CITY AND SUBURBAN
Beautiful insurance company by the silvery Tay, I am sad to say you've been taken away
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Lce the poet William Topaz McGona- gall, the General Accident Fire and Life Assurance Corporation dwells on the beau- tiful banks of the silvery Tay. In 1885 it was established in Perth and has worked ever since on the principle that south of the Tay is where the on-costs start. Once upon a time it broke its rule and bought a business in New Zealand, but this proved to be so general an accident — disaster, even that its managers scuttled back, chastened, to Perth, and have stayed there until now. I cannot say whether they brought Bob Scott back with them. He is the ambitious New Zealander who now runs General Accident and comes out as the big winner from its merger with Commercial Union. He will be this super-union's chief executive and has already decided to move his own office to the top floor of Commercial Union's big black City tower. Space in the City costs about ten times as much as space in Perth, but it seems that Mr Scott finds his present surroundings restrictive: 'In the midst of life we are in Perth.' The merger will create Britain's biggest general insurance compa- ny and, when all the fuss and distraction are over, may or may not represent an improvement. This comes with the usual guff about scale, synergy and sackings, all of it available by the yard from City corpo- rate financiers, half of whom are now putting even bigger deals together while the other half are taking them apart. In their shredders this week are Dalgety, BTR and Inchcape. They may yet find some way to extract a decent and distinctive business which until now has known where to stop.
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