Putting the industry back into departmental business
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Version 0 of 1. When Nicholas Ridley turned up as secretary of state at the Department for Trade and Industry in 1989 he famously asked: “What is the DTI for? I’ve got bugger all to do, and thousands of staff to help me do it.” In the age of Thatcherite privatisations, the sentiment struck a chord. Wasn’t the job of government to get out of the way of business? The crisis of identity continued until the New Labour years. Under Gordon Brown’s chancellorship, the Treasury always seemed to have a bigger voice in business affairs anyway. In 2007, the DTI was disbanded and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform created. It lasted only two years until the next shuffle, with Lord Mandelson back in government, saw the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills coming into being, assuming responsibility for skills, apprenticeships and higher and further education. Now the wheel is turning again. Theresa May has merged two departments to create the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, and has returned skills and so on to the education department. The new department’s bold name, and its broad brief, looks like a statement of intent. The last two words were presumably designed to send a message that the UK will not be shy about actually having an industrial strategy. That has been in doubt during Sajid Javid’s short tenure. “I don’t particularly like the word strategy coupled with industrial,” he told the FT last year, seemingly marking out his ideological difference with Sir Vince Cable, his Liberal Democrat predecessor during the coalition government of 2010-15. May has offered little detail about her plans for the economy. But her one and only speech during the leadership campaign hinted at strongly interventionist policy – Treasury-backed bonds for new infrastructure projects; a “better” research and development policy; workers in boardrooms; a block on foreign takeovers if they would harm “important” British industries; more housebuilding; and a plan to help “not one or even two of our great regional cities but every single one of them,” which seemed to indicate that not all the money will flow to Manchester. Some of those goals don’t require financial backing. In theory, in a post-Brexit world, it is a simple matter to change the law to make takeovers subject to a public-interest test. Similarly, if the prime minister really wants to put workers’ representatives in boardrooms, she only has to face down the inevitable squeals of protest from big business. Much of the rest of the agenda, however, requires determination to be backed with hard capital. Judge the real seriousness of the plan only when the financial answers become clearer. But a sense of identity is a start. And, if more Treasury-backed bonds for infrastructure implies less grovelling for Chinese state cash on terms that are as clear as mud, so much the better. Japanese logos still go-go The Superdry fad was meant to have turned to dust long ago. The half-decade-old theory held that there is a finite number of middle-aged blokes willing to wear kit sporting a dodgy Japanese logo. It’s time then to acknowledge that Superdry has more staying power than thought. Parent SuperGroup is even paying dividends these days. Revenues were up a fifth last year to £590m and pre-tax profit improved 16% to £73.5m. A maiden full-year dividend of 23.2p was supplemented by a special of 20p. The company offers many standard reasons for progress – online investment, wider ranges, better infrastructure, blah, blah – but founder Julian Dunkerton deserves a nod for recognising two years ago that it would best to hire an old hand to instal some basic nuts and bolts of retailing. Dunkerton stepped down as chief executive to become product and brand director and got Euan Sutherland, former boss of Superdrug and B&Q, to do the dull stuff. A share price that dipped as low as 800p in early 2015 is now £15.65, up 17% on Thursday. Smart move. |