Sunak calls on 14 bosses to serve on business advisory council

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Rishi Sunak will on Tuesday convene a new business advisory council, bringing together 14 senior bosses working on the “front line” to shape government policy.

Downing Street said chief executives from companies employing about 330,000 people in the UK would attend the meeting, the first such gathering since Sunak became prime minister in October last year.

The line-up of businesses represented on the council will be heavily scrutinised for signs of Sunak’s views on the future of the economy. Sectors represented include banking, pharmaceuticals, retail, construction, energy, tech, insurance, telecoms and defence.

The chief executives of AstraZeneca, NatWest, BAE Systems, SSE, Google Deepmind, J Sainsbury, Vodafone, GSK, Aviva, Shell, Sage, Taylor Wimpey, Diageo and Barclays are on the guest list.

Sunak said: “I look forward to hearing first-hand from business leaders about how we can break down the barriers they face and unlock new opportunities for them to thrive.”

The agenda is expected to focus on the current economic climate, including addressing inflation and labour shortages, along with questions of how to raise productivity and business investment, which has largely stalled since Brexit.

“The more businesses innovate and invest, the more we grow and create good jobs across the country,” said Sunak, who will host a reception for 100 businesses “to celebrate British enterprise” after the council meeting.

The engagement with business follows the breakdown of relations between corporate Britain and the Conservatives during Boris Johnson’s premiership.

While Johnson was scornful of business for raising concerns over the implementation of Brexit, Sunak has tried to repair relations by restoring his party’s reputation for sound economic management ahead of the general election expected next year.

In April, Sunak appointed former Morgan Stanley executive Franck Petitgas as his new business and investment adviser.

However, many business leaders still complain that they find it difficult to win an audience with senior government ministers, and corporate attention is increasingly turning to the opposition Labour party.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have led what party insiders have called a “smoked salmon and scrambled egg” offensive to woo chief executives.

Tuesday’s guest list is made up exclusively of the UK’s largest companies, which had led to concerns being raised with Number 10 in the run-up to the announcement, according to one person with knowledge of the discussion. 

The bosses of nine of the 30 most valuable UK-listed companies are included. Google Deepmind, an artificial intelligence-focused British subsidiary of the US search engine giant, is the only company represented on the council that is not a member of the UK’s blue-chip FTSE 100 bourse.

However, Craig Beaumont, chief of external affairs at the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “A handful of privileged FTSE 100 corporates given keys to this ivory tower mustn’t have access at the expense of the 99 per cent of UK businesses that are embedded in local communities and on our high streets.” 

He said that previous governments had engaged with groups that were “homogenous” and “the opposite of the true diversity of the UK’s 5.5mn businesses”.

The 14 members of the council should be able to show, at a minimum, that they paid their small business suppliers on time, he added. 

The council will meet only twice a year and membership is expected to be refreshed at the end of 2023, by which point the election is likely to be coming into view.

The council will also give Sunak a forum for interacting directly with some of the big businesses that quit the CBI, Britain’s most prominent business lobby group, in the wake of a misconduct scandal this year. 

Business council members Aviva, NatWest, Vodafone and Sage were among those to quit in April as the scandal escalated and the government excluded the CBI from official interactions with ministers.

Sunak said last month that his government would “continue to engage with businesses, individually and business groups”. Last week, the head of the CBI attended an event chaired by a UK minister in her first known high-level government engagement since taking the helm.