'We can never rebuild': The despair of Vodafone franchisees and the cost to their mental health

When Adrian Howe drowned in August 2018, his family found some solace in the support of his longtime employer.

- Simon Goodley

The bond between the 58-year-old and Vodafone - the multinational mobile phone group for which Howe had worked for 20 years - was so tight that his funeral featured a wreath shaped like the company’s speech mark brand.

Meanwhile, his widow was paid the equivalent of a death-in-service benefit, even though Howe had left the company weeks earlier. “I was reassured that Dad would be ‘reinstated’ back into Vodafone as if he had never actually left,” recalls daughter Kirsty-Anne Holmes. “He had [left] in order to open [Vodafone] stores as a franchise.”

Yet, when the family began to investigate the circumstances of Howe’s death, his personnel file was not the only record they felt needed adjusting. Vodafone’s narrative around its benevolent gesture was also interrogated, with the family beginning to suspect that there might have been serious problems with Howe’s plan to run a pair of the telecoms group’s franchise stores.

These feelings were exacerbated as it emerged last year that the £18bn company was fighting a high court claim brought by 62 of its former franchisees who allege Vodafone “unjustly enriched” itself by slashing commissions - a case MPs have compared to the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.

Vodafone says the legal claim is a “commercial dispute” but has apologised to claimants who blamed pressure from the telecoms group for triggering suicidal thoughts. A survey of franchisees during September 2020 resulted in 78 out of 119 respondents leaving overwhelmingly critical comments about the effects Vodafone’s actions had had on their mental health.

In July 2018, Howe had seemed excited. A year earlier Vodafone had begun to free itself from running its own retail network by transferring shops to franchisees - many of whom were former staff.