Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said UK businesses need a body that can represent them in Westminster after the Confederation of British Industry suspended most of its operations in light of multiple allegations of sexual assault among its staff.
(Bloomberg) — Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said UK businesses need a body that can represent them in Westminster after the Confederation of British Industry suspended most of its operations in light of multiple allegations of sexual assault among its staff.
“There’s no point engaging with the CBI when their own members have deserted them in droves,” Hunt told a group of journalists at the government’s Business Connect event on Monday in London.
“It’s incredibly important for me when I’m constructing budgets to have someone I can turn to who speaks for British business,” the Chancellor said. “It’s not for us to say how that happens because this needs to be an independent body.”
The government invited 200 chief executives and other company leaders to Monday’s event in an attempt to improve relations with the private sector and convince bosses that it has an “unprecedented” commitment to business and economic growth. The event coincided with a crisis at the CBI, Britain’s best-known business lobby group, which is fighting for survival after the Guardian newspaper reported separate claims by two women who said they were raped by colleagues.
The CBI fired its boss Tony Danker earlier in April after he was accused of inappropriate workplace behavior, unrelated to the other allegations, triggering a war of words as Danker said he’d been made the fall guy for events that happened prior to his reign. His successor, Rain Newton-Smith, was the CBI’s chief economist until last month when she joined Barclays Plc. She started as CBI director general on Monday.
The business group appointed law firm Fox Williams LLP to investigate the allegations and has frozen “all policy and membership activity” until an emergency general meeting in June.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, also speaking at the Business Connect event, reiterated that the government has paused all engagement with the CBI.
“What I’m going to do is make sure that this is the most unashamedly pro business government that anyone’s seen and that the business community knows and feels like they are being engaged with and listened to in a way that they’ve not seen before,” he said.
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