Ron Sandler, the man chosen by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to head Northern Rock when it was nationalised, is preparing to find a successor to take over the day-to-day running of the stricken mortgage bank.

Sandler, who has been paid £90,000 a month since his appointment in January, will step back to become non-executive chairman once he has found "someone with more hands-on banking experience" to be Northern Rock's chief executive.

At the time of nationalisation, Sandler said he would continue as executive chairman until a new management team had been selected and the bank was back on the road to recovery.

So far he is believed to have paid back almost £4 billion of the £24 billion of taxpayers' money provided to Northern Rock in emergency loans, and declared himself "quite satisfied" that the bank is on track to repay all the loan by 2010.

Northern Rock has yet to appoint headhunters to find its new chief executive, and Sandler would not disclose when he expects the handover to take place.

"The key requirements have been to give the organisation some sense of stability and direction - and getting the senior management focused on the creation and delivery of a plan," he said.

"That's been the agenda for the first four months. But there is another agenda beginning to take shape which is an operational agenda, which is how debt management is handled day to day - the design and fine tuning of savings products, the fine tuning of mortgage products and the detailed reorganisation of some of our contact centres. That is a more operational focus."

Northern Rock is expected to have axed 2000 of its 6000-strong workforce by this autumn as part of its cost-cutting measures.