Jim Armitage: Debbie Crosbie crossover great for TSB, not so much for CYBG

After the battering TSB has inflicted on itself and its customers in the past year, it was about time something went right.

Today’s swoop to hire Debbie Crosbie from its arch-rival is pretty much perfect.

As well as being the first woman to have had the job of signing the banknotes in Scotland, she is steeped in the challenger bank mentality through her two-decade career at Clydesdale and Yorkshire.

She’s changed the IT systems there, knows how to run a retail and commercial bank and has a good rapport with her managers — vital skills for an organisation in need of a post-scandal morale boost.

Added to which, she doesn’t have an overbearing alpha ego, meaning she’ll be willing to bend to the will of her Spanish paymasters at TSB’s owner, Sabadell. That’s key because, as her predecessor Paul Pester learned from Sabadell’s insistence on a rapid (and disastrous) switch to the Spanish IT system, Sabadell wants to run this business from Alicante.

For her old bosses at CYBG, her loss will be keenly felt. As one investor said this morning: it was partly the reassuring presence of Crosbie that gave shareholders confidence it would be able to integrate its £1.7 billion takeover of Virgin Money.

That deal only completed a few weeks ago. While CYBG boss David Duffy is clearly capable of doing the merger, the loss of this key lieutenant could hardly come at a worse time.

May’s hogwash

To the CBI annual conference, where Theresa May sunnily tells business leaders her Brexit deal means foreigners from outside Europe will no longer have to wait in the immigration queue behind EU workers. A fairer, better system for all of us, she claims.

Hogwash.

First off, it’s a sales pitch that makes little sense politically: those who voted for Brexit on immigration grounds did not want to replace Poles with Nigerians. They want fewer foreigners coming in, full stop. We all know that, so why try dressing up her new immigration plan with a fig leaf of fairness?

It’s economically daft, too. On average, EU migrants contributed £2300 more in taxes last year than the average Brit, while non-EU migrants contributed £840 less.

And, for businesses, it is infuriating. All this immigration pledge means to them is that the Home Office will be deluged with visa applications for tens of thousands of Europeans hitherto able to enter unchecked.

Would you bet on that going smoothly, without backlogs?

London’s booming tech industry has around 48,000 vacancies it can’t fill.

The number is rising every month. It’s a similar story in construction, leisure, science, manufacturing.

So what are we about to do? Make it harder for our hard-working neighbours to come here.

Brilliant.