Day 133 - 12 Jun 95 - Page 17
1 be in the Company's commercial interests to have as high a
2 turnover as possible. What do you make of that suggestion?
3 A. That, I think, would be a very short term view because
4 I have worked in the restaurants, as we have established,
5 for a long time and it -- frankly, that would not be the
6 most sensible way of approaching it. If people are
7 trained, you can run the restaurants much more easily. So
8 I think if you tried that, you would find that it did not
9 work.
10
11 Q. If you could just swap over those two files -- put X where
12 XII 12 is and bring XII on to the witness box beside you --
13 and then turn, please, to tab 40. Here we find turnover
14 figures all the way from the last half of 1989 through to
15 the third quarter of 1993 which is on page 703, yes?
16 A. Yes.
17
18 Q. They are given in percentage terms annualised, as we see,
19 at the bottom. I can tell you that although the graph is
20 not absolutely a straight line, the figures do fall from
21 190 something at the end of 1989 right down to 112 at the
22 end of the third quarter of 1993. The first question is,
23 to what do you attribute that drop in turnover over those
24 years?
25 A. I think there are a number of factors. Clearly, there
26 are always external factors which operate, things like the
27 recession and the economic climate. I think that
28 internally what we have is that we have implemented our
29 programmes, perhaps as Managers who are more experienced
30 and more trained, our programmes operate and people are,
31 therefore, remaining in the restaurants and working with us
32 and, obviously, we have other people who have had longer
33 service and are continuing to stay with us.
34
35 Q. Leave that there in front of you and recover the new
36 documents which are in the yellow file behind your
37 statement, please, which should be somewhere there.
38 Document F gives us an update in the sense that it contains
39 the figures for the last quarter for 1993. Do you have
40 that?
41 A. Yes.
42
43 Q. Where the annualised figures has gone from 112 and a bit to
44 just under 106 per cent, do you see that?
45 A. Yes.
46
47 Q. If you would turn to the previous document which is E,
48 which should have six pages, again it looks a bit like, to
49 my untutored eye, a computer printout.
50 A. Yes, it is.
51
52 Q. It is a computer printout. The last page in that
53 document -----
54
55 MR. MORRIS: Can we just hang on while we find the document?
56
57 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes. Can I just find it first?
58
59 MS. STEEL: What does it say?
60
