Pay scandal builder Persimmon hires National Express chief Dean Finch as new chief executive

Housebuilder Persimmon today hired National Express boss Dean Finch to succeed stopgap chief executive David Jenkinson who steadied the ship after its fatcat pay and quality control scandal.

Jenkinson stepped up to become CEO after Jeff Fairburn quit with a £75 million bonus critics said was largely derived from house sales boosted by the taxpayer-funded Help-to-Buy scheme.

Finch joins from buses giant National Express after 10 years as CEO there. Before that, he was head of Tube Lines and finance director of First Group.

At National Express, he has spent the past few months dealing with the collapse in traveller numbers due to covid travel restrictions. He tapped the government's emergency commercial paper loans scheme for £600 million and suspended its dividend. Its InterCity coach services were suspended altogether and its US school buses operation was shut down.

He will be paid £725,000 as a base salary with the possibility of earning double that as a bonus, 50% of which will be deferred for three years as Persimmon shares. A second scheme, the Performance Share Plan, will also pay him up to 200% of salary.

On top of that, Finch will get a golden handshake award to compensate him for "some, but not all" of the pay he would have been getting from National Express if he had stayed on.

Persimmon declined to comment on what that would be but National Express's report and accounts show he has 1 million share option awards under his long term incentive scheme worth £2.3 million subject to performance conditions plus a further 97,302 shares not subject to performance and currently worth £225,740.

In the last five years at National Express he earned a total of £19.5 million.

Persimmon chairman Roger Devlin said: "The board believes that Dean is a great fit for Persimmon and is well qualified to lead the business in to the next phase as we continue to drive a programme of changeto become the leading volume builder of good value, quality homes throughout the UK."

Jenkinson will stay until December while Dean, 53, will join the board and take up the CEO post at the end of the year.

Jenkinson signalled he wanted to step down once a suitable successor had been found. He was paid £20.4 million in 2017.