Sharon White's turnaround plan ran into internal resistance at John Lewis

Dame Sharon White is set to step down as the boss of the John Lewis Partnership (JLP) at the end of her current five-year term, ITV News' Business and Economics Editor Joel Hills reports

Change is necessary, change is inevitable, but change can be difficult. 

The outgoing chair of John Lewis, Sharon White, was recently forced to abandon a plan to sell the Leckford Estate after it was blocked by the Partnership Board.

The Leckford Estate farm covers an area of 2800 acres in Hampshire and has belonged to the partnership for more than 90 years. 

The working farm supplies Waitrose with apples, oil seed rape, and has a vineyard that produces a sparkling wine.

Leckford is the only farm to be owned by a supermarket in the UK. It's waters, gardens, fishing lakes and golf course are open to the public.

A separate 1200-acre plot on the estate was sold by John Lewis to a private buyer for an undisclosed sum in January 2020. 

ITV News can reveal that earlier this year, White decided to try to raise up to £100 million through a sale of both the remaining Leckford land and buildings and of Longstock Park, but she encountered resistance at the top of the business.

"The farm was purchased by John Spedan Lewis [the John Lewis founder]," a source close to the partnership told me.

"It’s an intrinsic and irreplaceable part of the partnership’s culture."

ITV News understands that property agents were appointed and briefed to find potential buyers before the Partnership Board voted down the sale in June.  

John Lewis has a unique structure. The company is employee-owned and power is shared equally by the Chair, the Partnership Council and the Partnership Board. 

To get things done requires the agreement of all three. As a result, White hasn’t always been able to make the changes she wanted to.

This morning, White notified the Partnership Board - which has nine members, a mix of elected and appointed directors - of her intention to stand down as chair and asked the Board to begin the hunt for her successor.

The timing of the announcement is puzzling.

Three weeks ago, I interviewed White when John Lewis reported a loss for the first half of this year.

At the time White warned it was going to take until 2027 to fully revive the business but she also suggested that she and the rest of the leadership team planned to be around to see the job through.

In its email to staff this morning, John Lewis presented the departure of White as an orderly, time-honoured, changing of the guard. 

White agreed to a five-year term when she became chair in February 2020 (although that wasn’t announced publicly at the time) and she intends to honour that agreement by continuing until February 2025.

We are told that she has the full confidence of the Partnership Board and it was her decision to stand down.

The turnaround of the business White leads is incomplete and, when she stands down, she will be the shortest-serving chair in John Lewis’s history.The leaking of the news - minutes after she had told the Partnership Board this morning - is, I think, also indicative of tensions within the company.

In the last few years, White has made decisions as Chair which she argues are essential if the Partnership is to survive but some of those decisions - the suspension of the annual bonus for partners; the closure of 16 department stores; the construction of new homes to rent; the renegotiation of the timing of shifts at Waitrose - have also proved unpopular.

The Partnership Board resisted White’s plan to sell the Leckford Estate.

She was also forced to abandon the idea of raising money from external investors by selling a minority stake in the business after it ran into opposition internally.

John Lewis is the closest thing a company gets to democracy. Partners have a meaningful say in the way the business is run. 

White has found it difficult, at times, to get enough people within the partnership to share her vision for the future.

Is her strategy for John Lewis the right one? Reasonable people disagree. 

White has faced huge challenges. Within weeks of becoming chair she was having to decide whether to close shops as Covid arrived in the UK. The business and its customers have since had to deal with the wave of inflation triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There are signs of a strengthening pulse. By the time White steps down, February 2025 partners may well be feeling sorry to see her go.

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