there is the other aspect of Coogan’s performance: he shows the japester, with his almost tapdancing caper along hospital corridors – that terrible springiness in his step, suggesting both of subterfuge and a general alertness for the next possible crime. Coogan also expertly delivers those clownish asides for which Savile was well-known – the sort of jokes which sound like they might be funny but which aren’t, and which even contain a kind of threat if you choose not to laugh.

    It all amounts to a performance as exciting in its actual brilliance as to its potential: someone who can deliver such a complex performance around such a sensitive issue can do anything. Great art is always a function of great intelligence, and this is the case with Coogan: every frame suggests a powerful mind at work.

    This is all good news. But we might be more comfortable celebrating it if Coogan hadn’t around the same time cemented himself in the ranks of celebrities who talk about politics with omniscience while also knowing very little. Around the release of The Reckoning, Coogan had this to say about people who support the monarchy:


    It’s just because most of the people that are into it all, those flag-waving plastic boats of people, I think are kind of idiots because they support a power structure that keeps the foot on the throat of working class people and I’m just not very keen on that kind of thing.

    The loftiness of the tone here is as bad as the reasoning. The way in which Coogan speaks about politics suggests a man in the media bubble used to being agreed with partly because he is famous, but also because the media is not a sector noted for its diversity of opinion. Such people talk as if the notion of disagreement with their view were wholly farcical.

    Meanwhile, the reasoning is poor because it shows a complete ignorance of the many good reasons intelligent people have for liking the monarchy: a liking for history, a passion for the individual character of a nation, the aesthetic of pageantry, or the good things which, for instance, King Charles III has done for society (and especially in the social mobility space). Coogan is talking with complete ignorance that such logic may exist, let alone that it might be valid, as it obviously is. This, then, is to speak idiotically while labelling others high-handedly idiots.

    There’s more. After the appalling October 7th attacks in Israel, Coogan was the most famous signatory to the ludicrous Artists for Palestine letter which asked governments to end their support for Israeli actions without mentioning the reasons why Israel had made incursions into Palestine in the first place. It was an early preview of the regrettable tendency, now widespread, to act as though nothing very significant or alarming happened on 7th October to make Israel act. This position has its logical conclusion in the reports we’re now seeing of people on TikTok embracing Bin Ladenism.

    Coogan was forced to backtrack, saying ‘that it goes without saying that what Hamas did is evil beyond imagination’, but a man of his intelligence knows that in the context – especially given the history of anti-Semitism – this ought to go with a good deal of saying. We cannot say it enough. In Gaza today, to omit context is to destroy the meaning of the events themselves, and therefore create the basis for excusing Hamas’ actions. It is also to remove any possible sense of regret which always accompanies legitimate acts of war – the baffled sense of being left with no choice for the sake of the memory of those you have lost, and their families, and the dignity of the nation. If anyone doubts that Israel was placed in this position on 7th October then they need to look again at what happened.

    It is no coincidence that Coogan has in the past supported another Hamas apologist Jeremy Corbyn. In this he is similar to Mark Rylance another brilliant actor who has also managed to convince himself that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. There is a trend here which cannot be entirely explained away by the media bubble. Coogan and Rylance are great actors because they are capable of independent though in their acting which they then cannot replicate when considering politics: in that area of life, they resort to the banalities of the herd.

    What then is going on? In Coogan’s case being famous at a relatively young age doesn’t help. Politics is to do with the day-to-day lives of millions and the life of the creator of Alan Partridge isn’t likely to be an ordinary one. For one thing, such people tend not to be especially expert on the tax system around which politics really revolves: they are financially secure and have advisors for that side of life. Nor are they particularly likely to develop this understanding during their busy lives. It was Asquith who said of the prime ministership that you have to conduct it with the knowledge you bring to it on your first day in office. He meant that there wasn’t enough time to acquire new knowledge. Today’s fame is probably similar: everything conspires to fix you in your opinions because success and busyness are now constants.

    It has been said that there is a distinction between artistic and moral intelligence. This is attractive but too simplistic: we could say Coogan is intelligent as an artist but not as a political thinker. But this isn’t satisfactory because, as we’ve seen, the Savile portrayal is so good because of its moral intelligence. This means that the only possible explanation is moral laziness – that Coogan is capable of great things when he is on camera, there is a paycheck involved and he knows vast numbers of people will be watching. However, we can say with reasonable assurance, that he doesn’t make as much effort when it comes to the issues which affect others.

    The elevation of the media as a sector has got out of hand. We would be surprised if Rishi Sunak stood at the despatch-box and announced that he had an idea for a TV drama. Maybe now, as the world’s issues gather in complexity, it might be a good idea if actors returned the favour, and worked harder on the detail before they gave us their political opinions.

     

     

     

  • Tesla Targets India

    Dinesh Dhamija

     

    I’m a big fan of Tesla.

     

    When I sold ebookers.com, I had salespeople trying to interest me in all kinds of fancy cars. Some of them I couldn’t squeeze into. Others just made me feel like a polluting road-hog.

    Several years later, I’m still extremely happy in my quiet, smooth, comfortable and non-polluting Tesla. And so is my wife, in hers.

    So it’s exciting to see that Elon Musk is getting serious about setting up Tesla in India. He’s met Narendra Modi a couple of times already and held meetings with commerce minister Piyush Goyal about building one of his mega factories in the country.

    Of course, there are hurdles to overcome. Despite hundreds of millions of consumers, few Indian car buyers can afford to pay $38,000 (the current cheapest Tesla). The government would have to lower its 70 per cent tariff on cars below $40,000 and 100 per cent on cars above $40,000, which will be resisted by domestic carmakers.

    An Indian government official was quoted in the Financial Times proposing a 15 per cent tariff for all EVs, in return for building a plant in the country.

    Infrastructure for EVs is basic to non-existent in much of India. Right now, they make up just 1.5 per cent of passenger vehicles sold in the country. And the most popular types of car are tiny, compared with the spacious Tesla saloons.

    Yet like so much in Elon Musk’s career, the idea of attacking the India market shows imagination and vision beyond the scope of most other people. He sets almost ridiculously high targets – the latest is to produce 20 million cars a year by 2030, more than Toyota and Volkswagen combined.

    For India and specifically for Narendra Modi, a new Tesla plant would give all the right signals: it would show that he welcomes industrial investment, is further developing his green agenda, boosting high tech employment and helping to improve India’s terrible air quality.

    A more mobile Indian population, with greater car ownership, will bring all kinds of other dividends. It will add to pressure on state and local authorities to improve the country’s highways, it will aid commercial growth and improve skills. If a growing proportion of this mobility can be electric, so much the better.

    On every urban Indian street, you find mechanics in their workshops tinkering with rickshaw engines and motorbikes. It would be good to see more smarter, higher-spec workshops with computer diagnostic equipment and EV charging points.

    As India approaches its next general election in spring 2024, Modi needs to demonstrate that he still has his finger on the pulse of the nation. Tesla’s arrival and the consequent mood of energising optimism around it could be just what he needs.

    Dinesh Dhamija founded, built and sold online travel agency ebookers, before serving as a Member of the European Parliament. His latest book, The Indian Century, will be published in the Autumn.