Peter Vicary-Smith interview: Which? chief on why he has the pensions industry in his sights

Vicary-Smith is looking to build a financial services group of its own

Peter Vicary-Smith, chief executive of Which? believes the consumer charity’s campaigning and commercial success make it more influential than ever (Micha Theiner)

Given the opportunity to name and shame, Peter Vicary-Smith, the chief executive of consumer champion Which? doesn’t hesitate. Which was the last company to fail him? Step forward energy provider Npower, the incumbent supplier at the house Vicary-Smith bought last summer.

“It took from August, when I bought it, to March for them to finally give me an agreed bill so I could switch,” he says, shaking his head. “They denied my account existed.”

Don’t stand in Vicary-Smith’s way. Bluff and no-nonsense, the south Londoner might have a lowish profile at the helm, but he reckons Which? is at the height of its powers. Once best known for exposing faulty kettles and cowboy car repairers, today the campaigning charity has a new target: the pensions industry.

“It is a big issue at the moment,” Vicary-Smith says. Chancellor George Osborne’s pensions revolution, which gave savers aged over 55 new freedom to cash in their retirement pots, sparked a rash of activity, much confusion and anger about exit charges imposed by some pensions firms on customers who want to get hold of their money early.

“How do we get these reforms to give genuine flexibility and fairness of treatment of individuals, so that the industry doesn’t find another way to rip off its customers?” Vicary-Smith asks, spreading out in his vast office in a Grade II-listed building on the Marylebone Road in London.

Which? has launched its own commercial push. It already has a mortgage advice business, employing 100 staff

Financial advice has become a knotty problem, with some banks fined for mis-selling to their customers choosing to pull back from the market. Enter Which?, with Vicary-Smith training his sights between those who have little pension provision and those with more than £300,000 in the retirement pot.

“It is that group in the middle who aren’t being serviced at the moment. We are looking seriously at pensions advice, another market where people are desperately in need of help.” It sounds like the beginning of a campaign, but the 52-year old is eyeing a money-making opportunity, too, to build a broad-based financial services group of his own.

Which? has launched its own commercial push, putting its trusted brand on the line. It already has a mortgage advice business, employing 100 staff and based in Bristol, and is close to turning a profit, despite a reluctance to cross-sell insurance and all the other policies unwitting customers end up with. “We have said we don’t want to do it like that, we want to break even on the mortgage business so we don’t have the incentive to sell people all the other stuff in order to make money.”

Vicary-Smith is confident that wading into a market is not at odds with the organisation’s campaigning roots. The strategy brings Which? into the world of the price-comparison websites which were recently in hot water for favouring some suppliers over others depending on what commissions they received. Vicary-Smith predicts it is a market ripe for the attention of the Competition and Markets Authority.

“With any of these people, if you are setting yourself up, as we do, to be whole of market you have to be genuinely whole of market. You have got to be absolutely impartial in what you recommend.”

Another new venture he has pioneered is Trusted Traders, a database of handymen rated by an army of ex-trading standards officers who check everything from qualifications and credit history to customer complaints. Then there is a legal services business which advises on will writing and conveyancing. Which? has also launched into the public sector, with 700,000 prospective students and their parents consulting its university guide last year.

“We are not just there to make money. We are there to change a market that needs changing,” says Vicary-Smith.

It is a quite an expansion. The scale of it is nearly as surprising as how Which? is funding it, as the consumer group doesn’t take government money or donations. This year, the turnover of Which? is on course to break £100m, with an operating profit of more than £20m. And it is all thanks to a boom in publishing. In the last decade, since the Consumers’ Association rebranded all of its activities under the Which? umbrella, magazine and digital subscriptions have almost doubled to 1.5m across all its titles.

In the age of TripAdvisor, Vicary-Smith is not bowled over by the value of user-generated content. Customer reviews, he says, suffer from the “the tyranny of the average” because only those people who rank a product as five out of five or one out five tend to bother. “It is best to independently research products or services and then say that the role of user-generated content is to give more details.”

Increased profits have also been ploughed into Which? campaigns, such as for banks to ring-fence savers’ cash at a safe distance from riskier investment banking activities – something bankers are appealing against. Vicary-Smith likens his aim to the ring fence that protected Bath-based Wessex Water from being stripped bare when its owner, the infamous energy trader Enron, collapsed.

“No one was digging up the pipes in Wessex. You have got to have some form of ring-fencing if you are going to have a sensible resolution regime operating in the market.”

Also high on his agenda are nuisance calls – interesting given that he used to inhabit the charity world which is under scrutiny for pestering vulnerable donors to give more.

Peter Vicary-Smith spent five years at Oxfam before joining the Imperial Cancer Research Fund as director of fundraising and communications (Getty)

“I have never liked cold calling by charities,” he says. “We didn’t do it in the time I was there and I wasn’t terribly popular in the industry for being against it. Charities have to be responsible in how they approach things. If an individual has given money then there is a question about whether that is implied consent to them being continually phoned and asked for more.”

Vicary-Smith spent five years at Oxfam before joining the Imperial Cancer Research Fund as director of fundraising and communications, staying on for a couple of years after the charity merged with the Cancer Research Campaign to form Cancer Research UK.

“The big question was, ‘Are we going to raise less money together than apart?’ I was saying, ‘No way, of course you are going to earn more, you have got greater focus.’”

His charity years followed earlier commercial experience gained in helping to launch brands from the Pictionary board game to the Tracker cereal bar, with a few years at management consultancy McKinsey sandwiched in the middle.

It turns out Mike Clasper – now chairman of Which? –recruited him from university to join consumer goods group Procter & Gamble, although Vicary-Smith didn’t work for Clasper. He recalls a Sunday Times profile just after he had joined Which?

“They said that I had worked for such arch smoothies as P&G and McKinsey, and they predicted the style would be very different.”

It is true that Vicary-Smith, a Crystal Palace fan, has a more studied approach than that of his predecessor, Dame Sheila McKechnie, who was a high-profile crusader against “rip-off Britain”. In the time we have been talking, he hasn’t banged the table once. And Which? is not always bashing the crooks and incompetents. Its annual awards praise good customer service, too.

“I think my job is to help marshal and service the [Which?] community but I am not the figurehead standing at the front chanting with a flag in my hand,” says Vicary-Smith. “I would point to the success we have had, not just commercial but campaigning. That is why I think this organisation has more influence now than it has ever had.”

The CV

Education: Gonville Primary School, Thornton Heath, Dulwich College and Queen’s College, Oxford.

Career so far: Joined Procter & Gamble as a brand assistant in 1984 working on Pampers but left for Mars to help launch the Tracker cereal bar. Briefly marketing manager for board games maker Kenner Parker, then management consultant at McKinsey from 1988 and head of appeals at Oxfam from 1991. Appointed director of fundraising and communications at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 1996, then commercial director of Cancer Research UK post-merger. Chief executive of Which? since 2004.

Personal: Married with two daughters aged 20 and 19. Just moved from Oxfordshire to Devon, where his weaver wife will keep a flock of angora goats. Relaxes by gardening.