Anthony Hilton: More women at the top will improve our dreadful productivity

Politicians love policy. It shows them what could happen, puts their stamp on it, gives them a purpose, gets them noticed by peers and constituents, and means they will shin up the greasy pole to get a better job.

What they don’t often do is execute a policy and make something happen. That involves rolling up their sleeves, getting exposure to the nitty-gritty, dealing with the consequences, making the difficult choices, and doing the hard work for little reward.

One thing we have in this country is a lot of policies with poor execution. When there is media frenzy, politicians don’t say they need to make their policies work better. They say there must be more policy.

Take productivity: the problem is we work long hours but don’t get the results. We are at least a fifth worse off than France or Germany who work fewer hours, have more to spend and give more money for public services. So Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, has made productivity a priority.

For at least the last 12 months he has sent civil servants to think up schemes to address the problem.

But rather than produce more half-baked policies, we could execute those we have. Take women in business. Survey after survey says a combination of women and men in the management team gives far better results than either men-only or women-only.

The decisions, ambience in the management suite and the rapport with staff are better.

No one disputes this, the weight of evidence is just too vast, but companies still don’t change. True, there has been an upsurge of women in the boardroom thanks to the 30% Club, which was headed by the then fund manager of Newton, Helena Morrissey, which itself followed a report by Mervyn Davies, formerly of Standard Chartered.

After 10 years around 30% of the boards are female among the very largest companies. But it quickly becomes more patchy with smaller companies. The real problem is that these are non-executive directors so they are on the board but not in power. There was an initiative by Sir Win Bischoff, the 30% Club chairman, to move women onto management committees, where the real power lies. At the time women filled about 9% of the roles. Five years later that figure has not changed.

Even on FTSE 100 boards, woman are not making headway. They have flatlined for a fourth year at 9.7%.

In the FTSE 250 it is a dismal 6.4% — or 30 people, down from 38 the year before. The government-backed Hampton-Alexander report on equality this week wrung its hands