If nothing else 2009 showed why credit insurance is a waste and bonuses aren’t.

It has been said that human beings are unique among animals for having the capacity to learn from the past; and remarkable for their disinterest in doing so.

The recession we have endured will be a good test of this maxim. There is much to learn from the process we are going through but once the red ink has changed to black will we retain that lesson?

Everyone has their own personal lessons from this recession. I have just three:

The first concerns credit insurance. During the boom times the insurers were happy to take your money. When the recession hit insurance was withdrawn.

This would be like having medical insurance that was invalid as soon as you began to feel ill. As conditions improve I would strongly urge suppliers not to start writing those premium cheques again. Put the money instead into a separate account, let it build up and it will still be there for you when the next downturn hits - unlike credit insurance.

The second concerns the sometimes reckless manner in which retailers expand during the good times. When sales are buoyant it is too easy to sign long-term leases in great locations that make you money now.

But if you look five or 10 years down the road, build in some rent reviews and a recession, would you still make money in that site? Unfortunately it is usually somebody else’s problem, since the people who sign these long leases are rarely the people who have to sort them out 10 years later.

Shareholders and non-executive directors need to exert greater pressure within both retailers and property companies to ensure that short-term lease decisions do not store up significant problems for both sectors in the future.

Finally - and controversially - bonuses are a good thing. Bonuses (or variable pay as the Americans more accurately call it) have had a bad press but they are actually a force for good.

In previous recessions the banks laid off huge numbers of their well-paid staff only to find themselves having to expensively re-employ them a year or two later. Having learnt from that experience, they then decided to reduce base salaries and pay larger bonuses instead. That way when downturns struck they could cut their overhead costs by not paying bonuses without having to get rid of valuable staff.

This was great in theory but poor in execution. Bonuses were paid on extremely short-term criteria and they did not flex with the economy as had been intended. But the fundamental thinking was correct. If all companies paid lower basic salaries but higher bonuses, based on the right long-term performance criteria, we would be able to flex overhead costs to match the economic cycle without the financial waste and human misery of recurrent cycles of redundancy and rehire.

I hope we are beginning to end this recession. But there will always be downturns. We need to learn from these events and avoid believing that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”.

Neil Gillis is chief executive of Blacks Leisure