Legal & General (L&G), the FTSE-100 insurance and asset management group, is preparing to kick off a search for a successor to chairman Sir John Kingman.

Sky News has learnt that the company, which this week announced a major corporate deal in the US, is close to appointing headhunters to oversee the appointment process.

City sources said this weekend that Sir John was likely to step down from the L&G board and retire as chairman at its annual meeting next year.

That timetable will give the company, which will mark its bicentenary in just over a decade, about 15 months to identify and appoint its next chair.

It was unclear on Saturday whether any of L&G’s existing non-executive directors would be in contention for the role.

Sir John has become one of the City’s most prominent figures over the last decade, having been a surprise appointment in 2016 to replace interim chair Rudy Markham.

Since then, he has become chairman of Barclays’ UK ring-fenced bank subsidiary, which replaced an earlier role he held as chairman of Tesco Bank.

He also presided over a landmark review of audit regulation in the UK in the aftermath of accounting scandals at companies such as BHS and Carillion.

Prior to his career in business, Sir John was a long-serving Whitehall mandarin, playing a leading role to Britain’s response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Following the bailouts of Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland – now NatWest Group – he was named the first chief executive of UK Financial Investments, the agency set up to manage the taxpayer’s bank stakes.

While in that role, he oversaw the effective defenestration of Sir Victor Blank as Lloyds’ chair – a move which stunned the City.

Following that, he moved to Rothschild as an investment banker.

For most of Sir John’s tenure as L&G chair, the company was run by Sir Nigel Wilson, who oversaw a big push by the company into financing urban regeneration projects across the UK, and expanding its pension risk transfer business.

Sir Nigel’s successor, the former HSBC and Santander executive Antonio Simoes, has announced a number of efforts to slim down the group’s operations.

He sold Cala Homes last year for £1.4bn, and on Friday announced the sale of L&G’s US insurance business to its partner, Japan’s Meiji Yasuda, for $2.3bn.

As part of the deal, Meiji Yasuda will also acquire a 5% stake in the FTSE-100 group.

L&G said it would expand its share buyback programme by £1bn once the deal closes.

L&G said in December when it announced a series of board changes that Henrietta Baldock, who was named senior independent director-designate, would “lead the Board succession process for the Chair”.

It has not made a public announcement about the timing of the recruitment process to replace Sir John.

On Friday, shares in L&G closed about 1.2% higher at 241.7p, giving the company a market capitalisation of £14.24bn.

An L&G spokesperson declined to comment further.

The government is spending £22bn on “unproven” technologies which will have a “very significant effect” on energy bills, according to an influential committee of MPs.

There has been no assessment of whether the programme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is affordable for billpayers, said a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of MPs.

The financial impact on households of funding the project has not been examined by government at all, the PAC said.

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Even if the state’s investment pays off, the technology is successful and makes money, there is no way for profits to be shared to bring down bills, it added.

Private sector investors, however, would recoup investment, according to committee chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown.

“All early progress will be underwritten by taxpayers, who currently do not stand to benefit if these projects are successful,” he said. “Any private sector funding for such a project would expect to see significant returns when it becomes a success.”

That’s despite the vast majority (two-thirds) of the £21.7bn investment coming from levies on consumers “who are already facing some of the highest energy bills in the world”, it said.

But there is no evidence to say the programme will be successful despite the government “gambling” its legally mandated net zero targets on the tech, committee chair Sir Geoffrey added.

There are no examples of carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) operating at scale in the UK, according to the PAC report.

As part of its work, the PAC heard the technology may not capture as much carbon as expected.

International examples show the government’s expectations for its performance are “far from guaranteed”, it heard as part of its inquiry.

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A threat to net zero

This lack of proof of the technology working is a threat to the UK reaching its net zero 2050 emissions targets.

Last year the government downgraded the amount of carbon it expects to store each year as the goals were seen as “no longer achievable”, but no new targets have been announced, creating a shortfall in the path to net zero.

It is now “unclear” how the government will reach its goal, the PAC report said.

“Our committee was left unconvinced that CCUS is the silver bullet government is apparently betting on”, Sir Geoffrey said.

The £22bn investment was due to be made over 25 years and into five CCUS projects.

The Bank of England has cut interest rates by another quarter percentage point, bringing down the cost of borrowing to 4.5%.

And in a sign that households can expect more cuts in the months to come, two members of the Bank‘s Monetary Policy Committee said they would have preferred to reduce rates even more, by a full half percentage point.

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However, the Bank slashed its forecast for economic growth, forecasting that the economy will skirt clear of a formal recession only by the narrowest margin in the coming months, and downgraded its estimate of the economy’s ability to generate income. And in a further blow to the chancellor, it said her latest growth plans, unveiled in a speech last week, will add nothing to gross domestic product growth in its forecast horizon.

The Bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, said: “It will be welcome news that we have been able to cut interest rates again today. We’ll be monitoring the UK economy and global developments very closely and taking a gradual and careful approach to reducing rates further.

“Low and stable inflation is the foundation of a healthy economy and it’s the Bank of England’s job to ensure that.”

The Bank’s forecasts seem to indicate that there will be at least two further rate cuts in the coming years and that that will be enough to bring inflation down towards its 2% target. However, investors are betting on more cuts.

The Monetary Policy Report and Bank forecasts released alongside the decision today signal that the economy is due to have another few years of weakness. They cut the forecast for economic growth this year, next year and the following year, as well as raising the inflation forecast. The Bank also said that the economy’s potential growth rate had dropped, down from 1.5% this time last year to 0.75% at the moment.

It said that while it expected last October’s budget to boost economic growth by 0.75%, thanks largely to greater public investment, it also expected the National Insurance rise to weigh down on activity, in particular by pulling down employment.

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It also warned that the tariffs threatened by Donald Trump on various economies posed a risk for economic growth in the coming years, though it has yet to incorporate them into its models.