Bringing a refreshing can-do approach to financial issues, Shadow Treasury Minister, Dr Anneliese Dodds MP, led a comprehensive Industry Forum breakfast briefing on Labour party plans for tackling long-standing UK productivity problems. Actions on investment, skills, and regional imbalances are essential but so too is a change in Treasury attitudes to a balanced dialogue with departments, and with the UK regions. Discussion ranged across funding for new infrastructure investment, a new National Investment Bank, public ownership, and employee share ownership. The meeting was held at the new offices of British Water and Lila Thompson, CEO of British Water, outlined the key features of the British Water Industry.

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Join members of the Shadow Treasury and BEIS teams for an evening reception at the Labour Party conference.

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A modern economy needs a good physical and digital infrastructure to support business, education, leisure and social services. But, infrastructure projects usually require long term planning and investment. Policy uncertainty, policy changes and priority changes can therefore all lead to lack of action or the waste of effort and resources on cancelled or modified projects. A successful UK industrial strategy therefore ideally needs political and social consensus on priorities, investment levels and individual projects. Sir John Armitt, Chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, will give his views on the need for greater consensus and lead a discussion on how it could be achieved.

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In brilliant form, Rt Hon Yvette Cooper MP, Chair of the powerful Home Affairs Select Committee, led an Industry Forum briefing at the Bankside offices of FleishmanHillard Fishburn. With great precision, she unravelled the complexities of the Brexit negotiations, the problems of the rigid red lines, the difficult parliamentary arithmetic, and how her cross-party committee is holding the Government to account on a wide variety of related immigration issues. The discussion inevitably led to the need for consensus building on Brexit as a path to moving forward and starting to remove the Brexit uncertainty that is so damaging to business.  On a note of hope, Yvette, outlined how such a process could begin, although it would require political compromises. To a business audience this would seem the natural approach; we can only hope that such wisdom takes wider hold in Westminster.

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Over a long term, companies and industries based on science and technology have contributed strongly to economic growth and the quality of life. For such reasons there is a growing consensus that significantly increasing the current relatively low level of UK investment in science and technology is a good way to address the economic challenges faced by the UK. Labour has a range of policies for increasing investment to help UK companies and industry sectors become more competitive, increase productivity, and provide more high quality jobs. Peter Dowd MP, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury will lead a roundtable discussion to look at the thorny questions of where additional investment is needed, and how it should be wisely spent.

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The explosive growth in use of the Internet and the World Wide Web began in the 1990s and saw the rapid establishment of what are now tech titans such Google, Facebook and Amazon as well as the further dramatic expansion of existing tech companies such as Apple and Microsoft. Regulators and legislators were initially sanguine about rule-bending and disruptive new business models and the serious nature of cyber security risks to national security and the operation of essential infrastructure. Google promoted the slogan ‘do no evil’ and there was little enthusiasm among the media, legislators, or the general public to look proactively for evil. This benign view changed radically from around 2016 when the real dangers of misusing private social media data, misrepresenting the news, and leaking state intelligence became more apparent. This roundtable will look from the political, legal and technological perspectives at the potential for new safeguards that could help address the problems that have become manifest, and might start to restore trust in digital tech.

Speakers:

John Brunning - Partner, Fieldfisher LLP

Lord Fox - Liberal Democrats Lords Spokesperson on Business & Industrial Strategy / Energy & Climate Change

Professor Marina Jirotka - University of Oxford

Matt Houlihan - Director, Government and Corporate Affairs, Cisco Systems

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