Evil or irrelevant: pick one.
, .
“I’d rather have an evil tech company in Leeds than a good one in London”.
When I said that, I liked it. Later, I worried that people would think it was an exaggeration to make a point. So I’m writing it down here too.
Of course it’s a balance. If a company were evil enough, I’d prefer it to be outcompeted by a less evil one even if that was a long way away from where I live and work. But up to that point, for me running a tech company in Leeds and living my life in Leeds, having a big tech employer paying good wages here, or in Sheffield, or in Manchester, or in Liverpool is a good thing for me, my business, my city, my region, and my society, even if their morals have weak points.
With some caveats I really would rather have an evil tech company in Leeds than a good one in London.
To explain, let’s talk about some “evil” companies, while being mindful that no person and no company is either free from evil or purely evil.
Bet365
Stoke-on-Trent is 40 miles from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield and was a centrally important city in England’s intellectual flourishing leading up to and at the start of the industrial revolution. Through the industrial revolution it was a huge generator and funder of British prosperity, largely through its potteries. Any biography of Josiah Wedgwood, one of Britain’s early tycoons, would be a fine place to start. I recommend enjoying it with a few pints of beer from Titanic brewery, the best mass-produced fruit beers in Britain. They have a pub in Stoke-on-Trent railway station if you’re passing through.
Deindustrialisation hit Stoke hard. It is not particularly large. It was never culturally cherished by British elites. It had no university well into the 21st Century. It was very heavily industrialised and when that industry declined there was little to replace it.
But Stoke had some luck. In 1967 Denise Coates was born there. She became the first in her family to get a degree, in Econometrics from the University of Sheffield, and at the peak of the dotcom bubble she began transforming her father’s high street betting company into a purely online one. Today Bet365 is the largest sports gambling company in the world. It is consistently one of the most technically innovative such companies, pioneering widespread in-play betting for example.
In most years Bet365 is the most profitable of its competitors. It has a strong case to be Britain’s most successful tech company.
Its success is so large that its presence is easily visible in economic statistics.
Manufacturing output in Stoke-on-Trent is lower in real terms today than it was three decades ago. Productivity improvements mean that this stagnation in output corresponds to substantial job losses.
But as Bet365 has grown exponentially since its founding in 2000, and in the last decade especially as that exponential growth translates to huge annual expansion, the Information and Communications part of Stoke-on-Trent’s economy that Bet365 is mostly classified into by our national statistical office has grown to become larger than the manufacturing sector. What could easily have been terminal decline and complete reliance on the state has been replaced with growth and a greater measure of economic purpose. That economic purpose translates into culture too. Stoke City were one of the 12 founding members of the English Football League and their badge proudly celebrates their industry of that time, The Potters. But the sponsor on the front of the shirts has long been Bet365, who until recently owned the club.
Stoke-on-Trent’s enormous growth in tech is unusual. It has easily overtaken other small cities in Britain such as Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Brighton, and Oxford — cities that often refuse to accommodate growth in the way that Stoke-on-Trent does. In the most recent year Stoke-on-Trent built more homes than either Oxford or Cambridge despite homes in Stoke being under a third of the price. Thanks to Bet365, the city has a tech sector closer in size to much larger places.
Bet365 is privately owned, mostly by Denise Coates and her family. In the most recent year it filed accounts, it posted a £600m pre-tax profit.
In an average year Denise Coates pays about £100m of tax on earnings multiple times that. The calculations are full of contestable assumptions and the number is uncertain, but it’s a decent guess.
To put that in perspective, in an average year the whole city of Stoke-on-Trent raises about the same £100m in local tax.
It’s a visible example of how the UK government already does what it should do and taxes the rich much more than the rest of us.
The Coates family combined with their senior roles and ownership of Bet365 and Stoke City FC pay even more tax, and almost certainly more than they could if they used more elaborate tax minimisation strategies or moved Bet365’s headquarters out of the UK. With uncharacteristic charity towards the ultra-rich, the Guardian have an excellent write-up of the Coates family’s wider charitable activity, political donations to the centre and right of the Labour Party, and reputation in Stoke-on-Trent.
But probably even more importantly, Bet365 employ about six thousand people, mostly on good wages, in Stoke-on-Trent, and increasingly in Manchester, 40 minutes away by train. Today on their website, Bet365 have 35 jobs advertised in Manchester and 60 in Stoke-on-Trent. Stoke-on-Trent is in the Midlands but on the border with North West England and just 40 miles from Yorkshire. All these regions have low and falling graduate premiums and regional economies among the weakest in Northern Europe.
The wages paid by Bet365 jobs are hugely valuable directly, funding huge amounts of secondary spending on homes, transport, and leisure. But they are even more valuable indirectly.
Young people know people who work in a world-leading tech company near them, aspire for the same, and study harder and for longer. The most common degree by far of Bet365’s staff on Linkedin is computer science, the most common universities are Staffordshire, Keele, Manchester, Lancaster, and Manchester Met. These people run a world-leading tech company, the UK’s leading tech company, from a city, and with qualifications and backgrounds, that most of the Brits and Americans who pump up Britain’s potential to be a world-leading economy again have never heard of and would dismiss if they had. That matters enormously.
Startups form when people with experience leave Bet365. Bet365 provides a pool of elite talent around which to run events and share knowledge and from which to hire, all critical features in a small place which lacks state-sponsored pools of talent such as in Cambridge and Oxford via their universities. The existence of Bet365 as an anchor employer that’s always hiring derisks trying to build a company because people feel that they could get a job there if things go wrong.
Bet365 make at least some of their profits from the misery, and worse, of people addicted to gambling. It would be dishonest to deny that and both insensitive and wrong to downplay it. The long-term effects of the liberalisation of gambling in the UK in 2005 and of similar liberalisations in the USA more recently are serious issues to consider. These downsides are probably why the University of Sheffield, usually so keen to promote women alumni in technical fields, make little mention of their richest graduate. And it is probably why I was laughed at for suggesting that when the UK government set up its new Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation it should be in Stoke-on-Trent. London was, of course, selected by default.
The economic good which Bet365 has done for Stoke and for places as far from Stoke as Leeds is enormous. For Stoke it’s almost certainly much larger than the good the decades of UK government efforts at “levelling up” have done. And if Bet365 were slightly less evil, but based somewhere else, they wouldn’t have happened.
But my quote wasn’t about Bet365. It was about another company, one in Leeds. TPP.
TPP
When the NHS was created in 1948, family doctors were treated differently to hospitals and their staff. GPs would remain independent operators working for the NHS rather than direct employees. This left them free to make their own choices and arrangements. When digital patient records came around and started maturing they so overwhelmingly chose just two providers of the software that there is a duopoly in GP records in the UK.
TPP and EMIS (now Optum) are based just a few miles apart in Leeds and control over 95% of the GP records market. TPP’s founder hates Emis, often amusingly so. Other outbursts of his hatred are far from amusing and have led to many organisations in Leeds refusing the company’s sponsorship. TPP is a fraction of the size of Bet365 and could never fund as much in Leeds as the Denise Coates Foundation will be able to in Stoke, but for now it cannot even do that.
There is a feeling among some people in and near the NHS and government digitisation circles that TPP and EMIS together are a block to progress. They, it’s alleged, refuse to make interoperability of their systems as easy as it could be, and have complied with agreements to interoperate with potential new competitors and adopt shared standards only grudgingly. They protect their duopoly and are not required to innovate as a result.
I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I am sceptical of reports from NHS champions of digitisation whose vision of a better system than TPP and EMIS is to spend billions of pounds on consortiums of data providers whose record of delivery is poorer than either. I am sceptical of UK government digitisation experts whose main achievements are less about delivering great digital government and more about forcing government websites to publish spreadsheet in the unwanted .ods format instead of the .xlsx format everyone wants. I am mindful that TPP and EMIS’s work on OpenSAFELY is widely celebrated by many as being incredibly efficient compared to trying to do the same with the NHS and UK government digital people who criticise TPP and EMIS. And I keep in mind that my experiences with TPP’s staff, which because they are in Leeds I have had several, have always been technically excellent and impressively professional.
My suspicion is that TPP in particular are disliked within the NHS and British national institutions because they’re based in Leeds and dare to have opinions. As a result they aren’t known to many people in the capital personally and they aren’t available for informal chats where the decisions are really made and opinions are really formed in and around government. Being further than 50 miles from London is a disadvantage to companies who interact with the UK government in any way, and TPP prove that you can overcome that disadvantage if you’re better by enough, but you do need to be better. I remind my team of that regularly and just in case you’re thinking I sound paranoid, remember that in business the paranoid tend to survive.
TPP also, infamously among detractors and famously among supporters, largely refuse to engage in some of the most wasteful performative acts around user-centred design, consultation, process bloat, inclusion, and accessibility.
But I concede that some people think TPP are a bit evil. A lot of their reviews on Glassdoor and Reddit suggest that too. And the NHS are certainly keen to try, yet again, to force a new player into the duopoly they occupy half of. NHS England recently approved and have been promoting Medicus Health, in London, as an alternative.
This is why I’d prefer to have TPP succeeding in Leeds over Medicus Health, or Babylon Health not completely unrelatedly, succeeding in London, even if they were a bit better.
For at least a decade TPP have bought the prime advertising spot at Leeds station and advertised tech roles to the city and its visitors. They compete with EMIS for talent, and they compete with Leeds’ other large tech employers in the online gambling industry for talent. They are a key part of our ask as a city to host the UK government’s National Data Library which we fear will otherwise default, as so often, to being in London.
TPP draw young people and career switchers into tech. Like Bet365 they are part of an ecosystem that provides pools of talent for events, startups, and other companies to hire from. In a city long overlooked by national government and constrained from local government action by that same government, TPP among many others step up to draw new people into tech, pay them well once they’re in, and show that a world-leading company can operate from here, with graduates from universities and colleges that others overlook, and accents some people look down on.
Are they evil? I’m sure they are a bit. All of us are. Every company is. Maybe they’re a bit more evil than most. But for me in Leeds they’re also a lot more valuable than companies that are over a hundred miles away who succeed less through the ruthless pursuit of being better and more through the comfortable advantage of proximity to power.