Gordon Horsfield obituary: The retired accountant who helped turn failing Drax power station around
Gordon Horsfield, who has died at 79, was an accountant specialising in insolvency who in 2003 came out of retirement to help turn around the failing Drax power station near Selby in North Yorkshire.
Two years later it had become one of the country’s most successful generators, with a floatation on the London stock exchange that valued it at £2.3bn.
Mr Horsfield stepped down as its chairman in 2008 to pursue a new life as a philanthropist in Yorkshire, distributing millions of pounds to charities and making a significant contribution to the restoration of the Great East Window at York Minster. He was rewarded with a CBE in 2017.
Drax had been commissioned in the 1960s by the Central Electricity Generating Board to utilize the produce of the Selby coalfield and when it opened in 1974 it was the UK’s most advanced and efficient coal-fired power station, capable of lighting around two million homes.
In 1986 it doubled in size and became the largest power station in the UK. It also began investing in technology to remove sulphur dioxide emissions – a precursor to its later conversion to burning biomass rather than coal.
But privatisation and the running-down of the mines in the 1990s changed its fortunes.
It was acquired for £1.87bn by the US-based AES corporation but was rendered virtually worthless when in 2002 its single biggest customer was forced into liquidation.
As Drax’s debts started to mount, it was Gordon Horsfield to whom it turned.
The company’s bankers saw him as a safe pair of hands, having served 34 years with Price Waterhouse before its merger with Coopers and Lybrand, with much of his career devoted to the corporate recovery sector.
They asked him to step in and attempt a do-or-die restructuring programme.
On arrival he reported that he had found a company akin to “a drowning man thrown a succession of lifebelts only to find he can swim after all”.
A period of horse trading with private equity companies ensued, and with the price of electricity going up and the profits of companies that generated it doing likewise, Drax was declared not only solvent but stock market-ready.
The success brought its own rewards. Mr Horsfield gambled on taking £30m in shares instead of cash, and when he announced his retirement two years later the value had risen by a third.
The windfall enabled Mr Horsfield and his wife Francesca to set up the Holbeck Trust, an organisation to support charities for young people and the arts.
His public life also encompassed chairing York University’s governing council and serving on York Minster’s finance committee.
Gordon Christopher Horsfield was born in Halifax in August 1946. His father, John Horsfield, was an accountant and both his grandfathers were managers in the region’s heavy woollen industry.
The family moved to East Anglia during Gordon’s childhood and he went to Norwich School and then Nottingham University to study economics before joining Price Waterhouse, where his work included overseeing the receivership of the Swan Hunter shipyard on the Tyne.
His post-Drax roles included chairmanship of the Norwich and Peterborough Building Society during a period in which it paid £50m in compensation for mis-selling complex investment products to older people.
The N&P later merged with the larger Yorkshire Building Society.
Mr Horsfield is survived by Francesca and by two daughters, a son and seven grandchildren.