It's early days, but Andrew Goodsell is in danger of giving private equity a good name.

He runs Acromas, the private equity-owned company (to which he did not give a good name) created last September from the merger of Saga and the AA.

At the time, the AA had come to represent all the alleged evils of private equity. After CVC and Permira bought it from Centrica, they sacked thousands of staff and took out hundreds of millions of pounds before merging it with Saga to generate more huge profits.

A campaign by the GMB union managed to demonise everyone involved, including Tim Parker, then the AA boss and now deputy to Boris Johnson, the London Mayor.

Mr Parker insisted that the cuts were necessary for the health of the business and that he left it in good shape. Yesterday's results from Acromas suggest there was some truth to this.

Admittedly, Mr Goodsell implies that cost-cutting went a bit too far and that there had not been enough investment. But the company had not been hollowed out in the way the critics suggested.

At the time of the merger, the unions gave warning of massive job cuts. In fact, the AA workforce has increased by 510, or 7 per cent, in the year to March and the group's total headcount has grown by 6 per cent to almost 12,000.

The AA's roadside recovery business has started growing again and patrols have risen from 2,700 to 2,800.

So well are things going that Mr Goodsell is already talking about an eventual stock market flotation.

Which presumably will bring more headlines about evil private equity firms cashing in.

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