Our first trip through Jiten Kotecha’s 2013 John Lewis placement found a £40 million holiday-pay correction, outsourced cleaners outside the Partnership model and hundreds of management jobs disappearing. The second visit lands in the John Lewis Partnership of 2026, where the language has become even grander. John Lewis calls itself an “experiment in industrial democracy” and says the business is “run by Partners, for Partners”. During 2025/26, however, the year-end Partner population fell from 66,400 to 63,800, average full-time-equivalent employment fell by another 2,000 and the Chairman’s pay rate was recalibrated from £990,000 to £1.2 million. Jason Tarry’s total reward reached £1,257,900. Apparently some Partners require rather more fucking Partnership than others.
John Lewis has always sold two things at once. Downstairs, it sells furniture, televisions, cookware and the sort of lamps that persuade you £180 is perfectly reasonable because somebody placed them beside an artisanal vase. Upstairs, it sells an idea about capitalism.
The idea is the interesting bit.
John Lewis employees are Partners. The business describes itself as the UK’s largest employee-owned company and its Constitution sits behind a model involving the Partnership Council, Partnership Board and Chairman. In the 2026 annual report, John Lewis goes further and describes the whole contraption as an “experiment in industrial democracy”.
That is magnificent language for a retailer.
It also invites people to inspect the experiment.
So TCAP did.
Back To Jiten’s Old Shop Floor
The first John Lewis instalment followed Kotecha’s 2013 placement into one of the more spectacular payroll years in the Partnership’s history. That piece dealt with holiday pay, outsourcing and what happened when the warm glow of employee ownership met the cold plumbing behind payroll.
John Lewis II is about something different.
This time we are not looking at whether Partners received the right holiday pay. We are looking at the modern Partnership itself and what the word Partner means when you follow it from the shop floor all the way upstairs to the Chairman’s remuneration table.
That journey gets interesting very quickly because John Lewis insists the ownership model changes the relationship between people and business. Partners supposedly share in the organisation rather than merely working underneath it. The company talks about democracy, fairness, respect and worthwhile work while making much of the fact that ordinary employees are not merely employees.
Fair enough.
Then open page 74 of the accounts.
The Partnership Gets Smaller
At the end of the 2025/26 financial year, John Lewis Partnership recorded 63,800 Partners.
A year earlier, it had 66,400.
That is 2,600 fewer people carrying the Partner title at year end. Meanwhile, the average number of full-time-equivalent employees fell from 48,100 to 46,100.
The brand-level figures are even more useful. John Lewis itself averaged 17,900 Partners, down from 19,400 the previous year, while Waitrose averaged 44,900, down from 46,700. Across those two businesses, the average Partner population therefore fell by 3,300.
Employee ownership, it turns out, does not prevent the employee population from shrinking.
Of course it bloody doesn’t. Retail changes, automation changes, costs change, jobs disappear and organisations reorganise. The interesting point is the language wrapped around that ordinary commercial reality. Tesco employees are employees. Sainsbury’s employees are employees. John Lewis workers carry a title embedded directly in the philosophical identity of the company.
Every person disappearing from that headcount is therefore not merely one fewer employee.
It is one fewer Partner in Britain’s great experiment in industrial democracy.#
Meanwhile, Upstairs
While the Partner population was contracting, John Lewis also reconsidered what it should pay the Partner sitting at the very top.
Jason Tarry joined as Chairman in September 2024 on base pay of £990,000, the same rate previously attached to Sharon White’s chairmanship. From 1 April 2025, John Lewis increased that rate to £1.2 million.
The phrase used in the annual report is exquisite.
The change reflected the “recalibration of the role”.
Recalibration.
What a fucking gorgeous little corporate word.
Ordinary people lose hours, jobs get simplified, headcounts contract and organisational structures get trimmed. The Chairman gets recalibrated.
Somewhere in HR heaven, a consultant just achieved orgasm.
One Point Two Million Pounds Of Calibration
Because the higher rate took effect part-way through the reporting period, Tarry’s actual pay recorded for the year was £1,132,800, rather than a full £1.2 million.
That was merely the first line.
John Lewis also recorded a £22,700 Partnership Bonus, a £93,200 pension cash supplement and £9,200 in other benefits.
Total reward:
£1,257,900.
A beautifully precise number from an organisation where tens of thousands of people are supposed to inhabit the same Partnership.
The Chairman was also the highest-paid director during the year. His pension cash supplement represented 8% of pay, while the other benefits included car allowance and medical cover.
There is no need for TCAP to embellish any of this with creative accounting. John Lewis has helpfully placed the entire damned thing in a table.
Everybody Gets Two Per Cent
The 2025/26 year also brought back something John Lewis Partners had not received for several years: the Partnership Bonus.
John Lewis awarded 2% of eligible pay, creating a total Partnership Bonus cost of £35 million.
This was good news for Partners. After three years of zero bonus, the profit-sharing mechanism had started moving again. John Lewis could once more point to one of the tangible features separating employee ownership from the normal corporate arrangement where everybody gets thanked warmly before the money travels upwards.
The same 2% rate also applied to Jason Tarry.
His disclosed Partnership Bonus was £22,700.
There is something wonderfully democratic about the percentage and wonderfully hierarchical about the pounds.
Everyone can be told they received 2%.
The bank accounts tell a slightly different fucking story.
Percentage Democracy
That is the delightful mathematical trick built into percentage-based equality.
Two people can receive precisely the same percentage while inhabiting completely different economic planets. There is nothing incorrect about that, and there does not need to be. It merely exposes the limits of using a uniform percentage as visual shorthand for shared reward.
John Lewis can say, perfectly accurately, that the Chairman participates in the same Partnership Bonus structure.
His disclosed Partnership Bonus was £22,700. There is something wonderfully democratic about the percentage and wonderfully hierarchical about the pounds. Everyone can be told they received 2%, but the same percentage becomes a very different cash sum when it sits on top of seven-figure remuneration. Same scheme, same percentage, different fucking solar system.
Run By Partners, For Partners
The John Lewis annual report says the Partnership model ensures the business is genuinely “run by Partners, for Partners”.
That phrase deserves to be left on the counter for a moment.
The company’s governance model certainly contains genuine representative structures. Partnership Council representatives, elected directors and other machinery give employees a formal role that ordinary retail workers generally do not possess in conventional shareholder-owned companies.
But hierarchy does not evaporate because somebody renamed the workforce.
The Partnership still has a Chairman.
The Chairman still sits at the apex of the structure.
The Chairman still receives a seven-figure package.
Management still restructures.
Job numbers still fall.
Commercial decisions still travel downwards with consequences attached.
Industrial democracy has not abolished gravity. It has given gravity a committee.
Happier Partners
John Lewis says its purpose begins with “happier Partners” enjoying “worthwhile and satisfying work” in a supportive environment.
Again, these are unusually ambitious promises for a large retailer. Most corporations settle for some bollocks about unlocking potential and creating stakeholder value before everybody goes home.
John Lewis deliberately goes further. Happiness becomes part of the corporate purpose. Partnership becomes part of governance. Fairness and respect become institutional commitments rather than decorative HR nouns.
That makes the numbers more interesting, not less.
At year end, 2,600 fewer people held Partner status than twelve months earlier. Average full-time-equivalent employment was down 2,000, while average Partner numbers across John Lewis and Waitrose had fallen by 3,300.
Meanwhile, the Chairman’s role required a £210,000 increase in its annual base-pay rate.
The happiness experiment has some remarkably expensive laboratory equipment.
The Word “Partner” Is Doing A Lot Of Work
Corporate language becomes interesting when a company uses the same noun for people occupying radically different economic positions.
A supermarket assistant is a Partner.
A warehouse worker is a Partner.
Someone answering customer queries is a Partner.
Jason Tarry is a Partner.
The title creates a horizontal image. Everyone is in the same thing together. The supermarket assistant and the Chairman belong to one employee-owned institution rather than standing on opposite sides of a conventional employer-shareholder divide.
Then remuneration arrives and the horizontal picture suddenly develops floors.
A £1.2579 million package does not stop anybody being a Partner. It simply demonstrates that Partnership and hierarchy coexist quite happily when the payroll software starts doing its sums.
That is the amusing part.
John Lewis has spent generations solving capitalism by renaming the workers.
The payslip still knows who’s upstairs.
The Partnership Bonus Returns To A £21 Million Loss
The full-year financial picture adds another layer.
John Lewis Partnership reported £13.4 billion in sales and £134 million profit before tax, Partnership Bonus and exceptional items for 2025/26.
Then came the rest of the arithmetic.
Exceptional items totalled £120 million. The Partnership Bonus cost £35 million. After everything moved through the accounts, John Lewis Partnership recorded a £21 million loss before tax.
That does not make the underlying £134 million disappear. It shows how many different moving parts sit between the retail operation and the statutory bottom line.
Nevertheless, somewhere inside a financial year ending with a £21 million pre-tax loss sat the decision to recalibrate the Chairman’s pay rate to £1.2 million.
Beautiful.
Even the loss had management structure.
One Hundred And Twenty Million Pounds Of Exceptional
The £120 million exceptional charge deserves a look because it helps explain the operating environment behind the shrinking Partner numbers.
John Lewis was restructuring, writing off and changing parts of the business while pursuing a wider transformation programme. Retailers everywhere have spent years battling changing shopping habits, wage costs, technology investment, property problems and customers whose disposable income periodically vanishes down the back of the sofa.
This is difficult shit.
However, difficult shit is exactly where corporate values become measurable. The interesting question is not whether businesses ever restructure. They obviously do. The question is how an organisation built around employee ownership distributes pain, reward and authority while doing it.
John Lewis’s answer produced a year with fewer Partners, a restored 2% bonus, a £21 million statutory pre-tax loss and a Chairman whose role had been recalibrated upwards.
That is not a slogan.
That’s an ecosystem.
September Arrives With £124 Million
By September 2026, the picture had become rougher.
John Lewis Partnership reported £6.3 billion in first-half sales, up 2%, while loss before tax and exceptional items widened from £34 million to £89 million.
Exceptional costs added another £35 million, largely connected with head-office restructuring and cloud-technology modernisation.
The resulting first-half pre-tax loss was £124 million, compared with £88 million a year earlier.
John Lewis itself had a tougher half, with sales down 2% to £2 billion and an adjusted operating loss of £83 million, compared with £53 million the year before. Waitrose performed better, with sales rising 4%.
The Partnership therefore entered autumn with the supermarket side moving forward and the department-store side dragging its arse through a considerably uglier set of numbers.
Christmas suddenly had quite a lot of work to do.
The Company Is Still Spending
John Lewis did not respond by pulling down the shutters and rummaging for loose change behind the customer-service desk. The September statement showed £1.4 billion of liquidity, historic-low external borrowings and £246 million invested during the half, almost 30% more than the previous year.
It also said annual Partner pay had increased by £108 million, taking Partner pay increases to more than £400 million across four years.
Those numbers matter because the John Lewis story is not some cheap morality play where a millionaire Chairman feeds while everybody downstairs survives on rainwater and damaged biscuits.
The reality is much more interesting.
John Lewis is spending heavily on its workforce, stores, technology and transformation while simultaneously reducing the number of people inside the Partnership and paying the person at the top more than £1.25 million.
That is the contradiction worth chewing on.
Not greed-versus-poverty cartoon bollocks.
Hierarchy inside democracy.
Industrial Democracy Still Has A Boss
The phrase “industrial democracy” conjures something almost revolutionary.
Workers own the business.
Workers influence governance.
Workers share reward.
Yet John Lewis also demonstrates something wonderfully British about attempts to reform capitalism: eventually somebody still gets an office, an executive package and responsibility for deciding where the furniture goes.
The Chairman occupies a role so important that John Lewis considered £990,000 insufficient and recalibrated it to £1.2 million.
Meanwhile, the average Partner population at the two retail brands fell by 3,300.
You can dress those two numbers in as much constitutional language as you like.
They remain two numbers sitting in the same fucking report.
A Democracy With Remuneration Consultants
The annual report also records the machinery behind senior pay. The Partnership uses executive remuneration advice, market assessments, job-evaluation methodology and compensation data when considering remuneration.
Nothing says industrial democracy quite like compensation benchmarking.
That sentence contains the whole modern corporate condition. Build an employee-owned institution intended to offer an alternative to ordinary capitalism, then eventually hire specialists to determine what competitive capitalism says the Chairman should cost.
The market therefore enters the democracy through the remuneration committee.
Nobody has to kick the door in.
It has an appointment.
The Chairman And The Checkout
This is where the imagery of Partnership becomes especially useful.
Picture two people entering the John Lewis ecosystem. One works a till, handles deliveries, stocks shelves or spends Saturday explaining to customers why the television they bought cannot connect itself to Wi-Fi through sheer optimism. The other chairs the Partnership.
Both are Partners.
One exists inside staffing budgets, rota efficiencies, restructuring programmes and whatever new piece of automation somebody has decided will revolutionise retail before causing six months of software problems.
The other appeared in the annual accounts with £1,132,800 in pay, £22,700 in Partnership Bonus, £93,200 in pension cash supplement and £9,200 of other benefits.
That does not make the word Partner meaningless.
It makes the word fucking fascinating.
The First John Lewis Piece Was About Payroll
Our first John Lewis instalment examined what happened in 2013, the year Kotecha’s career passed through the business and John Lewis discovered that holiday pay had been calculated incorrectly for around 69,000 employees.
That story was about the systems beneath the Partnership mythology.
John Lewis II is about the hierarchy above it.
The connection is not some hidden conspiracy connecting Jiten Kotecha to Jason Tarry thirteen years later. It is much simpler and far more useful to this series. Jiten’s Jobs follows the institutions on the CV and keeps returning when those institutions produce new material worth examining.
John Lewis has obliged magnificently.
First the payroll.
Now the pyramid.
A Better Kind Of Capitalism Still Has A Top Floor
There is a serious idea underneath the jokes here.
Employee ownership can give workers more influence, more information, more participation and a direct route into corporate governance. John Lewis has spent generations proving that a large retailer can operate through a structure materially different from the standard listed-company model.
Yet alternative ownership does not automatically flatten power or remuneration.
The 2026 accounts make that bloody obvious.
The Partner population fell.
The Chairman’s pay rate rose.
A universal 2% bonus returned.
The Chairman’s slice was £22,700.
The business describes itself as run by Partners for Partners while one Partner’s total reward exceeds £1.25 million.
That is not a flaw in the spreadsheet.
That is the structure the spreadsheet reveals.
The Partnership Has A Very Expensive Partner
John Lewis wants the word Partner to carry moral weight.
It should.
If you tell the world that employees own the business, help govern it and participate in an experiment in industrial democracy, people are entitled to look beyond the Christmas adverts and inspect how that democracy actually distributes money, power and pain.
In 2025/26, the year-end Partner count fell from 66,400 to 63,800. Average full-time-equivalent employment fell from 48,100 to 46,100. John Lewis itself averaged 1,500 fewer Partners and Waitrose 1,800 fewer.
At the same time, Jason Tarry’s base-pay rate moved from £990,000 to £1.2 million because John Lewis had recalibrated the role.
His total reward reached £1,257,900.
Then the Partnership posted a £21 million full-year pre-tax loss and followed it with a £124 million first-half loss six months later.
John Lewis remains an experiment in industrial democracy.
Experiments produce results.
These ones arrived in the annual report.
Apparently the Partnership is for everyone.
One Partner just costs a shitload more than the others.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project