4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2016
⏱️ 43 minutes
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The sales signs are going up in 163 BHS shops around the country as the liquidators try to salvage something from the wreckage of this once proud company. When Sir Philip Green bought BHS in 2000, it was making a profit. By the time he sold it in 2015, for £1, to a three-times bankrupt with no retailing experience, it was making a loss and the company pension fund was more than £400m in deficit. Exactly what went wrong at BHS is the subject of no fewer than four separate inquires. What is certain is that it's you and I, the tax payers, who will pick up the bill for the redundancy payments for the 11,000 staff and responsibility for the 20,000 members of the BHS company pension scheme. The head of the Institute of Directors described the affair as deeply damaging to the British business world. It's all a far cry from the days of Quaker philanthropy that inspired so many Victorian entrepreneurs. The study of business ethics is one of the few growth areas of the economy. You might be forgiven for wondering how effective such courses are when we see so many headlines about companies avoiding tax, walking away from pension liabilities, using legal loopholes to make excessive profits, zero hours contracts, falsifying data, mis-selling... The list goes on. Do companies have any moral duty beyond the bottom line? Is the only duty of a company to make money for its shareholders within the law? Where and how do we draw the line between legal duty to shareholders and moral duty to society? The individuals that run companies have moral agency, but is there such a thing as a collective, corporate moral agency? Can we impose a set of moral values, or a social licence, on a company? Or will that create a climate of "What can we get away with?" rather than "What is right?"? Chaired by Michael Buerk with Giles Fraser, Claire Fox, Mathew Taylor and Melanie Phillips. Witnesses are Dr Steve Davies, Dawn Foster, Prof Chris Cowton and John Morrison.
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0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
0:03.6 | Good evening. It can't be easy for the 11,000 or so employees of British home stores, |
0:08.5 | or the more than double that number of pensioners, |
0:10.6 | to be hearing how the company on which they depend collapsed. |
0:13.8 | Today, Dominic Chappelle, the serial bankrupt, who bought it for a pound, |
0:17.9 | was described by his chief executive as a Premier League liar with his hands in the till. |
0:23.4 | Sir Philip Green, who sold BHS to Mr Chappelle, along with a pension scheme that has a half-billion-pound deficit, |
0:30.6 | will soon be taking delivery of his third super yacht, worth or so it's reported over £100 million. |
0:36.8 | BHS is only part of his otherwise mostly successful retail empire, of course, |
0:41.1 | and his supporters would no doubt say putting it this way is unfair and an oversimplification, |
0:45.4 | but it doesn't look good. |
0:47.3 | And coming in the week when another billionaire, Mike Ashley, |
0:50.1 | has been facing embarrassing questions about conditions at his company, Sports Direct. |
0:54.7 | It's all focused attention on the responsibilities of companies and their owners, |
0:58.7 | and indeed the morality of capitalism itself. |
1:01.8 | Can, should, companies be moral agents, nor is that only for the individuals who own and work for them? |
1:08.9 | Should they only be required to stay within the law and make a profit for their shareholders? |
1:14.0 | Or should they carry a wider responsibility towards the society in which they operate? |
1:18.4 | If so, should that be implicit or spelled out by law or regulation? |
1:23.5 | Morality in Business, the first of a new series of the Moral Mays, our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on the Times. |
1:28.9 | Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas, Chief Executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, and Giles Fraser, the Anglican priest and polemicist. |
1:37.6 | Giles, are people like Sir Philip Green, to whom in a certain light you bear a distinct resemblance, by the way. |
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