CITY AND SUBURBAN
Share-owning is too serious to be left to the Stock Exchange
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Imagine waiting for the Stock Exchange to make us a nation of shareholders! I'd rather wait for the Docklands Light Rail- way. The Prime Minister is not minded to wait, which is why he wants to see shares bought and sold in the High Street. Selling the Government's Telecom shares across counters is an idea which goes back to his time as Chancellor. We have now, I hope, seen the last of privatisation on the old formula, the one-off selling campaign whose ingredients were saturation cover- age, coupon-clipping and something for nothing. What else could the Govern- ment's City advisers suggest? They lacked the first element in retailing, which is distribution. They therefore lacked every- thing else — scope to know their custom- ers, scope for repeat sales, scope for two-way traffic. The results are there to see. After a decade of privatisation, and with share prices cocking a snook at recession, we have millions of shareholders but few shareholdings. Half the people who have been interested enough to buy a share have never come back to buy another. Taurus, the Exchange's system for taking the paper and cost out of share owning, continues to recede into the dis- tance, getting dearer by the day. The financial retailers chosen for Telecom will have their systems up and running, and count on developing a business that will pay for them — which means getting the customers to come back. What they still need is a system of taxes which treat shareholders even-handedly — not, as now, cosseting institutions and punishing personal ownership. That reform, too, has the ring of an idea that appeals to John Major.
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