PRO FILE : STE V E I NGHAM
ING A N EW PAG E A life-changing skiing accident could have had a devastating effect on PageGroup’s CEO Steve Ingham. DeeDee Doke spoke to him about how life has changed for him – at home and at work
S
hortly before Steve Ingham and I are to begin our conversation, our first for a few years, a mighty crash has jolted Ingham’s London house. This particular house has recently undergone a lot of renovation, but apparently a piece of the building near the roof has plummeted to ground. However, everyone in the household, including the dog, is safe. So Ingham is in fine humour, crisp and energetic in one of his signature pastel, button-up shirts, open at the top. His office is on the top floor of the house, where renovations had begun before the life-changing accident that left him paralysed from the navel down during a birthday skiing trip to Switzerland in March 2019.
18 RECRUITER
When the accident happened, the CEO of PageGroup and his fiancée were living in a rented third-floor flat with no lift. But they had already purchased this house, and the builders were in. “It needed a lot of work, the roof was off and scaffolding was all over it. I mean, it looked like it was being held up by scaffolding,” he recalls. “And then I had the accident,” he says. “So, I rang them from intensive care, and said, ‘Stop’. They went, ‘Why?’ and I explained. I said, ‘I just need to know that whatever you’re doing, from now on, isn’t going to have to be redone, because I need a wider door, and I will need this, or I need that because of my disability. At the moment, I don’t know all the answers because what I learn over the next few months will give me
those answers – but you know, I don’t know whether I will want to change the design of the house’. “Obviously,” Ingham continues, “lifts were going to have to come into play, and you have to get planning permission if you’ve got a house of this age. So we had to work out whether, architecturally, there was a route for a lift to be able to go up and down the building so I could access every floor. “So,” he says with some understatement, “there was a lot going on.”
Living life Flashback to March 2019, when in addition to completing expensive renovations on the newly purchased house in London’s St John’s Wood, Ingham was looking ahead to his daughter’s wedding in
MAR/APR 2021
COVER STORY_11-Mar-2021_Recruiter.indd 18
11/03/2021 13:53
