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Archives for April 2009

Alternative couriers: update

Declan Curry | 13:36 UK time, Thursday, 9 April 2009

Guest blogger, Dominic Laurie, writes...

On Monday 6 April, I did a piece about a new approach to sending parcels. It's offered by a company called .

The principle: if you want to send a parcel, you log on to their website, describe the journey you want the parcel to make, and someone else in the community - either a professional courier themselves, or a private car user - can arrange to pick up your parcel for you, if they happen to be travelling along a similar route.

The idea is to help courier firms (who may for example be travelling back empty from a drop) or contribute towards the running costs of a private car. But the firm says it also benefits senders too as it's cheaper than hiring a van.

A few of you have written to us asking whether a private car driver is invalidating their car insurance by receiving money for taking parcels this way. Christabel Hallas, Tony Clegg, Joyce Diment, Roger Powell, Ian Little -- thank you for getting in touch. Doesn't a car insurance policy that covers Social, Domestic and Pleasure forbid using your vehicle for "hire and reward"?

Well, I asked stuff2send, and this was their reply: "Private individuals use the site as deliverers in a not-for-profit capacity. Senders contribute towards the individual's running costs for the agreed journey, and vehicles must seat eight passengers or less".

They say this is consistent with the advice that the insurance industry gives to those "offering lift share services where passengers may contribute to running costs for a journey." However, stuff2send does say that "anyone unsure of cover, should check with their insurer before proceeding."

It basically means that as "private" couriers receive less money that the actual cost of the journey, they are not doing it for profit or reward. So the Social, Domestic and Pleasure insurance policies that most of us have would not be invalidated. If they were taking several at a time, though, this would obviously change.

I also checked with the Association of British Insurers (ABI). They are the body that represents the industry and it was them that stuff2send says it went to for advice.

Malcolm Tarling from the ABI told me that the first thing to do is always to check with your insurer before you undertake to join any type of scheme such as this.

Your insurer, he says, will want to know whether the activity places you or your car at increased risk. Are you carrying expensive goods that will make your car more liable to be broken into? Does it make you at greater risk of having an accident?

On the other hand, they will also bear in mind that you are a private motorist who would have been making the journey anyway. So, before you do anything, give your insurer a call.

Dominic Laurie

Oops

Declan Curry | 12:11 UK time, Thursday, 9 April 2009

We got a couple of things wrong on Wednesday's programme.

As well as saying sorry, I also wanted to say thank you to the Working Lunch viewers who spotted the mistakes.

Our big guest yesterday was Tim Martin, founder of the pubs chain Wetherspoons. Except that we wrote "Weatherspoons" on one of our graphics. It was a simple typing mistake; easy to make, and surprisingly hard to spot - several people saw the caption before transmission and didn't detect it.

But don't think we're not taking it seriously. It's as irritating to us as it is to you. We know it makes us look silly and careless.

We also got one of our facts wrong in our item about companies reducing or cutting their regular dividend payments to shareholders.

In among all the other information, we said that HSBC had cancelled its dividend. It hasn't.

David Kirby in Midhurst and Russell Ridout emailed us to check they hadn't mis-heard. We're sorry to them and to anyone who owns HSBC shares, and who was alarmed by the report.

The bank is not cancelling its dividend, but it is re-calculating it because of its recent sale of new shares. As a result, shareholders are likely to end up with less money but there are no precise figures available yet as the bank has yet to decide its final dividend.

Once again, we're sorry for the mistakes - and we're grateful to you for your speed in alerting us.

bra business

Declan Curry | 16:33 UK time, Tuesday, 7 April 2009

So - how well do you know your bras?

If your knowledge stops at lifting and separating, then you'll have been as perplexed as I was by Tuesday's special guest, the bra queen Michelle Mone.

She sells bras up and down the high street, from the discreet department store changing room through to the supermarket special offer bin.

And she's got more than a few - er - models on the shelf. There are eight different varieties at one retail chain alone.

She rattled through the list - gel filled, backless, frontless-backless - by which point I'd lost track.

Then she started talking about something called the "Missile".

Crikey, I thought. Where does that go in the smalls drawer?

Actually, I'd mis-heard. It was her "Miss Ultimo" range. According to the website, there's a "unique graduated foam cup", a "quirky embossed silhouette" and "trademark cleavage". Note I looked this up, purely for research.

She also teased us with a story about a supermodel who wanted some free - um - smalls, but spent the entire time at lunch on the phone. After putting up with this for some time, Michelle stood up and left - and the supermodel had to pay the bill. (Given how little they eat, it can't have been that much, surely?)

If you missed the interview, you can catch it on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer.

Michelle didn't object when we called her an entrepreneur who has pulled herself up by the bra straps. She founded the business 13 years ago; nowadays it's valued by some at around £50 million.

At one stage, she and her husband sold a stake in the company to raise funds for expansion. She's since bought the lot back again, and the company is back within her total control.

But it gave her a personal insight into one of our other stories today - .

Innocent has made a lot of noise about its ethical values.

You may have heard one of its founders, Richard Reed, talk about it on Working Lunch last autumn - when he was one of our big guests.

So has it sold out - or is this just a sign of a successful young business growing up? Our reporter Gillian Lacey-Solymar took a look. That's on the iPlayer too.

The Innocent boys will have raised a pretty penny from the deal, which they say will pay to expand the business in Europe. But it's not just about the money. Coca-Cola also brings its unrivalled marketing expertise and its global distribution network to the table. These are more valuable than mere cash.

It could bring Innocent to a completely different place.

That's the reason Michelle sold shares in her business all those years ago. And she might do it again.

"There will come a time when I can't take Ultimo any further - where someone will come in and take it to another level," she told us. "When that happens I'll hang up my bra and walk away."

Time waits for no man...

Declan Curry | 09:57 UK time, Tuesday, 7 April 2009

I've written before on this blog about why we interrupt guests.

We don't do it very often. We don't like doing it. We know you hate it when we do.

But occasionally, live programmes go awry. Guests speak for much longer than we expected - or budgeted.

We can't make the programme any longer when they do. So, however reluctantly, we sometimes have to stop them talking.

We had to do it last Friday with a guest called Michael Lamoureux. He owned a small fortune in RBS shares, but only because he started out with a large one. His investment was worth £100,000 at one stage; now it's valued at less than £4,000.

Mr Lamoureux is unhappy. He thinks shareholders were misled. He is now planning to sue the RBS Group, and .

(You can see the full interview with him by looking up last Friday's programme on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer - it's about 15 minutes in.)

We invited Mr Lamoureux onto the programme as he had interesting things to say, and we thought other Working Lunch viewers might be in a similar position.

He was an informative guest, and we're very grateful to him for taking the time and trouble to appear.

But we asked him one question too many. And his answer was a lot longer than we anticipated.

This gave us a big problem. Our programme was already packed full. There was very little scope for items to over-run their allocated time.

We let Mr Lamoureux talk further - in fact, for as long as we could. But in the end, we had to step in.

We did it politely, and contritely.

But I'd like to apologise to him again for doing so. Jumping in to stop a guest can create a bad impression; some of you think it's a sign that we didn't like the interview, or the interviewee.

That's not the case.

We stopped him simply because the interview had already run one minute longer than expected - time we would need to claw back from the following items - and was showing no sign of ending imminently.

What's baffled some of you - including Mr Houghton in Cheshire, who was good enough to email in - was that we stopped Mr Lamoureux for a much longer interview with the chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz.

Mr Houghton writes that interrupting Mr Lamoureux "was made increasingly irritating by the content of the following item which appeared to contain a ten minute recommendation to drink Starbucks coffees."

This was not some free advert for the company. This was a rare interview with the British media with the chief of one of the world's biggest companies; you don't get to hear from him very often.

So we decided that what he had to say was worth hearing at length. That's the strength of Working Lunch's interviews - when we've got the big names, we can give them more time that they'd usually get in a daily news programme.

While Mr Schultz talked about the company's growth and innovation, we questioned him about the state of the economy, his company's response to the slowdown in consumer spending and the viability of his expansion plans.

These are important questions when finding out how the recession is changing companies' plans for future investment, job creation and spending. Those decisions will determine the length and depth of the slowdown, here and around the globe.

Howard Schultz masterminded Starbucks' transformation from a few small coffee shops in the Pacific Northwest into a multi-million pound operation that straddles the planet. He built a local name into one of the world's most prominent brands.

This was no mere pundit, or economic watcher. His decisions count - and it's important to know even a little of his thinking.

But - in retrospect - I think we may have played it a little too long. What felt an appropriate length when we listened to it in advance, in isolation, actually felt a little long when surrounded by other, much shorter items. It could, perhaps, have been improved by a surgical trim.

That's the joy of hindsight - it allows you to look at something afterwards and say, perhaps ...

Cake talk

Declan Curry | 10:57 UK time, Friday, 3 April 2009

Bit of a personal first last night.

Someone stopped me in the street and asked, "aren't you that bloke off Working Lunch?". This surprised me as usually the question is, "I used to watch you on Breakfast - why are you not on my TV any more?"

Before I could get too big headed he quickly added, "but I really love your co-presenter. She's much better that you."

If only he knew just how talented Naga is. This morning we arrived to the aroma of freshly-baked cake, all by Wifey's fair hand.

cake1A.jpg

There was chocolate...

...and for the healthy eaters among us, there was a raspberry and blackcurrant slice-thing. Well, I'm counting it as one of my five a day.

cake2.jpg

And Simon was going to tell you something about her carrot cupcakes, but he's a bit busy ...

cake3.jpg

She's our own little Nigella. Great in the kitchen, even better on the TV. And as this early look at today's programme run-down shows, Naga has a lot to get on with ....

cake4A.jpg

I'm just here for the cake.

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