INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY FAILS TO MATERIALISE

The continuing failure of BIS to deliver and its failure to be the “Department for Growth”, which Business Secretary Vince Cable promised is a national scandal.

Despite giving 16 speeches on the need for an industrial strategy, Vince Cable has not delivered one. BIS has failed to adopt the strategic approach that the UK needs to give businesses certainty. Instead of leadership, all we have seen since this rotten Tory-Lib Dem Government came to power is chaos, confusion and uncertainty.

As Vince Cable has said, the government lacks a “compelling vision” of how Britain can succeed in the future, and where new jobs are going to come from. Just as the Government has choked off demand by making the wrong decisions on the economy in the short-term, they have also failed to offer a credible plan of how Britain will pay its way in the world in the future.

The Government’s rag bag of measures are small in scale and limited in impact - they fail to meet the size of the challenges - all the while they are pursuing an economy based on people facing low wages and insecurity.

Even Lord Heseltine said in his recent report that the message he keeps hearing is that the UK does not have a strategy for growth and wealth creation. The fact that a former Conservative Cabinet Minister is still calling on the Government to come up with a growth strategy halfway through the lifetime of this Parliament is a damning indictment of the Government’s failure.

Business leaders have been unimpressed with the Government’s business policy and lack of industrial strategy. John Cridland, the Director General of the CBI, said “Where’s the beef?” in response to David Cameron’s speech to the CBI conference last Monday.

In the CBI’s, ‘Playing our strongest hand: maximising the UK’s industrial opportunites’, report this month says “the current hands-off approach to growth is failing to provide the confidence necessary for businesses to compete for the biggest opportunities out there. Rebalancing the UK economy must consist of boosting our productive potential, which means reviving business investment and trade as key drivers of growth. The debate is no longer over whether the UK needs an industrial strategy, but about what form it should take.”

According to the Chartered Management Institute almost two thirds of managers (63%) have little or no confidence in the Government’s current economic policy. Furthermore, 19% of managers give the Government a vote of no confidence. Business optimism is lower than it was six months ago, dropping from a net +11 to -2 since April.

This is clear evidence that the country is crying out for Labour’s One Nation Industrial Strategy. One Nation politics has to have at its very heart an economy in which everybody has a stake and in which wealth and prosperity is fairly shared.

An economy which encourages huge levels of inequality, or which relies on one sector or a small number of regions above over all others, resulting in huge distortions and vulnerabilities, cannot be an effective or fair way of doing things.

Growth must become more balanced across regions and sectors, so that more in our country benefit from growth and our economy is more resilient in the face of global shocks.