I think there's a huge appetite for a new agenda, for a sense of where are we trying to compete in the world? What is our strategy? No post Brexit is no good just saying we left it and we're going to have some trade agreements. It's how are we now going to compete in the world? Now we've created this dislocation in how we used to You can see it most acutely in things like the auto industry. We created friction for trade. No rightly or wrongly, that's what
people voted to do. Now we need a plan for how we compete, and that's popularly called It used to be called industrial strategy. Now this government, for whatever reason, has an aversion to the expression industrial strate. It's what everybody else calls it, so they can't bring themselves to say it. But I don't care whether it's a growth strategy or competitiveness. It's got to be a profound point of view as to how Britain's going to compete.
The government is sort of trying to address this idea of attractiveness the UK is are the hunt reforms, are any of the things you've seen out of government profound as you.
Say, look, I just don't I think one speech doesn't make a strategy. An industrial strategy has to be profound. And it's not just about our attue where we want to compete. What it's about what skills do we want to have? Don't get Government plays a very big part in creating skills. You know, the education sectors nationalized. We have something called the apprenticeship levy, which is a tax on skills and a tax on training. Most of that tax, a large part of that tax, is taken by the
treasury and not respent. Other countries are saying, no, we need laboratory assystems, No we need more coders, No we we need more data scientists. We seem to be agnostic. We don't know what we need, and that's not good enough. The footprint of government is too big in the economy to say we're just hands off, that we let the market decide, because government does create and shape the future direction. A competitive economy is one where the public and private
sector work together. That doesn't mean in an old fashioned sense of taxpayers money going into owning gumbery anything like that. It means we're working together on regulation, on trade, on investment in skills on how government supports entrepreneurs, how we shape the tax system. At the moment that's come slightly adrift post Brexit.
The IPO market in London is basically dried up. There's an issue around pension funds about whether or not they are allowed or are willing or able to invest enough
into UK businesses, and there have been various proposals. Lord lyons, for example, the City of London Lord Mayor was speaking to me about his fifty billion pound fund that he wants to try to put money into UK business I suppose what is your thought on actually trying to make UK capital markets as attractive as they possibly can be, because that's very fundamental to.
Our sits there absolutely and look, companies listing in London is not the be all end of the world, but what we did have with London was a place where people wanted to list and as a result, headquarters obey it and headquarters bring with them a lot of knowledge capital, a lot of inward investment in people, and then they
support the financial markets. You're headquarters in London, you're like to raise money in London so that competing has a place where companies want to list and bath themselves is a natural thing for the UK to do and to set out to do, and we slightly lost the plot. And now some of it to do with Brexit, I mean, just because that creates an aposteric feel for people, but some of it also to with the risk a version that the amount of regulation we're imposing on UK listed companies,
the amount of onerous reporting requirements. None of the things all well intended. It's just you know, the marketers as Saniel report is now two hundred and sixty pages long and next to it will be free on the pages long, and unfortunately an awful lot of that is not actually read by investors. So we just got to think about these things. Know that governance. The more and more governance we require, the more regulation we apply on people all well intended. It may be that other countries are not
doing that. Then you'll lose listings. We've got to think about that. You mentioned that I think the pensions industry is all national tragedy. We have this huge sway of the funds that over the last twenty years we spent d risking by regulation. Pension tystees have no incentive to get a great return for their investors.
Is anyone in government listening or are we already in transition of power mode? I mean these issues around pension funds and around creating growth, is there really a government listening or no.
Look, I think what's happened here is that Rishi Sona has arrived in a semi crisis, both the convulsion of in the economy and financial markets of the Liz Trust era. So their focus has been let's create some stability and let some fix some real here and now problems. His five objectives, which I think I can roughly remember anyway, I think that was fine at the beginning, but it's not fine for the future. And my advice to this government is, if you want to be reelected, you've got
to be the future, not the past. To coin a phrase, you can't be the fag end of thirteen years of conservative rule. And Rishi Sunak is a very different prime minister with a very good grasp of detail, a propensity to analyze and understand things in debt, is very receptive to these ideas. But there's come a point where you have to set out why you're a real break with the past and competition for labor, and I think that point is near