CBI Chair Rupert Soames Speech at CBI AGM 2024

Good morning and thank you all for joining us today for our Annual General Meeting, whose main purpose is to receive the Results for 2023 and to elect your Board. 

I was honoured to take up the post of Chair of the CBI in February 2024, succeeding Brian McBride, and I just want to start by recognising the fact that without him, and the rest of the CBI Board who served in 2023, we would not have the CBI today engaging with Government and speaking on behalf of its members. And I would also like to thank Brian for the gracious way he has managed our handover, and the massive support he has given to me. 

I took up my role because I believe that the CBI matters, and that it would have an essential role to play at an inflection point for our economy and our country. 

To be at the heart of a much-needed national effort between business and government, to set our country on a path of sustainable economic growth which generates the wealth that can then be invested in delivering more growth, which will pay for the high-quality infrastructure and public services on which the quality of life of all of us depends.

For nearly 60 years, the CBI has been the pre-eminent voice of business. It has the largest cross-economy policy and economics team outside Whitehall focused on serving the business community, it is internationally renowned for the quality of its research and policy advice, and it is the UK’s representative on the B7, Business Europe and a number of key international fora. Its role is to speak Business to Government, and Government to Business, and right now that role has never been more important.

The UK has a new government with the political authority and energy to get things done: who understand the importance of growth, and that business investment is the solution to deliver it. The CBI, as the voice of business, stands ready to deliver that mission. 

Over the next five years, government will pass into law between 25 and 50 new Acts and 3,500 Statutory Instruments a year, with consequences for employers, employees and economic growth. The CBI’s job is to ensure the voice of business is clearly heard as ministers and civil servants develop policy; and, once policy direction is set, helping them to avoid devilish details and unintended consequences. 

For an organisation whose raison d’être is to be an ambassador of business, losing the trust of our people, our members and our politicians in 2023 was devastating. I have seen, and you will hear from Rain, how much effort the CBI team put into regaining that trust. Both ensuring that the CBI has an inclusive culture we can be proud of, and getting back in the room with government so that we can do what we do best: delivering brilliant policy work on behalf of you, our members. 

The results of their work are manifest, from our re-accreditation by the Good Business Charter, to some of the strongest employee survey results I have seen in over 30 years of managing businesses. 

We are not in any way complacent, but the lessons of 2023 are now part of the CBI’s institutional memory, and we have fully implemented governance and feedback processes which greatly reduce the probability of a re-occurrence of the events and behaviours of prior years. At the very least they provide mechanisms which allow people to raise any concerns they might have in a structured and safe way.   

The results we have recently published for 2023 reflect the situation then, when a number of our members decided to suspend, cancel or not renew their membership. That loss of income, combined with a sharp increase in costs associated with the crisis, exhausted our cash reserves. but we were able to put in place borrowing from a syndicate of banks, which has since been increased and extended.

It will not surprise you therefore that since joining, a large part of my role has been in our campaign to make the case for the importance of the CBI to those members who paused or left. 

I am pleased to say that our campaign has achieved significant success with more than 80 companies joining or re-joining the CBI including 6 FTSE100 companies. So that as of October 2024, the CBI represents 850 members who themselves comprise 1,100 separate registered firms and 150,000 trade association members. As our campaign continues apace, we are confident in our growing membership book. 

Across the CBI, I have witnessed a profound improvement in our organisational effectiveness in the last 9 months. Not only in our renewal campaign, but in our policy work as well, and I think it is recognised that across our core missions we have performed well in 2024. 

In the run-up to and after the election, we have had a material impact on the policy landscape, from keeping the super-deduction on capital allowances, to planning reform, ending the ban on onshore wind, and increased public investment in infrastructure through GB Energy. Now, the sense we are getting in meetings from the Cabinet and across all levels of the civil service is that we are seen as the go-to voice of business.

So, renewed and reinvigorated and with a number of policy victories already under our belts in 2024, the CBI is ready for the future. 

With a renewed commitment to our people and our members, a clear vision and mission to deliver growth, and a new Labour government with whom we are engaging at all levels, there has not in recent history been a better or bigger opportunity to work together to shape the future of our economy and country for the better. 

None of this could we have done without the support of you, our members, and I want to extend my profound gratitude to all of you who have kept faith with the CBI and helped us over the last 18 months. So thank you, and with that I hand over to our CEO, Rain Newton-Smith.