The UK government contractor Serco has announced the planned retirement next year of its chief executive, Rupert Soames, who said “it is now time for me to outsource myself” after leading the controversial company since early 2014.
Soames, 63, will step down as chief executive on 1 January 2023, by which point he will have led Serco for nearly nine years. He will be replaced by Mark Irwin, the chief executive of Serco’s UK and Europe division, the company said on Monday in a statement to the stock market. Soames will remain as an adviser until September 2023.
Serco is one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the government’s push to outsource services once seen as core functions of the public sector, ranging from running prisons to housing people seeking asylum. It has faced repeated scandals over the quality of its services as well as a near-£23m fine in 2019 for overcharging for the electronic tagging of offenders – including some who were dead – before Soames joined.
The company also took a key role in the UK government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. It was paid more than £600m to run about a fifth of the Covid-19 testing sites and contract-tracing call centre workers, in a programme that repeatedly faced criticism for alleged poor performance as well as concerns over possible tax dodging by subcontractors used by Serco.
Soames, who was paid £4m in 2021 and whose total Serco earnings are more than £27m so far, has not been shy in offering robust defences of the company during his tenure. He signed his foreword to the company’s 2021 annual report “Serco – and proud of it”.
“I have a horrible habit of walking towards gunfire,” he told the Observer at the start of the year, while crediting a “family history of public service” that included his grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, his father, Sir Christopher Soames, a Conservative minister in the 1960s, and his brother, the former Conservative party MP Sir Nicholas Soames.
Soames joined Serco when its share price was slumping, from 290p a share in his first month to below 90p for several stretches between 2016 and 2018. Since then the share price has staged something of a recovery, at 180p on Friday evening. That valued the FTSE 250 company at £2.1bn.
Shares fell 5% on Monday morning, making Serco the biggest faller on the FTSE 250.
John Rishton, the Serco chair, said the company “is now a thriving and resilient business, following the successful turnaround led by Rupert Soames”.
Soames said: “It has been the privilege of my working life to lead Serco for the last eight years, but it is now time for me to outsource myself.
“My respect and admiration for the wonderful team of people at Serco, who work so hard to deliver superb public services and value for money for taxpayers, is unbounded. As it is for Serco’s customers, who are dedicated public servants facing the immense challenges of delivering high-quality public services in difficult times.”
