Tesco board loses two female directors

Tesco is left with just one woman on its board of directors after non-executives Liv Garfield and Jacqueline Tammenoms Bakker announced plans to step down this weekend.

Garfield said she wanted to focus fully on her new role as chief executive of Severn Trent, the water company, but Tammenoms Bakker, who has been on Tesco’s board for six years, did not give a reason for her departure.

The departures leave Tesco far short of the government target of 25% female board directors. Deanna Oppenheimer, the former Barclays executive, is the only woman now on the 11-strong board. There are no female executive directors, and just three of the 14 people on Tesco’s executive committee, the level below the PLC board, are women.

The exit of the two non-executives marks another step in the transformation of Tesco’s board over the past year. The group has replaced its chairman, chief executive and finance director amid falling sales and profits and a £263m accounting scandal.

A series of board directors exited under the tenure of former chief executive Philip Clarke, who at one point last year was the only full-time executive director at the head of the company. Clarke was the only person on the board with retail experience. Two new non-executives with any retail experience – Richard Cousins, the chief executive of food services firm Compass Group, and Mikael Ohlsson, the former chief executive of Ikea – both joined Tesco in November.

The new chairman, John Allan, who was appointed last week and was previously chairman of electrical goods retailer Dixons, is expected to lead a further revamp of Tesco’s board when he starts work on 1 March. Ken Hanna, the non-executive chairman of the audit committee when Tesco mis-stated income from suppliers, is thought likely to go.

Replacements for Garfield and Tammenoms Bakker are expected to be in place by the supermarket’s annual shareholder meeting in June but Tesco declined to say if the company would ensure more women were hired. “We are committed to a balanced, representative board and the composition of that board continues to evolve,” he said.

As Dave Lewis, Tesco’s chief executive who took over from Clarke in September last year, has never had experience in running a retail firm before, Allan may also want to bring in a director with experience of grocery retailing. Allan himself once worked for Fine Fare, the defunct supermarket chain, but he left 30 years ago.

Lewis is also making some changes to his team. Matt Davies, the well-regarded chief executive of bike and car parts chain Halfords, is set to join Tesco as head of its UK business in June while a string of executives were ousted after the discovery of the accounting errors.

Lewis has also made a number of radical moves to shake up the group including the planned closure of 43 stores and ditching plans for 49 more new developments. But this week Lewis said he thought there was room for Tesco to increase its share of the grocery market above the near 30% it currently holds despite new competition from discounters such as Aldi and Lidl.

He has already simplified the group by selling off digital entertainment service Blinkbox and putting part of analytics company Dunnhumby on the market. But he told the Daily Mail this week that he has no plans to sell off Tesco’s major retail businesses in South Korea and Thailand. He was less firm in his backing for the group’s eastern European businesses which he said had “long-term … underperformed, it’s always promised more than it has delivered”.