“I think we had a five-minute discussion for good governance, and that was pretty much it.” Bill Hocking, the chief executive of Galliford Try, is talking about the process behind the move to hand more than half of the firm’s 3,500 staff a cost-of-living payment totalling £1m in September. More than 1,800 of them were given a one-off payment of £750, which, together with a reward scheme, meant some employees received an extra £1,000 in their October pay packets.

“£750 will be a lot for some and not a lot for  others, but it was the right thing to do,” Hocking says. “We support a local food bank out of here [the firm’s main office is on a business park in Uxbridge on the outskirts of north-west London] and I’d noticed that demand for it was going up. It got me thinking. You hear stories about hard-working people struggling to make ends meet, and I thought: we’ve got to do something about that.”

Following the news, he received dozens of appreciative emails from staff whom he had never met. “It was a pretty heart-warming response, actually.” He seems slightly taken aback. “I hate this thing that people are having to choose between heat or food; that’s just appalling, and especially for kids. Can you imagine that? Choosing between putting the heating on or feeding your kids?”

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