Profile: John Heaps, chairman of Yorkshire Building Society, on his links with Leeds' Headrow

For John Heaps, it is the Headrow. His father’s once well-known travel business, Heaps Tours, had its main agency on the Leeds street.

His first law firm, Hepworth and Chadwick, was on the Headrow. As a young lawyer, he was in and out of the magistrates’ courts in the Town Hall, also on the Headrow.

After six years in the City of London with Freshfields, the magic circle firm, he yielded to the call of Yorkshire, Hepworth and Chadwick and the Headrow.

Heaps was a litigator of note and had a stellar career in the law with successor firm Eversheds, including four years as chairman until 2014.

He retired last year and took on a new role as chairman of Yorkshire Building Society in April. And its Leeds office? On the Headrow.

“There is something I have read somewhere which says everyone has these little themes in their lives, which are constants. This is a very constant theme in my life,” he says.

“It is the centre of Leeds in a way. It is the main arterial route through the city and so pumping the lifeblood through the city if you like and it has been a major arterial route through my career.”

The Heaps family story could have been made for these pages. His grandfather started the family’s eponymous travel business after the First World War with a vehicle that carried coal to Ferrybridge power station during the week.

At the weekend, his grandmother would scrub it out, fix seats and off they would drive to Bridlington with a load of people in the old charabanc.

His father Dennis returned from the Second World War and joined the family firm, much against the wishes of the aspiring journalist.

Sadly his newspaper days weren’t to be and instead he threw himself into the business, taking Heaps Tours from strength to strength during the 1950s and the golden age of coaching holidays.

Heaps says: “In those days, there were two major companies in Leeds doing this sort of thing. One was called Wallace Arnold and the other was called Heaps Tours or, as the good people of Leeds would call it, ‘Eapses, which used to upset Dad a lot so he eventually changed the name so it became Heaps Leopard Tours.”

Heaps Leopard Tours and Wallace Arnold blazed a trail, pioneering package holidays from Leeds Bradford Airport with a Viscount aeroplane which flew people to the Isle of Man, Jersey and the further afield.

The business did well, but Dennis fell ill and with his sons John and Mike still in school decided to sell out. Mike went into property and became a partner at DTZ while John entered the law.

Heaps says: “I was articled to Nimble Thompson, a character who appears a lot in my life down the years. He was my principal and in those days there were some giants of Leeds business.

“You had people like David Sykes, the corporate partner who would on the board of Waddingtons and Readicut, both of those would have been FTSE-100 or equivalent. We did all the work for Barr Wallace Arnold.

“You had other individuals like Howard Bryan who led the litigation team, David Gray who eventually became chief executive of Eversheds nationally and is now the chairman of Leeds University, and Everard Chadwick who at one was both senior partner at Hepworth and Chadwick and chairman of J Hepworth and Sons plc, which eventually became Next plc.

“The point I’m making is that we were immersed as an organisation in the local commercial community and in those days partners in law firms were allowed to sit on boards of their clients.

“That has stopped for obvious reasons of potential conflict but probably to a too greater extent because I think it’s very important you do have links to the local community and you also need to develop your skills as a member of the board so that when your time as a lawyer comes to an end you have built up those skills and abilities so you can pass into the world of non-execs and I think we need to do it better than we do it now.”

That said, Heaps has transitioned neatly into one of the best non-executive positions in Yorkshire as chairman of Britain’s second biggest building society.

It all started with a call from a City headhunter at Egon Zehnder in April 2014. An excited Heaps learned that he was on the shortlist but not near the top, due to his lack of experience in financial services. But meetings with board members and the chief executive Chris Pilling went well and he became the preferred candidate.

To win the approval of the City watchdog, Heaps went “back to school” over summer 2014 and immersed himself in financial services.

After 90 minutes of grilling from a panel of regulators - he emphasised his leadership and analytical skills and his networks in Yorkshire and the City - he was overjoyed to learn he had the job.

Heaps started in April 2015. He says: “The first thing that struck was how extraordinarily well managed it is and how well it coped with the financial crisis and how focused it was through its strategy on the future, including a very strong awareness of the challenges and the threats but also the opportunities of the market place, which is changing very rapidly.”

Digital revolution aside, the original concept behind the mutual movement remains much the same as it was in his ancestors’ day, says Heaps, providing people with security for their savings and allowing people to provide for themselves by owning their own property.