A View from the Top: Pimlico Plumbers boss Charlie Mullins on that Supreme Court ruling

The plumbing boss is down but not out after losing his appeal at the Supreme Court this week, and he’s got his eyes on an even bigger prize

Mullins says he'll never sell the business he started almost 40 years ago

The founder of Pimlico Plumbers has had quite a week. Charlie Mullins has been embroiled in a legal battle with a former member of staff over his employment status for the past couple of years, and on Wednesday the UK’s highest court ruled that Mullins was on the losing side.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he says, reflecting on the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ruling that Gary Smith was a worker at Pimlico Plumbers, not self-employed, and as such was entitled to rights such as minimum wage and holiday pay.

“It’s not the money and Pimlico Plumbers will be fine; it’s more the principle of it all that got the fighter in me wound up.”

Fighting is a common theme for Mullins. He fought his way to the top of his own successful company from a childhood spent on the Rockingham estate in Elephant & Castle, south London, which he tactfully describes as “not the nicest part of town”.

“Getting out of that life was the main thing that drove me on when I was a kid,” he says. “I knew I didn’t want to spend all my life on the Rockingham.”

He decided to pursue plumbing based on the fact that “the bloke I used to bunk off school to work with, from about age 10, Bill, was a plumber”.

“He had a car and a motorbike, and went on holidays, which was a lot more than most people I knew at that time had, so I was always going to be a plumber I suppose,” he says.

Mullins’ career started with a plumbing apprenticeship after he finished school, without qualifications. When his apprenticeship came to an end, he managed to scrape together enough money to buy a van and “with a few secondhand tools I’d collected while I was an apprentice, I went out on my own. That’s the way Pimlico Plumbers happened.”

He never set out to own a company, he confesses. “The self-employed thing is the first step and having a company, that just sort of happened as I grew more busy.”

Mullins credits much of his success to his observations of the trade during his apprenticeship, and says he paid particular attention to how the qualified plumbers he worked with interacted with their customers.

“The ones that made the effort got called back to the same places all the time. There were also some things that seemed to be common complaints from customers, which came down to mess, punctuality and charging too much,” he says.

“I set Pimlico Plumbers up as the opposite of all the things people say they don’t like about plumbers. People think there’s some kind of secret I’ve got, but it’s never seemed too complicated to me – turn up on time, be neat and tidy, clean up your mess and make your pricing transparent from the beginning of a job, and people tend to be happy.”

Still, his success with Pimlico Plumbers hasn’t come without challenges. He admits to a “bit of a bump in the road in the early 1990s when a combination of a recession and a bunch of w***ers in pinstriped suits almost forced me to go skint”. The company, which launched in 1979, was suffering for a lack of structure, and had overextended itself borrowing money to purchase its first premises in Lambeth.

Mullins almost lost his house at the time but, he continues, “I fought my way out of trouble” (there’s that fighting talk again), the firm was restructured and “we’ve never looked back since”.

Not that he’s resting on his laurels. In fact, Mullins is looking to ramp things up on the work front, as he prepares to enter the world of politics, with a plan to run for London mayor in 2020.

“It’s clearly a big job, but London is my city and it’s given me so much and I’d like to give something back,” he says. “I’m good at solving problems and I see plenty. Lots of the things I want to clean up are poverty-based and jobs, skilled jobs, are the answer in my view.”

Employment will be the main focus of his bid for City Hall, he says. “You name the problem and I’ll tell you how putting kids into a good career can solve it. Health, street crime, all of it.

“People just don’t have time to get into gangs and knife each other when they’re trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. But for that sort of thought to kick in you have to give them proper opportunities.”

Mullins’ plan to run for office is not a sign that he’s ready to make an exit from Pimlico Plumbers. “I’ll never sell,” he says.

The firm remains family-owned and run, and among the more than 400 employees are Mullins’ wife Julie, sons Scott and Samm and four grandchildren, “a couple of whom are plumbers like me”.

“We are looking into bringing in some outside investment,” Mullins says, “but that’s limited to 20 per cent, so it’ll always be my company. I’d never sell, it’s my life’s work.”

Meanwhile, there are still battles to be fought, and though Mullins accepts this week’s court ruling, he’s not going to take it lying down.

“The law is the law, but it needs to change to keep up with modern working practices. That is something everyone but the unions seems to get. I agree that people getting exploited need to be protected, but plumbers making more than £150,000 a year are not being exploited.

“There are millions of contractors working in the UK and something needs to be straightened out.”