Sun 1 Jul 2007
Builder's Breakfast with Eddie Shah.
Wootton Bassett is a place you would expect to find Gussie Fink-Nottle, one of Bertie Wooster’s Wodehousian chums, not union-basher, no-nonsense, highly successful businessman Eddy Shah.Eddy Shah? Ring a bell? Look at The Newspaper Society’s history of British newspapers and check the timelines.
1476: William Caxton sets up the first printing press in Westminster.
1983: Industrial dispute at Eddy Shah’s Messenger Group in Warrington.
1986: Eddy Shah launches Today – the first colour national newspaper.
Now you remember.
So why is a media magnate of yore – the first man to invoke Margaret Thatcher’s industrial laws – the subject of Builder’s Breakfast? (Actually it was a particularly fine, if relatively dry, lunch at Langan’s, off Piccadilly).
Shah, 62, intends to become a housebuilding tycoon, or, more accurately, typhoon. For Shah wants a ferocious wind of change to blow through the industry, intent on challenging the volume builders, in the way he took on and beat the print unions, to deliver low-cost, low-energy homes.
He is practising what he preaches in a development of 44 holiday homes around his golf course at The Wiltshire Leisure Village in Wootton Bassett, selling the three and four-bedroom timber frame properties from £198,000 to £265,000, ranging from 1050 to 1530 square feet.
Green Ladder Homes is the name, because Shah loathes the patronising word affordable, but wants to prove that energy efficient homes can be starter homes, allowing first-time buyers onto the ladder.
Never shy of a challenge, Shah is taking on quite simply the housebuilding challenge of the age, but he cannot do it alone and needs to take the industry with him.
“Rupert Murdoch once told me that any revolution had to come from smaller companies who were not part of a vested interest,” said Shah.
“I believe that time has now come for the housebuilding industry. I sincerely believe there is a cartel of major housebuilders whose main interest is in keeping prices high. That means higher profits and higher land costs to keep the smaller developers out.”
Listen up you Persimmons, Barratts and Taylor Wimpeys or whatever you will be called. There is more. Much more.
“Most products are over-priced due to the inefficiency of many large and established companies, who, like giant tankers at full speed, cannot react quickly enough to a looming problem,” added Shah.
“They are great in rising markets and their usual reaction to crisis is to slash costs and jobs. Very few of them are prepared for the drop in the market that is inevitable in a capital-driven society. It happened in the two industries I was involved in previously – newspapers and television.”
When Shah says professionally he has “one more big thing” in him, and that is housebuilding, it is time to take note, for Shah has “never give up”, “fight for what you believe in” and “don’t let the bastards get you down” writ large across a compelling CV. It is not just the “giant tankers” in the building industry he will have to take on, it is a planning system holed below the water line, and red tape and government regulation that could wrap up a cruise liner.
Shah banked £40 million from the sale of his Messenger newspaper group and moved into developing golf clubs including a shareholding in Wentworth, which he has since sold. Throw in four novels and you have a renaissance man ready for the next chapter in a rich and varied life, with no fear of the opposition, whatever its strengths.
“A cliché, but it is true the bigger they are, the harder they fall. When the revolution starts – and its time is now – it will not matter what the big boys say. They will have to adapt,” said Shah, ripping off a green gauntlet and hurling it on builders’ boardroom tables.
At the height of his battle with the print unions, including violent picketing, Shah was sent two coffins for him and his wife Jennifer and three small coffins for their children. Jennifer is his equally driven business partner, having fought cancer and radiation treatment that affected the nerves in her legs, leaving her disabled. Jennifer was a top model and actress, appearing as a Bond girl in the original Casino Royale.
Despite the absence of any bottles from the impressive Langan’s wine list (Shah is teetotal), lunch was a rewarding experience for a hack in the presence of a newspaper legend, with Shah just as interested in feeding free business advice as recruiting soldiers for his latest crusade – eager to help but with no punches pulled – a commercial godfather with soul.
There was a pre-prandial delay as brasserie owner Richard Shepherd introduced Shah, his golfing partner, to movers and shakers with heavyweight handshakes at neighbouring tables, before two hours of good company, great stories and still mineral water – the only thing flat in Shah’s fizzy, fast, fascinating world.
Shah is genuinely appalled at the lack of low-cost housing provision in this country, convinced squeezing smaller houses onto limited and ever more expensive land supply is a social time bomb.
“We need to pressurise government to give us back the living space we deserve. Humans should not have to be crammed into shoeboxes, crunched up together so they feel caged in and exacerbate many of the social problems we are faced with,” said Shah.
“The future of a constant property market has to be in sustained building at low and efficient costs. Either accept that or live in a boom and bust market in which the senior management do “very well thank you”, but the normal person in the street has no recourse as the market crashes up and down.”
The 235-acre Wiltshire Leisure Village offers timber frame lodges with the Japanese Daikin air to water heating system slashing electricity costs, grey water, energy saving lighting and high levels of insulation, all at prices that would barely cover the cost of livery for a Cotswolds horse. The championship golf course was designed by Peter Alliss.
“I used to hate the word sustainable. Now I like it, and it applies to how we build, the materials, the land, the financing and the running costs.”
Shah insists the housing market is like a fire that must be fed from the bottom. He would like to see the government introduce social lending schemes on a par with Fannie Mae in the United States, offering low-cost mortgages.
“The market has to collapse at some stage. The very wealthy will still be immune and able to pay high prices, but the majority will not, with a huge gulf between the haves and have nots,” said Shah.
“Once the market says we cannot afford to build because of crazy prices, that is when the revolution will start. There comes a point when a big company, through its sheer size, becomes unsustainable. We need to bring things back to local level, employing local labour, making homes cheaper to build and more affordable.”
Shah’s Wiltshire scheme is holiday homes, but he is now working with housing associations and looking at bigger residential projects, confident of delivering good-size homes for £100,000.
When the Wiltshire wildlife police told him he had to fork out to protect the greater-crested newt, he refused until he saw one and was promptly presented with a pair of them in a jam jar. Gussie Fink-Nottle is teetotal and his life is devoted to the study of newts. There, I can assure you, the similarities end.
Can the man who revolutionised the newspaper industry revolutionise the house building industry? Don’t bet against Shah and it is going to be great fun watching him. Pity about the drink though.
First published in Show House Magazine July 2007.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
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