‘We like developing people who’ve got the business under their fingernails’

Recession? What recession? At Morrisons, all is well. At the tail end of last year an extra 700,000 customers a week were rushing to its green-and-yellow stores. Like-for-like sales for the quarter to 2 November were up 8.1 per cent, dwarfing the 2 per cent seen by Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer. And, in December, the erstwhile small Bradford business provisionally agreed to buy 38 Co-op stores for £223.1 million.

A cynic’s response would be to bracket Morrisons in with the Aldi and Lidl ilk – no-frills supermarket chains that have seen a large growth in market share, courtesy of increasingly budget-conscious shoppers. But this ignores an HR success story that tells of expansion, acquisition and innovative training and development.