Business and Trade Committee 

Oral evidence: Industrial strategy, HC 727

Tuesday 4 March 2025

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 4 March 2025.

Watch the meeting 

Members present: Liam Byrne (Chair); Antonia Bance; John Cooper; Sarah Edwards; Alison Griffiths; Charlie Maynard; Gregor Poynton; Rosie Wrighting; Matt Western.

Science, Innovation and Technology Committee member present: Chi Onwurah.

Questions 152 - 173

Witnesses

II: Miles Celic, CEO, TheCityUK; Stevan Randjelovic, Head of Public Policy & Industry Affairs, WPP; Ramon Kaur, Director of Policy and Public Affairs, EY UK.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Miles Celic, Stevan Randjelovic and Ramon Kaur.

Q152       Chair: Thank you for joining us on this panel in our inquiry looking at the industrial strategy of the United Kingdom and those sectors that have been nominated as special growth-driving sectors by the Government in its Green Paper.

The first question that we would like to put is about whether the Prime Minister’s target of becoming the fastest-growing economy in the G7 is possible and whether your sector is going to grow faster than the overall rate of economic growth. Miles, I will start with you.

Miles Celic: The Prime Minister’s target is possible. It could be done, but it is not entirely in the gift of UK Government. It is a bit like your favourite football team. They might invest heavily in their performance, but you do not know what your competitors are going to do. There is an element that is outside the Prime Minister and this Government’s control.

The UK has a number of immutable advantages, such as time zone, language and so on. There is also the talent pool here, the direction of travel of the industrial strategy, and the indications and sentiments that have been put out by the Chancellor around regulating for growth rather than risk, of which we are extremely supportive. Also, quite candidly, certainly from our industry’s perspective, there is the position of some of the UK’s major competitors.

Yes, the UK is in a good position, but it should not be complacent in any terms at all. There are a number of challenges. We need to make sure we navigate properly what is going to be a tricky geopolitical and international regulatory environment. The UK is at its best when it is an open economy. The Governor of the Bank of England described free trade as being in the British DNA. It is something that is a natural advantage for the UK.

Putting all of those together, in the medium to long term I am an optimist, dependent on us not being complacent.

Stevan Randjelovic: Likewise, we are optimistic. We believe the growth mission is possible. I would also like to refer to one of your previous questions, about whether the industrial strategy is necessary. Yes, it is absolutely necessary. Why? The advertising industry, which I am here to represent, is a driver of growth. We are doing as well as the entire economy. We will only do well if the UK economy is doing well.

Yes, we are optimistic. However, there are certain shortfalls that we believe could be addressed, mostly in the regulatory field but also in investment in AI, in particular.

Ramon Kaur: It is an ambitious target, but I share Miles and Stephen’s sentiment. We are in a very strong place. I am particularly pleased to see that the PBS sector has been recognised. We are a powerhouse of a sector. If you think of the diverse, broad church of industries that we have within professional and business services, we are talking about lawyers, accountants, architects and designers, but we also have a fantastic regional footprint. If we think about a firm like EY, we are in 22 locations across the breadth of the UK. In all of those locations, we also have SMEs that have the potential to thrive in our sector and really grow. Providing dedicated support and a road map for the PBS sector could be a real lever for growth.

Q153       Chair: Is it possible to define the PBS sector, or is it just too amorphous?

Ramon Kaur: If you go with the Professional and Business Services Council, they would include the broad church of architects and designers. It is very broad. They exclude financial services, so we have a slight definitional difference to how TheCityUK would refer to it. In terms of PBS as defined by Government, we represent 17% of the workforce and over 500,000 firms. We are looking at 5.4 million jobs. We are a significant sector.

Miles Celic: Just to come in, I would not disagree on that specifically.

Chair: It is very diverse.

Miles Celic: It is very diverse. We represent related professional services, which is management consultancy, accountancy and legal services. We see those as part of the cluster or ecosystem of financial and related professional services. I would agree with Ramon: this is a massive national success story. It is a massive national strategic asset. it is something we do very well as a country.

Q154       Sarah Edwards: Is the UK an exciting market for professional and business services? If not, why not?

Ramon Kaur: It is. In terms of exports, we are second only to the US. If I could just give some numbers, it was £185 billion in exports last year. It is 21% of UK exports. It is an exciting and diverse industry that is successfully exporting. If we think about inward investment, EY does an annual attractiveness survey that looks at the sentiment and appetite of foreign investors to invest in the UK. That survey has repeatedly shown that this is a sector that people are drawn to as well. It is an exciting sector.

Stevan Randjelovic: I would agree. We have some research on this by WPP BAV, which did a survey that went around 89 countries putting questions to people from across different demographics, including business decision makers. Some 82% want to invest in the UK. When they were asked whether the UK is open for business or not, the UK was ranked in 37th place. France and Germany are around 20th place globally, when business decision makers are asked. The main driver of their reluctance is the so-called bureaucratic burden, which goes again to the regulatory burden that sometimes is perceived by potential investors.

In the advertising world, the UK is a big market. It is the third largest in the world. The annual advertising spend in the UK is £40 billion. Not only that, but 2.4 million jobs are directly supported by the advertising industry. There is a breadth of talent that supports that vision.

Miles Celic: I would agree with Ramon and Stevan. The UK is in a really exciting position. The point has been made that we are the second biggest exporter of services in the world. The FT described us as the Saudi Arabia of services exports. You can look at that as positive or not, but I thought it was quite a good shorthand.

We are the only G7 economy where services exports outstrip goods exports. If you look at management consultancy, export growth has grown by almost double over the last 10 years. If you look at legal services in the UK, it is bigger than automotive. It is growing by double digits in most years. It has had 80% growth over the last 10 years. It is the biggest single international legal services sector.

The point that I would make is, if you look at some of our major competitors in this space—I think particularly of the United States—those are massive domestic markets. The UK—it is a terrific market, but it is a market of only 70 million people—has to think about exports. Any company that is growing in the UK has to think about exports really quickly.

That is why the connection between the industrial strategy, which we are talking about today, and the trade strategy—I was delighted to hear this in the earlier conversation—is so important.

Q155       Sarah Edwards: Picking up on that point, how successful has the UK been in attracting investment into the professional and business services sector, compared to its international competitors? Where would you put us in that global ranking?

Miles Celic: We are pretty successful. The sorts of firms that are represented around this table and elsewhere are a fantastic example of that. Again, to look at legal services, all the world’s top 40 largest legal services firms are represented in the UK. That is partly because English law is such a fantastic platform, of which we ought to be making more. We are good at that.

If I am very candid, one of the challenges that we have had over the last 10 years or so is that we have been very successful against a deeply and unusually challenging backdrop. The UK has looked politically unreliable for about 10 years. People immediately assume that a lot of that is connected to the Brexit referendum and the uncertainty that came out of that. That was a factor, but it also goes back, frankly, to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.

A number of international investors have made the point to us directly that the UK could be relied upon to be predictable and almost a little dull, but you would get good returns there. The lack of policy stability, tax stability and regulatory stability has been a drag factor. We have heard that directly. A number of companies have pressed pause on investment decisions. Those sums of money do not sit to one side waiting for the UK to become an investable place again. They go elsewhere, into another investment opportunity in another part of the world.

The counterfactual is hard to point to. We have been very successful, and we continue to be successful. I will emphasise throughout today, and always do, the risks of complacency, but some of the background sentiment has made the UK harder to invest in than it has been historically.

Q156       Sarah Edwards: I have one last point, just to pick up on that. The Government have laid out their industrial strategy and their trade strategy, but we also need to think about how domestic elements such as procurement could be used. That could have a lot of benefits for the entire country, looking at where growth can be maximised across communities. Could the Government be smarter about how they use public procurement, for example, and bring in that supportive growth factor across the sector?

Miles Celic: Colleagues on the panel may have views as well, but from our point of view, yes, absolutely. It was good to see the Chancellor making her announcement about streamlining the procurement process around defence, for instance. That has been a challenge for a number of SMEs. I know we are talking about professional services here but, just as an example, one idea that we have floated with a number of members of the Committee is helping the connectivity in terms of finance between what the public sector needs and what the private sector can provide.

For instance, one of the challenges we have, just very basically, is how a prospectus is built for an investment opportunity in the public sector. Private sector investors tend to look for a particular kind of term sheet, prospectus or something else. Often, the expertise to provide those does not exist in the public sector. We think there is a role for the private sector to work with the public sector, and for the industry to work with Government, to find a way of bridging that gap and crowding in private sector investment off the back of that. We would be very happy to brief Committee members and Committee staff on that outside this meeting.

Q157       Chair: You are saying that there is not really a well-established and well-defined pipeline of investable propositions with nice, clear term sheets that is nicely set out for investors to come and take their pick from.

Miles Celic: Yes, absolutely. That is a key part of the problem. It is something some of our competitors do extremely well. I would point to Singapore as the obvious example, but France also tends to do this better, though not always perfectly.

Any investor is looking for, “What is the term sheet? Are you ready to go?” That is one of the reasons why the planning reforms that have been put forward by this Government are so welcome. People will not sit around waiting for something to take place. As I say, they will deploy the capital they have to generate a return for the owners. The term sheets are absolutely critical. Without that, shovels do not go in the ground.

Q158       Chair: We could contrast what has happened in the UK in the past with the approach that, for example, President Macron has taken to driving inward investment.

Miles Celic: Yes, absolutely. It has almost become a joke that there are fewer international investors who do not have President Macron’s personal mobile number than do. The events they hold each year in the Élysée are probably best in class, although I would say the Government’s global investment summit is catching up with those pretty quickly.

To give one example, we have been told that President Macron sits down on a regular basis—I believe it is monthly—with French defence firms and the French chiefs of staff to talk about how they can drive exports and what Government can do to support that.

From the conversations that we have with international investors and what we are seeing in current events, the reality is that the links and the strategic direction between industry and Government are going to be far closer than at any time since the cold war. That is something that the French have a bit more muscle memory on than we do.

Stevan Randjelovic: May I just add something on the public procurement point? There are two ways that public procurement can help. One is working with companies and investing in emerging technologies that will be drivers of growth, such as AI. That might involve working with companies that have implemented AI in their workflows. Secondly, public procurement can align purchasing with some of the overarching Government goals of growth. Sometimes there is a sentiment that the public pound is invested in companies who have their workforce elsewhere offshore, whereas many of the companies that operate and have their staff onshore in the UK are sometimes excluded from the public procurement process based on cost.

Q159       Chair: Should there be more conditions on public procurement to, for example, support local jobs in the UK?

Stevan Randjelovic: Yes.

Q160       Chair: Is that a shared view?

Ramon Kaur: I do not really have a view on that one, to be honest.

Miles Celic: It would depend on what the circumstances are and the extent to which you were choosing to bring in private sector capital to support that. Ultimately, the firms that we represent do not own that capital. They are custodians of that capital and they have to deploy it to generate the best possible returns for the owners.

Q161       Matt Western: Can I just go back to the point you were making about our reputation? We had a very platinum-level reputation several years ago, particularly in certain services that you were talking about. I think you said that that had been damaged. What needs to be done to restore that reputation, given that it is such an important part of our economy?

Miles Celic: Policy stability and predictability is absolutely key. That would be the first one that I would point to. That is something that the UK has been better at over recent years. It is certainly something we have seen in our interactions with international partner governance and international partner companies and industries. The UK has made progress on that.

If you look at the tax system, we can talk about the level of tax, but it is overly complex. I have worked at two large British multinationals that would, as a matter of course, regularly review domicile. Tax would be one of 20 or 30 different factors that we would look at. Everyone assumes that what we are looking at is the tax rate. That is part of it, but it is the fact that the UK is now, compared to most or many of its OECD competitors, more complex than the OECD average and becoming more and more complex each year. From recollection, the tax code is now 2 million words. That is a cost in and of itself. Navigating that and staffing up for that becomes a challenge for companies and a drag on competitiveness. We would point to that.

Some of the decisions that we have seen from HMRC and indeed from the courts have effectively retrospectively changed tax treatments. That is a huge problem. The Spanish solar industry took years to recover—it arguably never really did recover—from the retrospective removal of tax support for solar panels in Spain. That predictability is absolutely key.

The final one that I would point to is the sense from international investors that there is longer-term policy stability that they can depend on over five to 10 years. If I look at Singapore and, to a certain degree, some of our European competitors, they have done better on that than we have in recent years.

Ramon Kaur: Just building on Miles’s point on stability, he is absolutely right. Businesses love certainty. One thing that is positive from the industrial strategy is that, for the first time in a long time, we see a dedicated 10-year plan. Not only have eight sectors of high growth been identified; there is a real, concerted effort to think about the key enabling sectors around infrastructure, skills, education and transport, which are going to be fundamental if we are going to have a successful strategy that delivers against that very ambitious target to have the highest growth rate in the G7.

Q162       Matt Western: If I can turn to WPP, I am particularly interested to hear what your thoughts are on the barriers that we face in terms of the trade in services. What sort of barriers are there? What do the Government need to do to address those?

Stevan Randjelovic: The main barrier that we see is really the perception and reality around the UK enacting regulations and increasing the tax burden. We have witnessed the rise in national insurance contributions. If you look at what the Government are proposing, from additional reporting requirements for publicly listed companies to new laws on employment rights and so on, there is a continuous flow of new regulations.

Companies such as the one I work for continuously have to invest more and more resources in understanding and then complying with the law. Those are the basic resources that we need to be able to invest in growth opportunities, such as AI.

Q163       Matt Western: To be clear, in terms of selling services into other countries, WPP has a huge footprint globally. What barriers are there in terms of selling UK-based professional services elsewhere? Is that something you have experience in?

Stevan Randjelovic: No, not really. As you said, we have a global footprint. We have over 100,000 people operating in more than 90 countries globally. We have a footprint in every country. The trade barriers do not always impact us. What impacts us are the trade barriers in tariffs. That impacts the broader economy. If consumer confidence goes down, companies become unwilling to spend. They naturally withdraw some of their money from their marketing budgets. Therefore, that impacts us in our ability to grow, and the economy’s ability to grow.

Miles Celic: From our perspective, it is slightly different. A lot of the firms we work with are dependent on a number of professional qualifications. Mutual recognition of professional qualifications becomes a challenge. There are ways of working around that, including some of the methods that WPP have adopted. Ultimately, a lot of this is about the ability, in essence, to fly in and fly out, as it is termed, to provide services.

Broadly speaking, it tends to work quite well. One of the things I would point to that is more and more of a factor is data. Servicification of exports, which you will be very familiar with, means that a lot of manufacturing firms will essentially use their goods as a loss leader, but make their money on the maintenance contract on a jet engine, for instance, or something like that.

What is common to both goods and servicification and sole services companies is that data is now as important, certainly for our financial services members, as capital is. Data localisation becomes a real problem, and the ability of data to flow across borders with minimal impediments is increasingly a challenge at a time when a number of jurisdictions are approaching data in a much more restrictive way, including for national security purposes.

Q164       Matt Western: In terms of priorities for any trade negotiations, MRA is the priority.

Miles Celic: MRAs are a huge advantage, and digital economy agreements are a huge advantage. We would say that the era of the big‑ticket, full, comprehensive free trade agreement is probably largely behind us for a number of pragmatic reasons, as well as the political circumstances that we are in globally.

That does not mean that we cannot do things such as have been done on the Swiss-UK financial services mutual recognition arrangement, the moves that have been made in India on opening up the Indian market to British lawyers, or the digital economy agreement with Singapore. There is a lot more that can be done. Often, the nature of those arrangements and agreements is that they are much better suited to services than FTAs, which, as my colleagues on the panel have already pointed out, tend to be much more focused on goods.

Ramon Kaur: Data is absolutely critical. The UK-EU trade and co‑operation agreement has been critical for mutual recognition of standards and allowing personal data to be shared across UK-EU borders. Similarly, the Atlantic declaration in the US is a really important agreement. If we can get data moving freely, that is absolutely critical to the success of our sector. Similarly, on access to skilled talent, mutual recognition of qualifications is very important for us as well.

Q165       Matt Western: Do you have any concerns about the tariff landscape that we are increasingly facing and what that might do in terms of your provision of services globally?

Ramon Kaur: So far, most of the language and focus of rhetoric has been around provision of goods. There have been fewer conversations around tariffs. Particularly if we look at the US, we have such a closely intertwined relationship that is mutually beneficial. It is in both parties’ interests for that to continue.

Miles Celic: As Stevan has touched on, tariffs are a background context problem for the industry, for professional services, because they point to the raising of barriers between jurisdictions.

We tend to find, as I have touched on already, that when there is greater ability for capital to flow, for people to move between markets, for regulatory barriers to be reduced and for the avoidance of regulatory arbitrage, that is a positive for an economy such as the UK, which tends to have to be much more open, much more nimble and much more liberal.

The backdrop to this is concerning in terms of the direction on tariffs, but direct impact on professional services of tariff barriers tends to be more limited. It is about the canary in the coalmine factor that it tends to bring with it.

Q166       Antonia Bance: We have spoken a little about some of the domestic barriers to growth, but I wondered if you would perhaps like to expand on what you see as the factors that may be holding back growth here in the UK.

Miles Celic: There is a massive cultural problem—there is no getting away from that—in terms of the UK’s approach on risk. We have, for very understandable reasons, sought to push risk out of the system or at least to minimise risk. We have sought, as a society, to basically tell regulators and politicians that we should move from a world of caveat emptor to caveat venditor.

As the Chancellor put it in her Mansion House speech in November last year, and as I have already touched on, we need to move to a position where regulators are being told to regulate for growth, rather than regulating for risk. Certainly, we have seen in some of the post-Brexit changes that a direction of travel set by Government did not always survive contact with how that instinct or impetus was implemented by individual regulators.

That is not, to be clear, to beat up regulators unfairly. All the regulators are doing is following the direction of travel that has been set for them by society. We would absolutely point to that as a critical challenge. As was touched on in the previous panel, having a real clarity, therefore, between what Government is doing on a cross-departmental basis, what Government is doing working hand in hand with regulators and other public bodies, and how it is working with the private sector in furtherance of the delivery of its targets on growth is absolutely central.

This has to be a national effort, and it has to be something that brings together all parts of the UK to deliver. It is going to require a team UK effort to make this work.

Q167       Chair: Let me just pick that point up very quickly. If 10 is “completely seamless” between Government Departments and between Government and regulators, and one is just “a complete catastrophe”, where is the UK at the moment?

Miles Celic: I am genuinely not trying to dodge the question, but it depends which bit of Government and which regulator you are talking about.

Chair: Let us take the financial services sector.

Miles Celic: If I was looking at financial services, I would say that connectivity between where regulators and Government are is seven and rising.

Q168       Antonia Bance: Mr Randjelovic, would you like to comment on the points about barriers to growth? You have already said a little. Is there more you would like to add?

Stevan Randjelovic: I fully agree with Miles—and thank you for pronouncing my last name so well; it is not so common. One thing that all regulators and the Government should have in their mission statements is not only growth, but innovation. We cannot just regulate against risk. The EU has seen that that approach is not always working. They are scaling back on some of their regulation. It is pertinent for the UK’s growth mission to have that innovation also in their mission.

There is one other thing I would just like to highlight. I do not know if it is a proper barrier, but it is something to think about: how to upskill people and how to ensure that we are upskilling people for the next industrial revolution, which is already happening thanks to AI. We are hopeful that the newly created Skills England and also the levy replacing the apprenticeship levy is going to contribute to that, as a result of having much better input from the industry on what is needed, allowing us to use the money that we are paying into the levy pot on training that we actually need and not on the training that we are provided with by the training providers.

Q169       Antonia Bance: Following up on two of those points, first, do we have the balance between risk and innovation in AI correct? We may be straying into the domain of other Committees there. It is a shame Chi is not here, but I know that that is part of your expertise, and I would appreciate your thoughts on it. When it comes to skills, I would appreciate your thoughts on the skills shortages that your sectors are facing. Ms Kaur, I will also come back to you on barriers, but we will start with Mr Randjelovic.

Stevan Randjelovic: On AI regulation, the previous Government started very well, outlining five or six different principles that every regulator needed to take into account. We are fully behind that. There is no need for an overarching, big piece of legislation. We do not need to regulate AI as a technology. If there is a need for regulation, we need to regulate some of the riskier use cases that may exist.

I know that the Government are currently thinking about how to do that, and I know it is also part of the conversation with the US. The principle-based approach, allowing the technology to actually grow and evolve, is something that we are very supportive of.

In terms of skills shortages, the economy of tomorrow and, actually, the economy of today require that interdisciplinarity, which is a combination of creativity—especially relevant for the advertising industry—together with technology. That is not always something that is given, not only by the existing university programmes, but also by the training that is available. That is why we need a better influx of training providers, supported by the levy, which would allow our companies to train our people at that intersection and between disciplines.

Ramon Kaur: On barriers, the regulation point is a valid one. The FCA has approached its growth and competitiveness mandate in a very positive way, and certainly lessons can be learned as Government work with other regulators to look at how they want to approach the issue.

The one thing I would note, though, is that when we looked at our EY attractiveness survey and at the pull factors for foreign investors, there is a risk around throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Some 50% of the respondents that we speak to say they really value the legal and regulatory regime of the UK. This is our standing internationally; the fact that this is a safe, trustworthy place to do business is a pull in. When we add in that the biggest inward investor into the UK is the US, sometimes the conversation around deregulation can be a little bit stark. Actually, there is probably nuance there. When looking at deregulation, the issue is really smart regulation and that we still hold the principles—

Chair: It was quite expensive when things went wrong last time.

Ramon Kaur: Exactly, yes. There is definitely a balance to be had.

Q170       Antonia Bance: What about skills?

Ramon Kaur: The PBS sector, in some ways, you can view almost as a skills factory. People are so important. Talent is so important to what we do. If I look at EY, domestically apprenticeships have been hugely important for us. We take on about 1,600 school leavers and graduates each year. We offer a level 7 apprenticeship, which is regulated by Ofsted, and Ofsted have rated it as outstanding. To Stevan’s point, having the flexibility to use what was the apprenticeship levy and is now the skills levy to be able to fund those sorts of schemes is really important.

Also, from a social mobility perspective, we have seen a great uptick in the diversity of people we can bring into the profession. That is important for the attractiveness and sustainability of the profession. There is sometimes a misunderstanding around apprenticeships. At the end of level 7 apprenticeships now, people will come out with an accounting qualification that is exactly the same as what a graduate would have done. The Law Society are very enthusiastic about solicitor apprenticeships.

There was a question you asked the other panel. If we look at the potential disconnect within Government, what would be really helpful is joined-up thinking. In the Green Paper, DBT is very positive about apprenticeships. There have been slightly different soundings on the treatment of level 7s, and there is a bit of a question mark about how that will land. That is for the Department for Education and for Skills England. We must have everybody around the table to say, “What are we trying to do?” and, if we see this as a valuable vehicle, “How do we encourage its use?”, rather than inadvertently thinking in siloes. There is still a little bit of Government thinking that becomes quite siloed along departmental lines.

Q171       Gregor Poynton: We will shortly see the forthcoming sector plan on the professional and business services. Can you help us think about how we should judge that sector plan, both in itself, but then on an ongoing basis? What does success look like?

Ramon Kaur: It is great to see that the Government are leaning on expert and representative bodies. The Professional and Business Services Council is heavily involved in formulating the sector plan. It is really important that they are conscious that the SME voice and the regional voice are really loud here. It strays into exports, but there is real advantage if we can help those SMEs and those hubs in Leeds, Manchester and Edinburgh to really thrive and expand. That is going to ladder up to the kind of growth that we need to achieve.

Talking about what we want to see from a sector plan, let us be specific and let us be ambitious. Let us set some targets that we can actually measure. What is the percentage we want to see exports increasing by along geographical lines? Let us set some goals around recruitment numbers or the people we want to bring into the profession. Something measurable always helps to anchor back to success, rather than us ending up talking very broadly about it.

For our sector plan, the connectivity points that the Green Paper points to around skills are vital. We touched on apprenticeships and domestic skills. A really important part of our profession as well and of our ability to compete globally comes from the ability to deploy international experts and bring people in where that benefits us.

I will share a live example that would apply not just to the PBS sector but, I am sure, to life sciences and AI as well. If you have a world-class expert you want to bring in from India, the US or Spain, the ability to have a skilled worker visa regime that recognises that you want to bring in an expert to help upskill your teams and maybe work with you for a year and then go really has an important international competitiveness element.

Q172       Chair: Is the Home Office incredibly helpful at the moment?

Ramon Kaur: That would be a question for DBT to speak to the Home Office about, in terms of how they want to approach the issue.

Q173       Chair: You did not say yes.

Ramon Kaur: I have not had any direct conversations with them on it, so I cannot comment.

Stevan Randjelovic: The national strategy, the Green Paper itself, speaks about how they are going to measure success, and I actually agree with quite a lot of it. One is output growth. Will exports actually grow or not? In advertising, we have around £18 billion of exports and about £4.9 billion of surplus. It is currently successful, but we would like to see that growth go further.

The second one is productivity, but that is actually about the point around connectivity between different sectors. None of our sectors exists in isolation. A successful industrial strategy will see the points of connectivity and how those can bring further growth.

The third is about international position. Is the UK more or less competitive than the US, the EU, Singapore and other competitors?

Miles Celic: I agree with pretty much everything that Ramon and Stevan have said. The PBSC, under Iain Wright’s leadership, has been a great place where all of this has come together. The PBSC is at its best when it has something that it can engage positively and constructively with Government on. If we are looking at lessons from the past, we have kind of been here before, which is one of the reasons why Greg Clark’s involvement is very welcome.

It goes back to predictability and instability. We did have, effectively, a sector deal for the sector a while back, which then fell afoul of political movements in the Government of the time. It is important to have some clarity around the asks and the specifics around the asks. Those should probably be relatively few in number, but clearly achievable and with clear targets and metrics around them.

We very much welcome the creation of the industrial strategy council, but it remains unclear, if this is going to be a 10-year strategy, to what extent business will be consulted on it and brought in on it. Is that through the PBSC? Is that through other mechanisms? What forms of consultation will be utilised? Is it solely through the ISC? That would be a mistake. How is it kept live?

The picture in 10 years’ time, in terms of where our major international competitors are versus where they are today, is going to be very different, so we are going to need to have a plan that can adapt, but that retains its direction of principle and strategy.

Chair: That has been extremely helpful. Thank you very much indeed for giving us your time and your expertise. That concludes this panel.