It wasn’t a grab for power, or even a declaration that the CBI was incapable of being reinvented. Instead, Martha Lane Fox, one-time co-founder of Lastminute.com, merely reminded the world that other business organisations exist – such as the one she heads.
“Speaking as the president of the British Chambers of Commerce, there are phenomenally strong business networks that can do the job of working together and representing themselves into government,” she said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this week.
It’s a fair point. While the CBI has been the loudest and best-resourced “voice of business” for a very long time, it’s not the only show in town. For good measure, Lane Fox took a polite pop at the narrative – promoted a few times in recent days by former CBI heavyweights – that the furlough scheme during the pandemic was cooked up by the CBI and the TUC in partnership with the Treasury. Others also laboured, she pointed out, such as BCC staffers working 16-hour days.
It’s her job to big up her organisation, of course, and, since the business world is meant to be competitive, one would be disappointed if somebody wasn’t itching to fill the lobbying void, either temporarily or permanently. But Lane Fox makes a decent argument about BCC’s credentials and access to Westminster and Whitehall. The body may sometimes be perceived as the CBI’s sleepy cousin, but it has been around for 160 years.
Consider two alternative scripts. The first is the “reimagining” of the CBI as a slimmed-down, reformed body along the lines intended by its president, Brian McBride and Rain Newton-Smith, who took up her post as its new director general on Wednesday. The problem with that plan is that even McBride concedes the CBI may not survive and others, such as senior City figure Helena Morrissey, say it’s finished. Morrissey’s stance also chimes with an undercurrent of opinion among some big-company corporate-affairs types. There is an appetite in some quarters to try doing things differently.
How about an entirely new organisation, the other idea doing the rounds? The drawback there is that it’s hard to invent something from scratch. The only tentative proposal so far comes from WPI Strategy, a public affairs firm. Forget it, say some: WPI’s founders have links to the Conservative party and there’s no point backing a startup body, even as a stopgap, that carries a party political whiff when a general election lies around the corner.
All of which leads one back to the BCC. Among the non-CBI bodies in the “B5” business organisations, it is the only candidate for the captain’s role. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), as its name indicates, has no pretensions to represent all sizes of companies. Make UK is focused on the manufacturing sector. And the Institute of Directors has shrunk in size in recent years and its 20,000 members join as individuals, rather than in a business capacity.
The BCC’s sleepy image perhaps owes something to its devolved structure and skew (less so than the FSB) towards small- and medium-sized businesses. There are 53 regional chambers of commerce affiliated to a central body whose last set of accounts showed only 32 members of staff.
Too provincial? Actually, that feature could be viewed as a virtue of sorts. The traditional grumble about the CBI is that it has been dominated by a cosy club of big companies. The Bank of England, note, also prizes its network of regional agents as its eyes and ears to know what’s happening on the ground in the economy. And it would be wrong to think of the BCC as too local and regional: it also has an overseas network.
There would still be a job to do to gain the confidence of FTSE 100 companies and very large companies, whose views obviously cannot be ignored. To effectively seize the business lobbying microphone, more experienced lobbyists would surely have to be hired. There is a reason why most large European countries have a body that looks more like the CBI than the BCC.
But if the CBI, despite Newton-Smith’s efforts at reinvention, proves to be permanently off the pitch, it would surely worth seeing what the BCC could do. It sounds keen. That’s a start.
