As the hunt for growth gets tougher, Britain needs a business plan. As it happens, the nation’s firms, trade unions and consumer groups agree on what it needs to say.
As our Business and Trade Select Committee travels the country listening to hundreds of businesses and trade unions, economists, academics and experts, I’m struck by two big truths. First, there’s a real bullishness that Britain can indeed become the fastest-growing economy in the G7. But second, we can’t carry on as before, for three big reasons.
The “American retreat” from the multilateral system built after the war requires us to step up and help shoulder new burdens ranging from defence to the defence of free trade.
This will come with new costs; it also offers a wealth of new opportunities to help shape new markets of the future with allies such as the European Union, Switzerland, Japan, Australia and Canada.
The opportunities for a strong, dependable, predictable defence exporter like the UK – which happens to be a services superpower, a world beater in tech and AI, and a green energy leader – are going to be legion if we get our story straight. We’ll need to pivot from simply signing free trade deals to really deepening trade diplomacy – especially in defence, green energy and AI – and above all strike for a super-ambitious reset with our closest neighbours, the EU.
Second, the green and digital transitions demand completely new ways of working between government departments, between regulators, and between central and local government. As business tries to take new possibilities and blaze new trails – and create new jobs – firms are too often held back by disorganised and disjointed public agencies that simply aren’t rowing together.
We can’t afford this any longer. Which is why the comprehensive spending review needs to deliver a revolution in reinventing government for new times so that the public sector once again becomes an enabler of change.
The Office for Life Science is a good example of where we have figured out how to coordinate better. We need to make this the norm as we better coordinate skills policy, access to finance, university-business links, lower-cost energy, grid connections, digital connectivity, regional transport, planning reform – and public procurement.
Finally, we have to worry about small business much more. There’s a risk – ministers have clocked it – that we don’t grow as fast as we could because the economy is held back by a long tail of under-productive small firms. We need a plan to fix this. We need to revolutionise access to scale-up finance to stop our high-potential firms being gobbled up by the Americans and think much harder about ways to incentivise take-up of digital and AI technologies by busy and time-poor small-business leaders.
Britain is one of the world’s best places to do business. Our entrepreneurs have been making history by inventing the future since the days of the Industrial Revolution. In these new times, we’re going to need every ounce of that spirit to ensure our best days lie ahead.
This article first appeared in our Spotlight Igniting Growth supplement of 14 March 2025.
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