It wants to be the leading energy services firm in the UK and Ireland, which means raising its turnover while helping vast numbers of Britons burdened with draughty homes and rising heating costs. John Hill meets Paul Varley, the man who hopes to make Carillion Energy Services into a £1bn turnover company.

WHEN it's cold enough, Carillion Energy Services managing director Paul Varley can wander to the window on the seventh floor of Newcastle’s Partnership House and see how much work still needs to be done.

“In the winter, you can see the ones that have no snow on their roofs.” he says. “That means they don’t have insulation in the loft.”

The company, which was Newcastle-based Eaga plc until a takeover this year, has handled projects such as help services for the digital switchover, but it is mostly recognised for its work on energy efficiency and renewables.

Through the Government-funded Warm Front scheme, it helps vulnerable people to install insulation and energy-efficient boilers, and in March it announced it had raised £300m to fit solar panels to more than 30,000 homes.

Varley says: “I go home every night and know we’ve helped people across the country. I may not have touched those people, but something our business has touched has improved their lives. It will have kept them warm. It will have given them something.”

However, the role which Varley assumed in April is a different one to that of his predecessor. For a start, it has been re-named following the £306.5m takeover by Midlands support services firm Carillion.

“The thing I’ve been quite clear on is that we’re a business that’s based in Newcastle”, says Varley. “Sure, a company from the North East has disappeared from the stock market, but it doesn’t reduce our involvement on a local level.

“I don’t think our standing in the North East has diminished. It will create more opportunity in the region for employment. There’s a stronger balance sheet and better access to finance.

“Probably the major difference in my role is that I don’t worry about the city as much. I’ll be pulled in as and when Carillion need me, but it took up a significant proportion of my predecessor Drew Johnson’s time.”

He is now also a board member on the North East’s Local Enterprise Partnership, which is assuming some of the responsibilities of One North East.

He says: “We’ve got some strategic choices to make, and we’re still working through those choices. But we’ve got a huge opportunity to set the North East up as a beacon.” Wakefield-born Varley has called the region home since his family moved north when he was nine. He grew up in Northumberland, was schooled in Jesmond and went to university in Durham. When he joined Procter and Gamble, he chose a role in Newcastle over one in London.

“I live my life pretty much in places I can see from this building,” Varley says. “I live a quarter of a mile away. The kids go to school nearby. I coach rugby in that field and go to the cricket club over there for beers with the lads on a Friday night.

“I’ve had a season ticket at Newcastle United for 28 years. My son went to his first match when he was three. It was a pre-season game when we beat Juventus 1-0, and as the team came out of the tunnel with Local Hero playing, I was there with him beside me and a tear in my eye.

“Newcastle buzzes. It’s infectious. How many people come to university or a company and stay? They say that if you go on the tube in London, you don’t make eye contact. On the Metro, you might end up having a conversation.

“People will work anywhere these days, but I feel you’ve got to decide on your home and then live where you go to work. I see friends that don’t have that support network around them because they’ve moved around a lot, and it’s tough.”

Varley joined Proctor and Gamble after university as a financial analyst, getting involved with various areas of the consumer products giant.

He says: “The reason I became an accountant is that 86% of chief executives in the FTSE100 were accountants. I spent time working with people in marketing, sales, accounting and manufacturing. I saw how to make stuff, sell stuff and add stuff up.”

However, Varley also says he learned a number of life lessons at the firm. He says: “You’ve always got to make time for what’s important. It’s very rare I’ll miss something at the kids’ school.

“Someone once said to me that there are good times, and there are lessons. Even if you have the worst boss in the world, you can learn how not to do something.

“I have a very simple rule that if I’m not having fun at work today, I’m not coming into work tomorrow. Plus you’ve also got to take the time to celebrate success.

“I always try to walk around the building and talk to people. As I was starting out, if one of the leaders of the organisation walked past you and knew your name, you’d be on cloud nine the whole day.

“I surround myself with people that are better than me, as it makes life a lot easier. I think I’ve learned how to make money for an organisation as well.”

Varley spent nine years at Procter and Gamble, including a spell in which he helped launch a popular orange drink.

He says: “I saw one of those shows listing the top ten moments in 1998, and one of those was the launch of Sunny Delight. That’s staggering.

“It was probably the first time in business when I could see something get off the ground and say I was part of that. It was entirely about marketing. It was basically juice, but it was something kids got their mums to buy because it was cool.

“It had to be at the front of supermarkets, so I came up with the commercial offering that meant it went to the front.”

Varley was later charged with setting up a shared services centre in Newcastle to consolidate back-office functions, so he travelled around Europe dealing with the necessary factories.

He says: “I went to Morocco, France, Belgium and Italy. I went to Geneva 15 times and I never saw it in daylight. After that, there were no really suitable roles for me at Procter and Gamble in the UK. I didn’t want to go globe-trotting because I had a family, and I was never going to the top since it was a marketing-led organisation.

“Therefore I joined Siemens as an operations director. I was running a shared service centre that became an outsourcing organisation, so it was similar to what I was doing at Procter and Gamble. However, it was measured on delivering the bottom line. I basically had my own business to run.”

Varley was at Siemens for two and a half years, but when he was made redundant, he joined business and technology service firm Logica.

He says: “On my first day, I was introduced to someone with the same job title as me, and my boss said to me: ‘What are you doing here?’. You form your opinions from that, don’t you?

“A couple of months later, I saw an advert for a job at Eaga. I’d never heard of them before, but discovered their HQ was across the road from my old school.”

Varley initially headed up Eaga’s insulation business; bringing together four divisions and rolling out the best business processes from each. He then moved to the division responsible for managing government contracts such as Warm Front.

He says: “Government operates in a completely different world.

“It’s about the right policy agenda rather than saving money. If you can deliver on their policy agenda, that’s an option for them even if it costs them more money. It’s not about profit or loss. It’s about where government needs to go.”

Which brings us neatly to where the Government “went” last year.

As part of the ongoing theme of austerity cuts, the coalition sliced Warm Front funding by more than two-thirds, causing Eaga to announce up to 700 jobs would have to go nationally.

“It did take me by surprise”, says Varley. “I didn’t think the cut would be that deep. But you dwell on it for 20 seconds and then you move on to dealing with it.

“The Government had to make choices. Warm Front went from £380m to £110m, meaning the people we’ve helped went down from 230,000 to 60,000.

“The cut in funding is significant, and it was a call to action to diversify and to change. But there’s no doubt the cut to Warm Front will hurt the fuel poor.”

The “fuel poor” are those who make the choice between heating or eating; the elderly, those raising families, those with low incomes, disabilities or long-term illnesses.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change says the number of people who had to spend more than 10% of their income on keeping warm rose by 22% to 5.5m in 2009, and those numbers are now even higher due to energy price increases, job losses and pay freezes.

The government has proposed a “green deal” in which businesses provide the cash for home energy efficiency improvements and recoup their money through the energy bill. However, Varley says “fuel poverty” is still a “huge problem”.

“There’s a significant amount of work that needs to be done through things like the Green Deal,” he says. “About 84% of the country’s housing stock is more than 28 years old. We can work with energy companies, and we’ve got funding to put insulation in homes and install energy-efficient boilers.

“There’s no doubt the tragic events in Japan have caused some people to reflect on whether nuclear power is the way to go. You’ve got conflicts in parts of the world that are oil-rich. The demand for energy is not going to dissipate. That means you either go for fossil fuels or renewable energy. We’ve got to do things as individuals.

“I have solar panels on my roof and an energy-efficient boiler. I pay my electricity bill by direct debit every month, and every quarter I get a cheque which more than pays back what I pay out. Climate change is something we just have to address. The proof is quite stark, but even if it is all rubbish, as a consumer why would you not want to save money?”

Varley says Carillion wants to develop the leading energy services company in the UK and Ireland. It wants to explore efficiency projects for private homes, businesses and social landlords.

The aim is to reach turnover of £1bn by 2014; increasing the current figure by around 20% despite the fact it will lose 75% of its contracts over the next two years.

Varley says: “Carillion paid more than £300m for Eaga and have to get a return on that. One of the major reasons they did that was the people, and a quarter of those people are in Newcastle.

“My biggest buzz now is spotting talent and trying to pull that through the organisation. I say you should give people enough rope to learn, but not enough to hang themselves.

“One of the best things I ever did was jury duty, about six years ago. It’s very rare in life that there’s no pre-supposed hierarchy. Every single person sitting there was equal, and I met some fascinating people.

“I think it’s important to find out what makes people tick. If you understand what’s important to them, you can recognise how to get the most out of them and deliver what’s important to them as well. It’s about treating people fairly, not equally.”