Britain’s entrepreneurs build the economy: so why do they not run it?

Britain is a country bursting with entrepreneurial talent. Every day, millions of people risk their own money, employ staff, meet payroll, solve problems and compete in some of the toughest markets in the world.

Yet when you look at the people making the biggest economic decisions, very few have ever had to do any of those things themselves.

Recent analysis found that 54 per cent of Andy Burnham’s Cabinet had no commercial private sector experience before entering Parliament.

Only two of the 28 ministers analysed are estimated to have spent more than a decade working in business before becoming MPs.

Now, I am not saying you need to have run a plumbing company to run the country. Politics matters. Public service matters. But it does strike me as odd that we expect politicians to shape an economy they have so rarely experienced from the inside.

The UK economy generates around £3 trillion of output every year. It supports millions of jobs, hundreds of thousands of businesses and carries public debt measured in trillions of pounds. In effect, it is the biggest and most complicated enterprise in Britain.

If you were recruiting the chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, would you overlook commercial experience altogether? Would shareholders accept someone whose entire career had been spent advising businesses rather than actually running one? I doubt it.

Business teaches lessons you simply cannot learn in a policy paper. You discover what it feels like to make payroll when cash is tight. You learn that every new regulation costs someone time and money. You understand that growth does not happen because you announce it. It happens because somebody is willing to take a risk, invest, hire people and compete.

Those experiences shape how you see the world. Too often, governments seem to approach business as something to regulate, tax or manage rather than something to enable. That mindset is not necessarily ideological. Sometimes it is simply the result of never having sat on the other side of the table.

Perhaps that helps explain why Britain can produce world-class entrepreneurs while struggling to produce sustained economic growth. Businesses survive by creating value, managing costs and living within their means. Governments can postpone those disciplines for a while by borrowing, but eventually the bill always arrives.

Britain does not suffer from a shortage of people who know how to build organisations, create jobs and generate wealth. We have thousands of them.

The question I keep coming back to is this: why do so few ever make it into the rooms where the biggest economic decisions are taken?

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