An economic prize worth £700bn lies in wait for Britain by 2030 if business and government can forge a partnership focused on innovation across key industry sectors, a report from the CBI will say next week.
Sky News has learnt that Britain’s biggest employers’ group will urge ministers to require all of the UK’s economic regulators to enshrine investment and innovation as part of their core remits.
The call from the CBI will come after the former Conservative leader, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, was asked by Boris Johnson to make recommendations for removing barriers to start-ups in a post-Brexit economy.
Sources familiar with the report – entitled Seize the Moment: How can business transform the UK economy? – said it would outline an ambitious blueprint for reviving Britain’s competitiveness.
One of its principal ideas is to ensure that industry regulators such as Ofcom and the Financial Conduct Authority be obliged to pay heed to the impact of their decision-making on the ability of British companies to innovate.
The report is intended to form part of a more constructive relationship between the CBI and Downing Street after years in which the lobbying group’s opposition to Brexit caused severe frictions.
Tony Danker, the CBI’s new director-general, told the Sunday Times in a recent interview that it now “violently agree[d]” with the government on major issues such as decarbonisation and its approach to levelling-up the economy in the aftermath of the pandemic.
One person close to the CBI said the group continued to stand ready to “constructively criticise” government policy.
An example of that would appear in next week’s report in the form of a recommendation to scrap the Apprenticeship Levy and replace it with a Learning for Life Levy “that ends cross-subsidy and challenges each firm to spend every penny investing in the skills of their workforce”, the person said.
The CBI declined to comment ahead of the report’s launch on Monday.