As I made my way onto the ever faithful 521 bus this morning, I grabbed my daily copy of City AM which, in my opinion, is the best free paper around. I was eager to start scanning the headlines (a standard morning ritual) but I got stuck on page one - “Osborne snubs Vickers on Lloyds Branch Sales”. I tutted out loud, I’ll be honest! Why can’t government and powers that be in the realms of Whitehall just agree, for once? I can’t get my head around how we are meant to ignite this economy back into action if there is a constant disagreement about how we should be doing it. Today’s vehement misalignment of opinion was regards the sale of Lloyds Bank branches. Sir John Vickers, chair of the Independent Commission on Banking, has made a main recommendation that Lloyds should sell far more than the 620 branches currently on the block whereas the Treasury is happy for Lloyds to proceed as planned – a huge snu b to Vickers. If this was an isolated story theme I wouldn’t hold an opinion, but given day in day out I read the same – I felt I had to flag it! Read the full story here. For more details on Project Verde, click here.
Elizabeth Biggs is a consultant on the FreshMinds Talent Interim team.
