Marks' timing is out of step

STUART Rose is chasing the money-changers from the temple. Fleeing with their pockets stuffed with cash and options are another six senior executives and serried ranks of consultants at a saving of £20m.

There will be regret at the departure of Maurice Helfgott, who is credited with reinventing the menswear brands.

Rose wants to take control of merchandising and buying instead of working through a treacle layer. That is an admirable proposition which means there can be no blaming anyone else if business continues to deteriorate.

But one hopes that Rose, who thinks buying is about cutting down on the number of tomato varieties and types of black trousers for women, should not forget that sophisticated customers like choice. That has been key to Debenhams' success with designer labels and the Waitrose challenge in food.

What continues to grate for investors and staff is the amount of cash being handed out to departed executives. The cost of axing former chairman Luc Vandevelde and chief executive Roger Holmes is more than that of ridding the company of 650 people at head office for £3.8m.

So much for a caring and sharing management. One of Rose's constant mantras concerns M&S's high staff costs when compared to its rivals. But Marks could afford to absorb such overheads because its margins were so much better. If it is getting down and dirty with lower-cost products and quicker turnabout of merchandise there must be fear that it will vandalise the brand.

Indeed, a breakdown of the latest results makes for curious reading. M&S was the first retailer to see financial services as a promising way to earn substantial profits-Now the 'more credit card arm has been sold to HSBC too cheaply and insurance is tanking. It is as if successive managements relish taking good parts of the business and dismantling them.

It is amazing to think that it will cost £29.3m to close down one Lifestore shop in Gateshead. That is the economics of the madhouse.

In fact the only part of M&S that is singing is its international arm from Hong Kong to Dubai.

Shutting down Europe - a decision taken by Vandevelde - is looking like a grave error. Maybe the company should have closed its domestic retail operations and focused on Sir Richard Greenbury's global expansion.

But at M&S these days the winning formula appears to be going, going, gone.

Pensions rewrite

NOW we have heard it all. The crisis for final salary pension schemes is the CBI's fault, not the Treasury's.

Gordon Brown's claim that it was CBI lobbying which led to the pension tax credit being abolished does stretch credulity.

Without wishing to open old wounds it is well known that before the 1997 General Election Brown employed an army of accountants, paid for by former paymaster general Geoffrey Robinson, to look for new income streams for the Treasury. Abolishing the tax credit, already cut back by the Tories, was an easy option.

Having played a part (not the only part) in undermining final salary pensions it ill behoves the Chancellor to come along and tell industry that he will not bale out private-sector pensions by increasing the scale of state provision.

The pensions tax credit already has made the government-sponsored stakeholder pension redundant by its generosity. In fact it has been a positive incentive to live off the state rather than save.

Where the Chancellor and the Pensions Secretary appear to be leading us is towards compulsory pensions savings after the election, which is bound to be perceived as back-door taxation.

Far better first to move to 'opt out' status for company pensions under which employees are obliged to sign a contract saying they do not want to contribute to a retirement package. This might save us from taking the Chileanstyle route of compulsion.

Trade boost

MUCH has been written in recent days about America's huge trade deficit. But one of the big beneficiaries of the US's appetite for exports is Britain with the transatlantic trade surplus surging to £528m in September from £401m.

This was a big factor in the improvement in Britain's total trade balance which narrowed to £2.9bn in September from £3.6bn in August, including services.

The black spot was the negative number for oil imports at £254m in the red against a surplus in the previous month. This was due to production problems in the North Sea.

But in the coming years we will have to adjust to the fact that Britain is no longer among the oil-exporting titans.