Barclays to make Sir Ian Cheshire its new UK Chairman
Barclays UK will announce the appointment of Sir Ian Cheshire as its new chairman. Although Sir Ian's role in overseeing the government buy-out of high-street lender Bradford & Bingley in 2008 led some to question his suitability for the role, the Prudential Regulation Authority approved the appointment.

Barclays will this week announce the appointment of Sir Ian Cheshire as chairman of its UK-based operations, a key milestone in its planning for new rules aimed at protecting taxpayers in a future banking crisis.

Sky News has learnt that Sir Ian's application to chair Barclays UK has been approved by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), the banking watchdog.

An announcement will be made on Monday morning, according to people close to the lender.

As chairman of Barclays UK, Sir Ian will oversee a business comprising the group's high street branch network in Britain, as well as its business banking and Barclaycard operations in its home market.

With roughly 22 million retail customers and almost one million business banking clients, it will be one of the largest UK-based lenders, and will be run by Ashok Vaswani, its chief executive.

Most of Barclays' international and investment banking activities will sit within a new non-ring-fenced entity run by Tim Throsby, a former JP Morgan executive.

The two parts of the business will, in accordance with the post-crisis framework proposed by Sir John Vickers in 2011, have separate funding regimes, allowing the retail bank to continue functioning even if the non-ring-fenced lender were to become insolvent.

Confirmation of Sir Ian's appointment will come four days after Barclays announced a rise in full-year profits alongside a modest cut in the bank's bonus pool for staff.

Shareholders have been forced to swallow a halving of the bank's dividend as Barclays completes a restructuring which has taken several years.

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Sir Ian, the former boss of B&Q-owner Kingfisher, was identified as the preferred candidate to chair Barclays UK in the autumn of last year.

He is one of Britain's best-known businessmen, chairing the department store chain Debenhams and acting as the Government's lead non-executive director in Whitehall.

Some media outlets raised concerns about his appointment to lead Barclays UK because he was on the board of Bradford & Bingley, the high street mortgage lender bailed out by taxpayers during the 2008 financial crisis.

Sir Ian was a non-executive on the board of B&B for several years before a freeze in wholesale funding markets led it, like others, to fall into the arms of the state.

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The Government is now close to completing a sale of B&B's £12bn loan book.

Sources said the interview process that Sir Ian had undergone with the PRA had been rigorous but that the regulator had "full confidence" in him.

The appointment comes little more than year after the group's chairman, John McFarlane, sparked fury at the Bank of England by proposing a structure under which Barclays' retail operations would temporarily be owned by its investment bank.

The plans were reworked following an intervention by Mark Carney, the Bank of England Governor.

Barclays has said that it intends to implement its ring-fencing plans during the Easter weekend in 2018, which would give it several days to execute the logistically complex task of establishing a major new UK bank.

Other lenders have also begun making preparations for the new ring-fencing regime which formally comes into effect in 2019.

Barclays and Sir Ian both declined to comment on Sunday.