How one week can show there's all to play for

CBI Annual Conference was big news this week. Who knew there’d be so much interest in my articulation of regional economic policy?

We didn’t opt for our usual venue – a top-class, London hotel. Because while London remains the world’s greatest capital city, economic opportunity in the UK is everywhere.?

Instead we kicked off in the North East – with the Prime Minister. Then headed to Birmingham to hear from the Labour leader. And we travelled to Belfast, Yeovil, Swansea and Woking too. Symbolically we ended up in ITN’s Westminster studio, right across the river from Parliament.

Business feels betwixt and between at the moment.

The summer was a period of total optimism and ambition coming out of lockdown. But over?recent weeks, it’s clear how squeezed things have become. Labour shortages, cost and wage inflation and supply chain shortages dominate. Add to that pandemic uncertainty, energy costs and Article 16 fears.

Business leaders now appear to have a twin track mindset: growth and ambition remain the plan, but bandwidth is mostly deployed on current hurdles. One personal reflection from my meetings – there are high levels of resilience and leadership strength among bosses who’ve got used to unprecedented volatility these past couple of years.

I am confident therefore that ambition will remain.?

As Nissan’s Kevin Fitzpatrick said on one of our panel discussions: “If you can’t juggle the present and the future, you don’t have a future”.

Seize the Moment: from vision to reality

We can’t put the future on hold. That’s what we did in 2008 and it led to a decade of anaemic growth.?

We must create momentum following the pandemic, Brexit and COP, and make big bets for the economy. Despite the current challenges, I was struck by just how much growth was still part of the plan for the world-class speakers we had on stage.?

And together, over three days, they helped us get under the skin of our six Seize the Moment themes. These are just some of the things we heard:

1.?????On decarbonisation, it’s time to get real about making green markets happen – in hydrogen, for example?

2.?????On trade, we need to open up new ground on services too

3.?????For a changing workforce, the UK has a long-term imperative to build new skills for new areas of growth; but a short-term need to release capacity quickly

4.?????Thriving regions requires higher value sectors, firms, skills and investment (see my speech, where we?announced the launch of a CBI Centre for Thriving Regions)

5.?????In health, firms will lock in the behaviours that they have adopted during the pandemic on employee wellbeing

6.?????And innovation will get faster not slower, so there’s no rest allowed. To reflect that reality, the CBI has launched its new Seize the Moment film – a kind of Nike advert for UK economic performance.

So, what happens next?

My head is spinning on what all this means for 2022. I will reflect a bit and try and write something before Christmas. But I do know that we need a year of both greater ambition and real delivery across the economy.?

Ambition begins with a north star of 2.5% growth not the 1.3% growth in the government’s plan. That's the challenge I set out to government in?The Times last weekend.?

And for all the talk of a high-wage, high-skill, high-investment economy, we still lack the mechanisms to create it. That’s where we’ve now got to do the work.

From government, we need far more decisiveness and detail around its growth plans. From business, we need more investment. We can help each other deliver both. And we must.

I’m now a year into my role as Director General of the CBI, and I’m still as optimistic as I started about the part business can play in all this – whether we’re shaping change, leading it or learning from each other about how to embrace it.

But there’s a bit of jeopardy coming into view – that we slip back into business as usual or settle for just good enough.?Seizing the moment is hard – but nothing is more important. We will never have this kind of reset moment again.