GEORGIANA HEAD SUGGESTS FRIENDLY REGIONAL RIVALRIES CAN BE A FORCE FOR GOOD IN THE TAX AND TAX RECRUITMENT MARKETS
There has always been a ‘special’ kind of rivalry between Yorkshire and the north west. It all dates back to around 1455 when England was torn apart by a series of civil wars, with two branches of the ruling Plantagenet family fighting over the English crown.
Later, these were known as the Wars of the Roses – after what was claimed to have been the heraldic symbols used by the two sides: the red rose of the House of Lancaster and the white rose of the House of York. I decided that I would explore this further and find out whether there was still any lingering rivalry between Leeds and Manchester, and Yorkshire and the north west.
Looking west
Richard Williams, corporate tax partner at Deloitte in Leeds said: ‘The Deloitte Manchester and Leeds offices work very much as a team, we all know each other and the teams are pretty similar in terms of size. For historic reasons each has different capabilities; so Leeds for example has a strong capital allowances team and Manchester has a larger transfer pricing presence.
'We recently implemented a scheme which means that members of these two specialist teams spend time in both locations and we even have desk space allocated to visiting staff. We’ve found that a closer understanding of each other’s specialities has already led to more cross-selling opportunities and presence from both offices in client pitches.'
Richard did admit that there was friendly banter between the offices about the Pennine divide but that ‘in reality there is a very collegiate feel, we in Leeds leverage off a treasury partner, Ben Mosley in Manchester, and Manchester in turn leverages off Sue Holmes, one of our associate partners in Leeds who specialises in financial services work’.
The reason why Richard thinks the teams are able to work so closely is down to the strong transport links between Leeds and Manchester; as he says: ‘It takes an hour to get to Manchester from Leeds, the trains are really frequent and it’s possible to do work on them’.
Looking east
Are these feelings reciprocated and are tax folk in the north west equally magnanimous? John Loebl, the head of tax for Grant Thornton’s Manchester office gave his thoughts on working in Manchester and the cross-Pennine divide.
‘Manchester is a really vital city, with a wealth of PLCs and growing owner-managed businesses many of which have an increasing international focus. We find that we actually work closely with our colleagues in the Sheffield and Leeds offices, and there is certainly plenty of cross-selling between the offices’.
John expanded on this, adding that ‘nowadays you will find that many northern offices will use each others’ resources to compete against London-based tax practices’.
From a recruitment perspective, it always seems to me that a north-south divide figures much more strongly in the tax market than a Lancs-Yorks demarcation; candidates may be happy to relocate across the Pennines for the right role, but are perhaps more nervous of making a move to London.
In-house work
To get a feel for the in-house perspective in both regions, Nigel Sutcliffe the group tax manager and treasurer of DB Schenker Rail (UK) Ltd, based in Doncaster, gave his views. Would a Yorkshire based in-house team take advice from outside the region?
Nigel explained: ‘We will go to the best adviser for the specific piece of work, so that might be within Yorkshire, the north west, or indeed London or the Midlands’.
Nigel really understands the dynamic of the relationship between Yorkshire and the north west. ’When I was in practice with KPMG, I spent my last six months with the firm splitting my working week between the Leeds and Manchester offices, and specialists such as the transfer pricing team advised clients on both sides of the Pennines.’
Steven Forster, indirect tax manager at the Co-operative Group in Manchester, has a similar view.
‘I don’t really see much rivalry between Yorkshire and the north west. Although our advisers tend to be Manchester based, we have also dealt with their colleagues in Leeds. This tends to be where the Leeds offices can offer certain specialisms or where there have been resource issues within the Manchester offices. I’ve certainly not seen any evidence of rivalries between the two offices.’
Steven explained that ‘Leeds and Manchester are geographically close, have strong cultural and business centres, and the size of the accountancy practices in each location feels pretty similar. If anything, the competitiveness I’ve seen is between Liverpool and Manchester. When I worked in Liverpool I found that clients preferred to be serviced either by Liverpool firms or by the Liverpool offices of the national firms’.
Perhaps rather than a rivalry between the red and white roses of the Lancastrians and Yorkists, this rivalry is a more recent one between the red football shirts?’
The war is over
To conclude, perhaps I should confess that I am a Yorkshire woman and my colleague Alison Tait is a Lancastrian. We have never actively noticed any reticence from clients or candidates in one area about either their work or ours in the other, though perhaps this is because we usually spend time in both camps.
We’ve often had banter with our Scottish clients about whether someone from England or Wales can help them, and similarly our clients in London are sometimes quite shocked to find we are actually based in Leeds. And I particularly enjoy listening to Scottish candidates’ reactions to the question we have to ask everyone: ‘Do you need a work permit or visa to work in the UK?’ For some reason they seem to take this quite personally!
Overall, it would seem that while there is friendly banter between the north west and Yorkshire, the good transport links between these two locations and the ‘cross pollination’ between their accountancy firms means that there is actually a feeling of camaraderie between Leeds and Manchester.
At least that’s true of the tax and tax recruitment markets, perhaps if we had been talking about football teams we would have found a very different reaction.
It’s interesting to see that when Henry VII ended the War of the Roses he took steps to reconcile both factions. He traced his royal claim through the House of Lancaster and married Elizabeth of York. Henry even used the Tudor rose as his heraldic device, deftly combining the Lancastrian red and the Yorkist white.
Perhaps it’s a relief that these days we no longer need quite the same medieval diplomatic skills to marry candidates with accountancy or tax practices and those firms with their clients when they’re from different sides of the Pennines.
