Tag: Labour Policies

Pay-outs from Labour’s Dividend Plans

I said in my last blog post that the Labour Party’s plans to take 10% of a company’s shares and pay the dividends into an employee trust did not make much sense. I have actually worked out what the implications of such a scheme would be on a few large UK public companies. These are the figures (after 10 years and assuming 10% of the total dividend is therefore paid to employees):

  • BP pays £6.15bn in dividends and has 74,000 employees: £8,310 per employee.
  • Shell pays $10.87bn in dividends and has 92,000 employees: £9,846 per employee.
  • M&S pays £304m in dividends and has 84,000 employees: £360 per employee.
  • Tesco pays £82m in dividends and has 448,000 employees: £18 per employee.

The latter two do of course have many part-time employees. How they might be treated is unknown so I have assumed they get an equal share. Tesco has also been paying a low dividend of late because of past financial difficulties but even if it returned to previous levels, the pay-out to each employee would be low – hardly sufficient to motivate them.

In the case of the oil companies where they have relatively few employees in a capital- intensive business, the pay-out would exceed the £500 cap in year one, so it would be mainly the Government that benefited.

This seems a perverse result to say the least. Are M&S and Tesco employees so much less worthy than BP and Shell employees? Whether an employee got any worthwhile share of the dividends would much depend on the kind of company they worked for.

Another odd result is that the Government would collect a lot more in tax (the amount above the £500 cap) from capital intensive companies than from those with lots of employees.

The more one looks at this, the more perverse this scheme turns out to be.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right.

© Copyright. Disclaimer: Read the About page before relying on any information in this post.

 

The Impact on Investors of the Labour Party’s Plans

I commented briefly yesterday on the plans by John McDonnell of the Labour Party to give employees shares and possible future nationalisations – see: https://roliscon.blog/2018/09/24/labours-plans-for-confiscation-of-shares-and-rail-system-renationalisation/

More information is now available on the share scheme and the more one studies it the more one realises that whoever devised it does not understand much about business and the stock market. In other words they were typical politicians with no experience of the real world I would guess.

The scheme would apparently operate by companies with more than 250 employees being forced to hand over 10% of the shares in a company to an employee trust fund. That would be over a period of time – possibly ten years – and presumably that would be by the issuance of new shares rather than confiscating existing shares, but it still means 10% dilution for investors.

Shareholders normally get a vote on the issuance of new shares but presumably that could be legally subverted. Otherwise the scheme would cover about 11 million employees. However, foreign owned companies would not be covered so that excludes perhaps a third of the employees (the Labour Party apparently admits they would not be and it is difficult to see how legally any such law could be enforced on them).

One simple way for companies to avoid the scheme would be to move their country of registration elsewhere – no need to change where their shares are listed, just move domicile. We could see a host of companies re-registering in such places as Panama! An unintended consequence that I am sure the Labour Party would not like.

The shares accumulated in the trust fund would pay dividends to the individual shareholders out of the dividends paid to the fund by the company. But there would be a cap of £500 per employee. Any amount payable above that cap would revert to the Government. It is estimated this might generate £2 billion a year to the Government after 5 years – another large tax hike in addition to proposed increases in Corporation Tax the Shadow Chancellor is promising.

Employees could not buy or sell the shares held on their behalf, so presumably could not take them away when they leave or retire. So in practice those companies with high staff turnover would see the dividends accumulating for the benefit of the Government, particularly if the £500 cap remain fixed, i.e. unindexed.

But the company could avoid paying out this windfall to the Government simply by not paying dividends. Many companies don’t pay dividends anyway. Alternatively they could pay a dividend in shares (a “scrip” dividend), or offer to buy back shares occasionally via a tender offer or market share buy-backs– these would not be dividends and hence would be excluded.

Another problem with the scheme is that companies who had a few less than 250 employees could decide not to expand and hence become subject to this scheme, i.e. this would discourage companies from growing which is not what the Government wants. Alternatively they could create new separate companies owned by the same shareholders to expand their business and avoid it that way.

Apart from the 10% dilution that will hit not just direct investors but those investing via pension schemes, you can see that this scheme is not just daft because of its unintended consequences and likely avoidance, it’s an insidious way to raise taxes on companies and investors very substantially.

The only good aspect of the scheme is that it would help to give employees a stake (albeit indirect) and hence interest in the company they work for. It might also ensure some representation of their interests because the trust fund would be controlled by employees and could vote the shares. But there are much better ways to provide both those benefits.

In conclusion, the idea of an employee trust fund sounds attractive at first glance but it has not been properly thought through. A lot more consideration needs to be given to come up with a workable scheme that does not prejudice companies and their investors. Any foreign investor who saw such a scheme being imposed on his UK investment holdings would promptly run a mile – and don’t forget that most of the UK stock market is now owned by foreign investors. The impact on the Uk stock market, and the economic consequences of investors taking their businesses and investment money elsewhere beggars belief.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right.

© Copyright. Disclaimer: Read the About page before relying on any information in this post.

Labour’s Plans For Confiscation of Shares and Rail System Renationalisation

Jeremy Corbyn made it clear in a speech last night that the rich will be under attack if Labour gets into power. John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor, will present his plans today to give 10% of shares in all larger companies to employees over a period of years. The Daily Telegraph described it as a Marxist plot to control businesses while Carolyn Fairburn of the CBI attacked it as a “new tax that adds to the impression that Labour sees business as a bottomless pit of funding”. The proposal seems to be based on setting up a trust for employees into which the shares would be deposited and from where dividends would be paid to employees.

Comment: It will certainly dilute existing shareholders so readers of this blog might find they and the pension funds that invest in shares are proportionally poorer. Although it sets a bad principle, if the numbers being proposed are enacted it might not have a major impact on companies or investors. Enabling employees to have a financial interest in the profits of a company is quite a sensible idea in many ways. But it might simply encourage companies to take their business elsewhere. If they are registered in another country, how will the UK Government enforce such legislation?

Last week Chris Grayling, Transport Secretary, announced a review of the privatised rail system. That follows the recent problems with new timetables where the regulator concluded that “nobody took charge”. John McDonnell said that he could renationalise the railways within five years if Labour wins the next election – it’s already a manifesto commitment. Perhaps he thinks he can solve the railway’s problems by doing so but this writer suggests the problem is technology rather than management, although cost also comes into the equation.

The basic problem is that the railways are built on inflexible and expensive old technology. There has never been a “timetable” problem on the roads because there are no fixed timetables – folks just do their own thing and travel when they want to do so.

Consider the rail signalling system – an enormously expensive infrastructure to ensure trains don’t run into each other and to give signals to train drivers. We do of course have a similar system at junctions on roads – they are called traffic lights. But they operate automatically and are relatively cheap. Most are not even linked in a network as train signals are required to be.

Trains run on tracks so they are extremely vulnerable to breakdowns of trains and damage to tracks – even snow, ice or leaves on the line cause disruption – who ever heard of road vehicles being delayed by leaves? A minor problem on a train track, often to signals, can quickly cause the whole line or network to come to a halt. Failing traffic signals on roads typically cause only slight delays and vehicles can drive around any broken-down cars or lorries.

The cost of changes to a rail line are simply enormous, and the cost of building them also. For example, the latest estimate for HS2 – the line from London to Birmingham is more than £80 billion. The original M1 was completed in 1999 at a cost of £26 million. Even allowing for inflation, and some widening and upgrading since then the total cost is probably less than £1 billion.

Changes to railway lines can be enormously expensive. For example, the cost of rebuilding London Bridge station to accommodate more trains was about £1 billion. These astronomic figures simply do not arise when motorways are revised or new service stations constructed.

Why invest more in a railway network when roads are cheaper to build and maintain, and a lot more flexible in use? At present the railways have to be massively subsidised by the Government out of taxation – about £4 billion per annum according to Wikipedia, or about 7.5p per mile of every train journey you take according to the BBC. Meanwhile road transport more than pays for itself and contributes billions to general taxation in addition from taxes on vehicle users.

So here’s a suggestion: scrap using this old technology for transport and invest more in roads. Let the railways shrink in size to where they are justifiable, or let them disappear as trams did for similar reasons – inflexible and expensive in comparison with buses.

No need to renationalise them at great expense. Spend the money instead on building a decent road network which is certainly not what we have at present.

Do you think that railways are more environmentally friendly? Electric trains may be but with electric road vehicles now becoming commonplace, that justification will no longer apply in a few years’ time, if not already.

Just like some people love old transport modes – just think canals and steam trains – the attachment to old technology in transport is simply irrational as well as being very expensive. Road vehicles take you from door-to-door at lower cost, with no “changing trains” or waiting for the next one to arrive. No disruption caused by striking guards or drivers as London commuters have seen so frequently.

In summary building and managing a road network is cheaper and simpler. It just needs a change of mindset to see the advantages of road over rail. But John McDonnell wants to take us back to 1948 when the railways were last nationalised. Better to invest in the roads than the railways.

It has been suggested that John McDonnell is a Marxist but at times he has denied it. Those not aware of the impact of Marxism on political thought would do well to read a book I recently perused which covered the impact of the Bolsheviks in post-revolutionary Russia circa 1919. In Tashkent they nationalised all pianos as owning a piano was considered “bourgeois”. They were confiscated and given to schools. One man who had his piano nationalised lost his temper and broke up the piano with an axe. He was taken to goal and then shot (from the book Mission to Tashkent by Col. F.M. Bailey).

Sometimes history can be very revealing. The same mentality that wishes to spend money on public transport such as railways as opposed to private transport systems, or renationalising the utility companies such as National Grid which is also on the agenda, shows the same defects.

The above might be controversial, but I have not even mentioned Brexit yet. Will the Labour Party support another referendum as some hope and Corbyn is still hedging his bets over? I hope not because I think the electorate is mightily fed up with the subject. In politics, as in business, you should take decisions and then move on. Going back and refighting old battles is not the way to succeed. All we should be debating is the form of Britain’s relationship with the EU after Brexit.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right.

© Copyright. Disclaimer: Read the About page before relying on any information in this post.

Back to the Jeremy Corbyn Future

With the latest revelations from the Labour Party conference, we now know what their policies are likely to be if elected. These include

  • Nationalisation of the railways and utilities (including National Grid).
  • Scrapping all Private Finance Initiative (PFI) deals by buying out the owners with Government debt.
  • Rent controls in the private housing sector.
  • Reform of leaseholds.
  • Workers in the gig economy will get full employment rights.
  • The NHS will get more money.
  • Student loan debts will be written off (at least it’s an “ambition”).

Now some of these policies are not totally daft (the last four for example), even if the cost is probably unaffordable at tens of billions of pounds. But for those of my readers who do not remember the times when we had rent controls, and nationalised industries back in the 1960s and 70s, let me remind you.

Rent controls meant that rents stayed low, but private rented housing pretty well disappeared as a result over the years from 1950 to 1960. Nobody would invest in rented housing when they could get better returns on other investments. Or it promoted the spread of Rachmanism where landlords would allow properties to run down and then use aggressive tactics to remove sitting tenants. In other words, a great example of the usual “unintended consequences” of economically illiterate policies.

The control of industries by politicians and civil servants created hopelessly inefficient industries like the nationalised railways, the car industry and the coal industry which should have been shrunk in size well before Mrs Thatcher took steps to do so.

There would of course be an enormous flight of capital from the UK if these policies were implemented, and it seems the shadow chancellor is already anticipating a run on the pound. What he could do about it other than get the IMF to bail us out is not clear. To remind my younger readers, this is exactly what happened back in 1976 under Prime Minister James Callaghan when the IMF enforced massive cuts in the UK’s budget deficit as a condition of a large loan (the UK had been living beyond its means for some years, and building up large debts, very much like recent years under another socialist government who invented PFI deals to enable them to borrow money without putting it on the Government balance sheet – but the interest payable has now caught up with us). Would a new socialist Government simply default on the contracts or borrow even more money to get out of the PFI deals? Either way it looks a grim financial future for UK Plc.

The last Labour Government made a big mistake when they nationalised a small UK bank called Northern Rock – we just passed the year anniversary of that event. That proved disastrous when other banks such as Bradford & Bingley, RBS, HBOS, et al, who were dependent on short term money market lending needed liquidity. Nobody was keen to lend to UK institutions so British banks and the UK economy were some of the hardest hit worldwide by the events of 2008/9.

As for renationalising the railways, they may get more subsidies from the Government now than they did when they were last nationalised, but ridership has increased, new tracks are being laid, and services improved. The problem was surely the nature of the privatisation and the fact that all railways are horribly inefficient and an inflexible means of moving goods and people around. Old technology, beloved by users who do not have to face up to paying the real cost of the service.

So the policies of Mr Corbyn and his colleagues may be exhilarating for LabourParty supporters, but no I don’t want to go back to a future set in the 1960s. Been there, done that, and no thanks.

But if the Conservatives wish to win the next election, they certainly need to look at tackling employment law to bring it up to date for the gig economy, to tackle the problem of funding education and relieve students of the enormous debts they are now incurring, to deal with the problem of insufficient housing in the South-East (and associated over-population which is the cause) which is leading to demands for rent controls, and tackle the thorny question of funding the NHS. Yes we need some new ideas, not old policies recycled Mr Corbyn.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right.

© Copyright. Disclaimer: Read the About page before relying on any information in this post.