Jo Valentine decided the House of Lords offered a way of getting things done,
says Jo Valentine is endearingly vague about just who suggested she put
herself up for a working peerage. One of two people quietly mentioned the
idea in 2005, she says.
Business people or politicians? “Business people who were in the political
world. It certainly was not in my game plan.” She will know plenty of such
people. For more than a decade she has been running London First, the group
that speaks up for businesses at Whitehall and elsewhere.
In the event she was persuaded, and applied to become Baroness Valentine of
Putney on the relevant website, which is apparently how these things are
done. “I was told they are looking for some women. They would like them to
be under 69. Even better if you are a mother who works as well. So I ticked
those boxes.”
It is perhaps ironic that these were the qualifications because, were it not
for motherhood, this former merchant banker could well have been running a
company by now, something that had been an ambition since she was 16.
She took her seat in the Lords as a crossbencher. This was probably necessary
if she was to continue as chief executive of London First, which must
operate independently of any particular party. But she insists: “I actually
don't have strong political opinions at all. I presumably have views on
particular issues but I really don't have party political views. I'm missing
that gene.”
Her job at London First seems to involve an endless round of meetings: working
breakfasts, seminars, round-table discussions and conferences. She arrives
at London First's offices off Trafalgar Square from Heathrow and the third
of five breakfast meetings this week.
It would bore the average person witless, I suggest. “It doesn't feel boring
doing it at all.” The trick, she says, is to be selective. “I'm not going to
spend time in meetings if there isn't an outcome.”
London First was created in 1992, its first chairman being Lord Sheppard of
Didgemere, then running Grand Metropolitan. At the time, and well before
Valentine joined, London was heading into recession and “was miserable”, she
says. “There was a need to champion London; say London is a great place; to
promote London.” One of the main issues was the deplorable state of
transport and one of the first campaigns was for Crossrail, which would run
from the east to Heathrow. In those Thatcherite times there was no London
authority after the abolition of the GLC and a feeling that businessmen were
the appropriate people to sort out the nation's problems.
A decade and a half later, Crossrail is still not built - the powers that be
then decided the Jubilee Line extension was a suitable substitute - and
London is again heading into recession. But we do have an elected Mayor. Is
there still a need for a pressure group such as London First?
She says: “Our view is that you do need a political champion to make things
happen for London. Given that that political champion exists, I think our
role is very much to understand where the business community is coming from
and what business's concerns are. There is not a government voice for
business.”
London First is not a lobbyist - “that isn't a word I like to use about what
we do” - and she bristles further if it is described as a quango. It is
funded by member companies and gets no money from the Government, but does
provide a single business voice on a wide range of issues.
Apart from Heathrow and other transport matters, the group was instrumental in
building the Millennium Bridge despite some local planning concerns. A
future event will look at the pros and cons of a bicycle hire scheme similar
to the one that operates in Paris.
Also upcoming is a careers event at Excel in Docklands that will attract
50,000 young people. A looming concern for business is the effect on the
London economy and the capital's competitiveness of changes in City
regulation and in the tax regime. “It is not so much absolute tax. It is the
way it is introduced and signalled - whether people introducing it know how
the marketplace works in reality, rather than in theory.”
Her tolerance of the inevitable meetings aside, Valentine is well placed to
understand tax and regulatory issues. She was brought up in Putney and still
lives a couple of streets away from her family home in the London suburb,
though more by coincidence than some ingrained homing instinct, she insists.
After St Paul's, she read maths and philosophy at St Hugh's College, Oxford
and went straight into corporate finance at Barings. “As a junior, I was the
one producing the timetable of the merger.” She says cor- porate finance is
remarkably similar to her work at London First: “It's about getting the
relevant people around the table and agreeing the agenda.”
Why Barings? “It was the milk round. I was the first female executive at
Barings in 1981.” But it had a reputation, even among City banks at the
time, of being stuffy. “There were several of them that weren't exactly
female-adjusted,” she says darkly. “At Barings, they were very charming.”
She considers. “If you are very gentlemanly, you come back around the other
side and become more acceptable to women.”
She advised on various deals in the City before Big Bang and on one of the
biggest management buyouts at the time, a diversified conglomerate. “Ihad
this highly complex computer program, which I loved, putting all these
businesses into a spreadsheet. It would look a bit Noddy now.”
But by the end of the decade she had had enough of banking. “It was a very
gentlemanly atmosphere. I did feel quite stultified, is that the word, by
it. There was a lot of cricket and shooting.”
She ended up at the complete antithesis of gentlemanly merchant banking, in
the decaying former textiles district in Blackburn. “The Prince (of Wales)
was trying to set up a regeneration partnership in Blackburn based on the
way they did regeneration in the States.” It was a severe cultural shock. “I
went up as a rich, southern, white female. It was very old Labour, working
men's clubs, male”, with a large ethnic population. “They nearly threw me
out of Blackburn several times.”
Once the project was up and running, she went to work for BOC, as head of
corporate finance and planning. “That was supposed to be a route towards
running a company. It was too back-office for me, with hindsight.”
Ideally she would have ended up heading one of the businesses within BOC but
these were almost all overseas. With two very young daughters, the amount of
travel required would have been impossible.
She moved to Central London Partnership, which brings together the public and
private sector in several inner London boroughs, and then to London First.
Though the latter has to operate as a business and look after its own
budget, she has, therefore, never run that public company. Could she yet?
“If somebody wants to offer me a job in five years' time in a plc, then
perhaps. I do like running things. I don't have a plan. I gave up having
plans when I had children.”
CV: Baroness Valentine
Born: 8 December 1958.
Educated: St Paul's Girls School; St Hugh's, Oxford.
1981 - 88: Corporate financier, Barings Bank.
1988 - 90: Chief executive, the Blackburn Partnership.
1990 - 95: Head of corporate finance and planning, BOC Group.
1995 - 97: Chief executive, Central London Partnership.
1997 - 2003: Chief operating officer, London First.
2001 - 2005: Commissioner, National Lottery.
2003 to date: Chief executive, London First.
Family: Married, two daughters.
