From building pigsties and playing football ‘in the back lane’ as a four-year-old to working on the new Wembley Stadium, from a high-level career in Whitehall to taking the helm of Hays Travel, Dame Irene Hays has led a varied and fascinating life.
Born and raised in the North East, she built a career in public service, holding the office of Chief Executive of both Sunderland and South Tyneside local authorities before moving to Whitehall, where she became Director General for Local Government and Regeneration, and later Permanent Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government.
In 2019, she and her late husband John Hays, founder of Hays Travel, were hailed as ‘the saviours of the high street’ when they took over failed Thomas Cook’s 555 stores, safeguarding around 2,500 jobs.
Irene was awarded a CBE in 2008 for services to community, followed by a damehood in 2021 for her work in training, education and support for young people.
Here she reveals more about her achievements and her passions, what keeps her awake at night, what gets her up in the morning, why she’s disgusting at weekends, and her plans for the future [spoiler alert: she’s not going to retire].
I’ve always loved football. As a little girl, I used to play in the back lane, from the age of about four. We lived two streets away from [England players] Bobby and Jackie Charlton.
Sir Trevor [Brooking, former West Ham footballer and Sport England Chair] asked if I could help set up the Football Foundation, so I worked with the Premier League, Sport England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for nine years. I used to love helping clubs to grow. And as part of that, I was on the panel that worked on the new Wembley Stadium and Manchester City Stadium.
I was brought up with a passion for community. I did voluntary work with my mum and dad pretty much every weekend. I remember there was a local convent where I helped build a pigsty and chopped down weeds to make way for a garden.
What still gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing that I can help others. When I was a graduate management trainee with a local authority, I attended a disciplinary interview in a transport depot with this lad Gary, who was on a YTS [Youth Training Scheme].
He was about to be fired because he never turned up for work on time, but his mentor Ted asked for him to be given one last chance; he said he thought he could help him.
The HR officer asked me what I thought and I said: “I love Ted and I think he can do this.” She rolled her eyes, but I said: “What harm can it do?” so she agreed, but tore a strip off Gary and warned him he’d only kept his job because Ted had vouched for him.
Later, Ted told me he’d come across this big lad Gary outside, after the hearing, leaning against a wall with his head on his arm and sobbing, and he said: “What’s up, have you never been told off before?” He said: “I’ve been told off plenty, but no-one’s ever stuck up for me before.”
That’s what we do in Hays Travel. We stick up for young people.
One of my biggest achievements was about 30 years ago. Sir Trevor Brooking asked me to Chair the Equality and Diversity Board of Sport England because of my passion for community.
My role was to make sure the sports governing bodies encouraged everyone in the community to get involved in sport, but I was finding it incredibly difficult to get any traction, so I suggested Lottery funding should only go to those that evidenced that the money would be spent on the whole community, not just middle-class ladies in white skirts playing badminton on a Tuesday morning.
After a lot of lobbying by my team, we did it, and the governing bodies were given 18 months to ensure they evidenced how they would demonstrate that disadvantaged, ethnic minorities, disabled, LGBTQ and women were embedded within their plans.
On a national level, it is sometimes quite hard to move the dial, so I like that we did that.
I feel very strongly about benevolent capitalism. It’s okay to make money because growth drives the economy, but there needs to be philanthropy.
Hays has helped 60,000 young people over the past 46 years, either through our apprenticeships, our graduate scheme, our Hays Travel Community Partnerships or the Hays Travel charitable Foundation.
I’m still highly motivated to help others succeed, especially entrepreneurs. At Hays Travel, we started the Independence Group and the homeworking operation at around the same time. What we do is wrap our arms around these entrepreneurs, providing them with our legal, financial and regulatory framework and encourage them to grow.
Over the past 26 years, we’ve had some notable successes, for example, the very talented boys at loveholidays, Robin Deller at Imagine Cruising and lots of other great people, like Amanda [Matthews] at Designer Travel, who has a hugely, hugely successful business. I’m so, so proud of what Hays Travel and the team have done to help these businesses. The entrepreneurs provide the poetry, we provide the plumbing.
I never use ‘Dame’, unless it’s important to other people. If I’m not doing okay as ‘just Irene’, I’m not going to do any better as ‘Dame Irene’. But I sign cards for staff ‘Dame Irene’ because they like to take it home and show it to their mam. I want to be clear though, I couldn’t have achieved what I did on my own, the honour I received was for all those I worked with helping young people.
What keeps me awake at night? Now, nothing. When we went into the COVID lockdown in 2020, 16 weeks after we’d taken over the licence to operate Thomas Cook’s 555 stores in addition to 175 of our own, I have to say, honestly, that was the only time John and I had ever woken up worrying about something.
Then we lost John [who died suddenly in late 2020]. It was one thing waking up at 2.30 in the morning knowing that John was awake too, we’d make a cup of tea and talk about it, but it’s a whole other thing waking up in the middle of the night and you’re on your own.
But since we came out of COVID, the extraordinary people across the whole of the business have built it back up to more than it was before, so now, no, I don’t wake up worrying about anything.
I never considered not taking over the leadership of Hays Travel when John died. When you have a private company with more than 3,000 people dependent on some form of leadership, and not to replace that role with someone they knew, that wasn’t an option.
I had worked in the business for a long time, in the background, working with retail, IG and homeworking, so it was the right thing to do. I handed in my resignation at the Department for Education as a non-executive board member to work full time, and some, in the business. I didn’t know how I would fare, but I knew I was blessed with a great team.
What got me through was the Hays people. They’re exceptional, exceptional people. I asked Jonathon [Woodall-Johnston] to be Chief Operating Officer (pictured below, with Irene). He’d started with Hays as a 16-year-old apprentice in 2005 and he was still so very young, but John and I had seen that he had a natural, raw intellect, he’s incredibly bright, so we’d put him through his accountancy qualifications, and I told him, there are things you can do I can’t, and maybe there are things that at this point you can’t do, but together, I think we can do this. If I can’t, and you can’t, we’ll fail fast and bring someone in.
My ambition is still to be the most profitable independent travel agency through valuing our people, our customers and our communities. We want to continue to grow but stay true to the vision and values we’ve had for 46 years. We will take whatever learnings there are from the Competition and Markets Authority review of our recent purchases [Polka Dot and Millington Travel], but we want to continue to grow, as long as that is good for our business and our people.
I never think about retiring. That’s not for me. I have a succession plan, of course, you have to with a business this size, but I’m not going to answer any more questions about that!
I’m in this for the love, not the money. I don’t spend a lot on clothes or jewellery. I don’t wear jewellery, only my Oura. I’ve been deaf since the age of 12, so I don’t want to draw attention to my ears with earrings. I buy clothes at Matalan. I love Matalan!
I do like to travel. If I’m going on holiday with the family, I love a villa in Europe with a pool and a great barbecue.
If I’m travelling on my own, I love learning. I like to go somewhere like South America.
But sometimes I need to recharge, and for that, my favourite place at the moment is the Maldives, but a minimalist resort because I don’t like glitz. I like to go somewhere where you just eat whatever fish they’ve caught that day. The island I went to at Christmas with [daughter] Helen was very low key, and Helen caught the fish! I didn’t wear shoes the whole week, not even on Christmas Day. Just my Matalan shorts and Matalan t-shirts!
I celebrated a big birthday last year on an Explora cruise and we had the most amazing time. I’m very fortunate that when we were setting up a business, it was either going to be a travel agency or an undertaker. I don’t think the overseas conferences would have been as good if we’d gone for the latter.
I’ve always been very active. I exercise every morning. I do 24 minutes of high-intensity exercise and track everything on my Oura Ring. I think energy comes from exercise, nutrition and sleep, so I have a really healthy regime from Monday to Friday, but at the weekend, I’m disgusting. Actually, let’s be honest, I’m disgusting from Friday evening!
I read lots of books about the pursuit of happiness. Not self-help books, academic books, and I think it’s fundamental to people’s well-being to be happy at work. That’s why we have a lot of fun with our people. We do a lot of dressing up, for Halloween, at Christmas, and we’ve given away £100,000 in our Big Hays Travel Thank You and our 12 Hays of Christmas, to show appreciation to our people.
You spend so much time at work, that if we can make it a good place to be, we should. Working in the travel industry should make people feel happy, and I think it does.
