Serco chief to retire: ‘It’s time for me to outsource myself’
The UK government contractor Serco has announced the planned retirement next year of its chief executive, Rupert Soames, who said “it is now time for me to outsource myself” after leading the controversial company since early 2014.
Soames, 63, will step down as chief executive on 1 January 2023, by which point he will have led Serco for nearly nine years. He will be replaced by Mark Irwin, the chief executive of Serco’s UK and Europe division, the company said on Monday in a statement to the stock market. Soames will remain as an adviser until September 2023.
Serco is one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the government’s push to outsource services once seen as core functions of the public sector, ranging from running prisons to housing people seeking asylum. It has faced repeated scandals over the quality of its services as well as a near-£23m fine in 2019 for overcharging for the electronic tagging of offenders – including some who were dead – before Soames joined.
The company also took a key role in the UK government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. It was paid more than £600m to run about a fifth of the Covid-19 testing sites and contract-tracing call centre workers, in a programme that repeatedly faced criticism for alleged poor performance as well as concerns over possible tax dodging by subcontractors used by Serco.
Soames, who was paid £4m in 2021 and whose total Serco earnings are more than £27m so far, has not been shy in offering robust defences of the company during his tenure. He signed his foreword to the company’s 2021 annual report “Serco – and proud of it”.
“I have a horrible habit of walking towards gunfire,” he told the Observer at the start of the year, while crediting a “family history of
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