You don’t see signs for Bradford & Bingley any more – not even on its former head office building at Crossflatts.

The name, once familiar across the country, disappeared from the high street following the sudden nationalisation of the mortgage business in 2008 and sale of the branches to Spanish bank Santander – which soon rebranded them with its own flame logo.

Now the B&B name has become a sub-brand of UK Asset Resolution.

UKAR is the Government-owned holding company established to oversee the mortgage books of Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock (Asset Management) plc – the ‘bad’ bit of the Newcastle-based failed bank. UKAR has 850,000 former B&B and Northern Rock customers.

The mission is not to lend any more, but to wind down the mortgage book and repay the Treasury the £48 billion used to nationalise the two lenders during the banking crisis.

The man charged with the day-to-day running of the new set-up is the appropriately-named Richard Banks.

He reports to UK Financial Investments, which was set up to manage the Government’s nationalised banking interests.

Richard Banks is non-committal about how long UKAR’s operations at Crossflatts and two former Northern Rock sites in Newcastle and Sunderland will continue.

But he is working to a ten-year plan and is clear about the priorities for the business, which employs about 1,200 staff at Crossflatts, and 2,400 in total.

Arriving in April, 2009, eight months after the demise of B&B as a going concern, Mr Banks found the Crossflatts office to be a “cold place”.

“It was half full, with the Bingley (Main Street) site still operating and people feeling very depressed. The Government had guaranteed no redundancies for up to nine months (after nationalisation) but that period was ending,” he said.

“My challenge was to revitalise people and get them to understand that there was a long-term job to do. Staff needed to understand that the way forward was orderly management rather than slash and burn.”

One of his key priorities is to make UKAR a good place to work as well as creating a low-cost service provider and a ‘best in class’ debt manager while repaying the Government.

He acknowledges that welding two separate cultures into a combined and focused team in an organisation with a finite future is, to say the least, challenging.

He said: “It’s a challenge to retain and recruit the best people because their first question is about how long they will be in a job. We’ve explained that, while we are a long-term operation, we won’t need all the people we have today as the mortgage books decline “What we do offer is a rewarding career while they work here and experience that will improve people’s employability.

“It’s vital that our staff know they are valued. It’s about creating a team of people from two different organisations in separate locations with a single focus and a loyalty to UKAR and what we need to deliver.”

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