New Severn Trent head becomes youngest female chief on FTSE

The 38-year-old will take the number of women running FTSE 100 companies to four.

Ms Garfield, who describes herself as “Yorkshire born and bred”, is best known for the roll-out of BT’s £2.5bn super-fast broadband.

She will take up the top position at the water company in Spring 2014.

Ms Garfield will join Alison Cooper at Imperial Tobacco, easyJet’s Carolyn McCall and Angela Ahrendts at Burberry as the fourth female CEO in the blue chip index of leading British companies.

Ms Ahrendts is due to join Apple next year, but Moya Greene, who runs Royal Mail, may well see the newly listed company promoted to the FTSE 100 when the index is reviewed next month.

Ms Garfield, who comes from Harrogate and read languages at Cambridge, will earn a pay package worth up to £2.4m at Severn Trent.

She will be paid a basic salary of £650,000 and will also receive a pension contribution of 25 per cent, equalling £162,500.

Her maximum annual bonus of 120 per cent will be £780,000.

Severn Trent said she will be enrolled in a long-term incentive plan to help meet the loss of a deferred cash bonus she forfeited by leaving the telecoms giant.

The plan is worth up to 125 per cent of her annual salary, or £812,500.

Ms Garfield has spent two-and-a-half years in charge of the BT’s Openreach division after working her way up the ranks at BT after joining in 2002.

At Severn Trent, she will take the reins at a company with 4.2 million customers from the Bristol Channel to the Humber.

She is to take up the role when current boss Tony Wray retires next spring.

Ms Garfield said: “I am really looking forward to joining Severn Trent. It is a leader in an industry going through significant change and has, at its heart, a commitment to serving its customers well.”

Severn Trent’s chairman Andrew Duff said: “We are delighted that Liv is joining us to be our next chief executive. Liv brings experience of managing customer service delivery and complex organisations in a regulated environment.”

In June, a proposed takeover of Severn Trent collapsed when a Canadian-led consortium pulled out, days after its final £5.3bn offer was rejected, the third time its overtures had been spurned by the group’s board.

Announcing her departure, Ms Garfield said: “It is a huge wrench to leave Openreach but I feel the time is right to take on a fresh challenge.

“Our commercial programme to bring fibre broadband to two-thirds of UK premises is almost complete.

“It has been a tough decision but I leave Openreach in fantastic shape and have every confidence it will continue to thrive.” BT’s chief executive Gavin Patterson said: “Liv has made an enormous contribution to BT over the past 12 years and she’ll be greatly missed.”

While in charge of Openreach, Ms Garfield has overseen the roll-out of broadband, which BT says is transforming the lives of households and businesses across the country.

However the roll-out of superfast broadband has come under fire, with MPs accusing the Government of placing sole provider BT in a “quasi-monopolistic position” which will end with it owning assets created from £1.2bn of public money.

BT rejected the criticism from the Public Accounts Committee, pointing out that the network would be open to all its rivals.

Analysts said Ms Garfield’s move will be a blow for BT. She has held several top positions at the company including head of strategy.

BT said it would announce a replacement in due course.

BT headhunted Ms Garfield from management consultancy Accenture, then Andersen Consulting, where she worked for six years.

Talking about the lack of female bosses at FTSE 100 companies, Ms Garfield said: “I think it’s great that the Government is actively encouraging more board diversity in UK businesses and the stats seem to imply that more energy is needed.

“Although personally I have to say that I have enjoyed fantastic support in my career and certainly never bumped into a glass ceiling at either BT or Accenture.”

Ms Garfield is known for her strong team-building skills.

Talking to the Yorkshire Post, she said the best way to manage people successfully is to get to know them.

“The chance of motivating somebody to really work for you and to really give their best is negligible if you have never bothered to find out if they have got two kids, called Luke and Charlie, and they are aged four and six,” she said.

“You don’t have to know loads about them. You don’t have to become their friend. But you do have to have a sense of what’s going on in their lives.

“Once you understand the human side of people who work for you, you then get a sense of what motivates them. Just because cash motivates one, it does not motivate the next.

“Subliminally, you need to make sure you are adapting your communication style and your management style towards what that individual needs.”

Ms Garfield was raised in Harrogate and attended Belmont Birklands School in Harrogate to the age of 16.

She moved to Bootham School, an independent Quaker boarding school in York, for her A-levels before reading German and French at Cambridge University.

An aim to have the lowest bills

Severn Trent supplies 4.2 million households and businesses and has customers in Rotherham, Sheffield and Scunthorpe.

It has promised that its average household bills will be £13 lower in 2014-15 in real terms than in 2010.

It added that customers will start, and end, the five-year period between 2010 and 2015 with the lowest average water bills of any water and waste water company in England and Wales.

The company said it is investing around £1.3m a day in its services to ensure it delivers a safe, reliable supply of drinking water and removes and treats waste water

By 2015 it said its efficiency improvements will help save £8 from the average household bill.