Legal & General: a win for ‘inclusive’ capitalism? The jury’s out but the City's happy with the bung from slowing UK life expectancy

CEO Nigel Wilson is on a mission and he's keeping the numbers up so he'll get the chance to see it through

Media City in Manchester: L&G thinks the UK needs more investment in projects like this (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Manchester's Media City: L&G boss Nigel Wilson thinks the UK needs more investment in places like this Getty Images/iStockphoto

When businesses say they have a mission it’s usually just so much fluff. Not so Legal & General under Nigel Wilson.

The life insurer and asset manager’s results made headlines as a result of profits smashing through the £2bn barrier by dint of a £332m boost to the bottom line because longevity isn’t increasing as quickly as it had expected and planned for.

But the MIT educated northerner would much rather talk about L&G’s investment in “inclusive capitalism” in places like Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester, in universities, housing, start up funding for new businesses, and how all this is contributing, and will contribute, to the bottom line.

He’d like to see it reflected in the media, too.

When he gets going on this sort of stuff he’s like a runaway train. It’s impossible to stop him. Brexit? Londoners need to stop obsessing over it. We’re doers, he says, we’re investing, and people are investing with us. This is still a great country for that.

We’re building houses for people to rent, we own half of Media City in Manchester, which is such a good place that non media companies are setting up shop there. Kellogs, for example.

His story, the way he tells it, and debates it, stands in stark contrast to the sort of thing we’ve become accustomed to hearing from the Brexit Party’s leaders, and the aggressive and thuggish mob that surrounds them.

It could surely use someone like Mr Wilson, a rarity in financial services in privately smiling at the referendum result, but he has no interest in getting involved with politics.

Business is his thing, and he’s serving a purpose there. Business could do with a few more people motivated by something beyond the next trading update, the next annual bonus. It could do with people interested in talking about investing, and then being willing to back it up with action, with putting money at risk to back the entrepreneurial flair of the nation’s young people.

They’d reap rich rewards if they did. Mr Wilson’s vision might be capitalism with cuddles but it’s still capitalism, and making a return is what this is all about.

To his credit, he doesn’t seek to contradict me when I suggest that we could easily have his vision of a Britain that invests more, boosts its regional cities, fosters a more productive, dynamic economic model, within the EU, and that we’d get there a lot more quickly than we will stuck in the cold outside of the bloc.

Londoners obsess over Brexit because it is damaging and dangerous and because it is being pushed through by nasty extremists. And it isn’t just Londoners.

Mr Wilson’s optimism also still has to be set against the fact that the company he runs is more exposed to the UK than its big rivals and the UK economy has gone from being the fastest growing in the G7 to the slowest despite his rosy view on it. It is missing out on the rapid global expansion going on around it.

That helps to explain why the shares have given investors such a bumpy ride over the last year.

To foster his bold vision, Mr Wilson needs to keep a shot term obsessed City of London on board. Big bungs from those longevity reserves being released, and a 7 per cent rise in the dividend, will help with that and they’ll toast him if the roof doesn’t fall in and vision he espouses comes to pass.

But the jury is still deliberating, and it’ll be out for a while.