Welcome to today’s session of the Business and Trade Committee and the opening of our inquiry into industrial strategy. I am absolutely delighted that all three of you been able to join us; thank you so much indeed for making it. I know you have had to sacrifice important visits and engagements to be with us this afternoon, and we are really grateful for that. We have a hard stop at 3 pm on this panel, so we are going to whistle through the questions we have for you as fast as we can, and if you can be punchy with the answers, that will help us cover as much territory as possible. We are going to basically go through growth forecasts and industrial strategy as a contributor to growth forecasts, and then we will get into the strategic principles that you think are important. Professor Mazzucato, perhaps I could start with you. The Prime Minister has set out some pretty bold ambitions about becoming the fastest growing economy in the G7. Do you think that that is achievable?

I do not know any country that does not want to have a high growth rate, so that does not distinguish this country. What we need to look at are the structural drivers of growth, both in the past and what is being done today to affect those. A key driver of growth is public and private sector investments. GDP, as you know, can be broken down in terms of business investment, Government investment, consumer spending and net exports. We have historically under-invested in the public sector and we are 28th in the OECD in terms of private sector investment. If this industrial strategy, which we will get to in a minute, can actually catalyse public sector investment, which crowds in private sector investment, then, absolutely, we can increase the growth rate. But you do not get growth by talking about growth; you get it by investing in all those things that increase productivity.

Given that analysis, do you think it is possible to get 2.5% growth out of the UK economy in three years’ time?

If we became the coolest place in the world to be investing in AI and life sciences, bringing together all sorts of new services in the digital economy and the financial services to catalyse great achievements around, for example, our health objective, reducing the digital divide, and having net zero across all the different cities in the UK and all the private and public sector investments that require that, then yes.

Diane, what is your view?

Short-term forecasting in such an uncertain world is very difficult, so I do not know about two years’ time, but there is certainly scope to increase the economy’s potential growth rate over the long term. You will have seen that, recently, the Bank of England reduced its forecast for potential growth. To me, getting that potential growth rate up is the real target, because that is what drives living standards and the quality of life for people in this country, over not just the next two years but the next five and 10 years.

Given what you know about economic growth and development around the world, do you think it is possible to make the order of magnitude of change that is perhaps needed in the UK over this Parliament?

The opportunity for the UK and everybody is that there are extraordinary technological developments going on. Throughout history it has been technology that drives long-term productivity growth, GDP growth and improvements in the quality of life. So what we are talking about today is how you crystallise the opportunities that those technologies afford, as well as the whole range of other policy instruments available to increase that long-term potential growth rate.

What I am hearing is that it is stretching but possible?

Yes.

Perfect. Sir Charlie Mayfield, what is your view?

I am the only non-economist on this panel, so I slightly defer to my colleagues. First, I agree that investment and tech adoption are two absolutely critical drivers of growth. If you can get those both working, then we have a chance of growing the economy significantly faster. But I would add a third critically important aspect, which is adoption. There are fantastic technologies out there. There are lots of people talking about how powerful things like AI are, and there are a lot of businesses that are quite confused or unsure about how they are going to transform their businesses. So, alongside the classical drivers of growth—investment and tech adoption—you also have to think about adoption and the behavioural aspects of any growth strategy. That applies particularly to smaller businesses; it is always worth remembering that small and mid-sized businesses employ about two thirds of the people who work in this country. Most of the conversation around growth and industrial strategy tends to overlook those key parts of the economy. We have to address them, and we will not achieve the growth we would like to see if we do not include them.

We have not had an industrial strategy in this country for several years. I would be interested to hear from the economists whether other countries, particularly the G7 countries, have boasted an industrial strategy over the last five years or so. What contribution do you think the industrial strategy could make to closing the gap between our growth rate and those of our G7 peers?

First, we have had an industrial strategy for many years; it is just that there are different ways to do it. Ultimately, an industrial strategy is just about giving guarantees, subsidies and loans to particular key sectors that have maybe lobbied their way up to be considered a key sector. A transformational strategy allows all sectors, and asks all sectors, to do their part, and especially if they are small companies that are willing to work with Government around important priorities, they should get extra help because they are small. But it is not about size in and of itself—we often say, “Don’t pick winners; pick the willing.” Back in 2018, when Greg Clark was Minister in BEIS, for example, I was working with him around how to transform what was at the time a sector-based strategy—there was aerospace, automotive, life sciences, finance and the creative sector—into a challenge-oriented strategy. Clean growth, sustainable mobility, healthy ageing and the AI data economy were chosen. Taking sustainable mobility as an example, the idea was to start thinking about all the different investments and innovations we need, not just in transport, but also in areas including how we build with green cement and green steel. So we were really looking at challenges and missions that require multi-sectoral, cross-sectoral transformation. Other countries—Germany, for example—have recently been very clear about where some of their challenges are. For example, with the Energiewende, we see that the way they have redesigned their industrial strategy has indeed been catalytic. Why? When their public bank, the KfW, provided loans to sectors such as the steel sector, those were conditional on that sector doing its part towards the challenge around the sustainable energy mission. That meant that the sector had to invest and repurpose, reuse and recycle technology across the whole supply chain get a public loan. What we have seen in this country for many years is a one-way relationship where sectors receive support without there necessarily being conditions on what is required in terms of investment and innovation.

Thank you. Professor Coyle, do you have any comments?

I think of industrial policy as referring to all the tools Governments have available to affect the supply-side structure of the economy, as opposed to the macroeconomics, and that is a really wide array of policies. In a sense, you can have an industrial policy by accident, because there are lots of things the Government does that will affect the conditions for business. The important thing about labelling it as a strategy is that signal about consistency over time, and prioritisation of the economy’s strengths. We have had a lot of chopping and changing in policies; that adds risk for businesses and increases the return they need to get if they are going to invest. So consistency is very important. To some extent, leaning into sectors is very welcome. If you look at the history of industrial policies in the UK over time, Governments have identified the genuine strengths of the UK economy, such as life sciences, the creative sector, professional services and so on. It is clear that they are strong sectors, which we should enable to continue growing, and to do so faster than they have before, to help them export. You do not want to do that in too much detail, because it becomes vulnerable to lobbying and narrowness of focus, but the strengths of the economy are clear. Because the technologies are changing so quickly and we are in this situation of major technological transformations, decisions taken now by both the private sector and the Government will affect living standards probably for decades to come. So it is absolutely the right moment to think about an industrial strategy that will have an independent industrial strategy council to monitor and evaluate what is happening, and to embed that so that we get away from the chopping and changing in policies that we have seen in previous decades.

Charlie, can I just turn to you? Are there any tensions between the growth ambitions the Government have set out and their objectives of net zero, regional strategy or economic security?

They can be complementary, but it depends on how they are executed. Clearly, net zero could be complementary if it involves, for example, a stimulus for a lot of investment that then has spin-off benefits, as Professor Mazzucato was saying. But, equally, if you take a regional approach and say that everybody has to have a little, you end up with Government playing a role which, arguably, it is not very well placed to play. My observation on previous attempts at industrial strategy is that they have been too democratic. Everybody has to have a little, and then the whole thing ends up caving in on itself because, effectively, it becomes an exercise in advanced lobbying by industry bodies that are basically looking to the Government to provide them with money, and they are competing with one another to get the money. Of course, there is not enough money to do that, and nor, critically, is that the role of Government. So, in my view, the way you achieve the right alignment—whether your priority is net zero or anything else—is to be very selective and very disciplined about identifying where there is genuinely the opportunity to create comparative advantage for the UK. There is a requirement for the Government to be an actor, alongside industry, in facilitating that. So you have to be selective, and there has to be real, genuine industry leadership. I am afraid that I have sat on both sides of this fence, and I have seen occasions where industry bodies will take the opportunity to lobby effectively and vocally. [Interruption.]

I am going to pause you there; there is a vote in the House, so this panel is suspended. Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming—

We have resumed, and we are now going to turn to Sonia Kumar.

I will start with Sir Charlie Mayfield. Do you think the Government should lean into its competitive advantages, or do you think it should look at areas that are slightly weaker in terms of productivity and focus on those?

It is a difficult political issue because there is an enormous draw for the Government—any Government—in terms of looking at areas of deprivation, for example, and the need to raise them up and improve them. But I am firmly of the view that the industrial strategy should be selective and focused on areas of comparative advantage, because that is really the only way in which it becomes sustainable. I would personally advocate for a very focused and disciplined approach to deciding what those areas are. We need to recognise absolutely important areas that need to be addressed from an economic standpoint—around regions and different parts of the economy which also perhaps need to be given some stimulation—but also to be clear about what is actually industrial strategy and what is more about rebalancing the economy.

While I agree, there is something about being really ambitious in what we are trying to do, and then translating that into a different type of relationship between the public and private actors, even on things that are quite normal, such as school meals. Those can either be produced in a very lazy way, and there is a public-private relationship there, or we can have an innovation outcome. So, healthy, tasty, sustainable school meals all of a sudden require an outcomes-oriented procurement—and procurement, we should remember, is a very large percentage of every Government’s budget. That can do great things like sustainable mobility, which I mentioned before, or health for all or healthy eating. Having innovative criteria for what we are trying to do then puts pressure on the public-private relationship to be, again, outcomes-oriented, requiring investments in human capital, physical capital and innovation. I was just mentioning during the break that Sweden’s challenge is a carbon-free welfare state, so they have brought it down to everyday issues like the school meal policy. What that has done to the supply chains, to the diversification strategy and to the investments that have had to be made by small and medium local food suppliers, is that it has kick-started lots of investment that otherwise would not have happened.

So you do not feel that we should be targeting a specific sector per se, but that it should be more diffuse across all sectors?

Not diffuse, because I would agree with Charlie Mayfield that then you are just spreading the support and it does not land anywhere. We need to be extremely ambitious and selective on what the country is actually trying to do. For example, if we are ambitious around net zero, then all of a sudden many sectors—I gave the example before of steel, but think of cement, think of food—would have to innovate in order to meet those criteria. Denmark, for example, is the No. 1 provider to China of high-tech green digital services. That did not come about by just saying, “Digital, digital, that is our strength.” It came about because they wanted to have the greenest cities in Europe, and that meant that a lot of the demand-side policies, like procurement, allowed small companies to scale up. They received support not just because they were small, but because they were willing to work with the Government around the particular types of digital services needed to help manufacturing reduce carbon emissions.

I would think about it in terms of potential. While leaning into the sectors that we know we are good at, we should think about where Government intervention could have an unusually large impact on productivity and growth. That will often be in the supply chains. So if you are thinking about something like life sciences, think about what potential there is for the supply chain in certain regions where that is strong.

I just want to nail this point.

Could I come back on one point?

Yes, but let me just sharpen it up a bit. Andy Haldane, for example, is one of those who have argued that we need to focus on diffusing productivity gains through the economy, rather than focusing on a bunch of sectors where we already have a comparative advantage. Charlie, what I heard you say is that you have to make choices and you have to prioritise the sectors. You say that despite being the former chair of Be the Business.

And current chair of Be the Business. I am also a big fan of Andy Haldane and his thinking. The point I am going to make is in this vein. Let us take an area like AI: it is not even a sector, but it could be a technology that the Government decided was worthy of industrial strategy-type focus. Within that, you would immediately say, “There need to be a number of supply-side interventions to support it, around research and a really healthy research base, and probably around infrastructure to make sure we have the right data centres and what have you.” But there is also a demand side to these things. If you wanted to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, you could take something like AI and say, “This is going to be a focus for the industrial strategy of the United Kingdom, and we’re going to do things with the Government on the supply side, but we’re going to apply at least as much effort on the demand side,” which is about adoption. The advantage, of course, is that that applies to every business in every part of country. It is also something that you can do very different things with: it is not about big capital investment; it is actually about bringing together communities of businesses and stimulating, supporting and encouraging people to experiment, to try new things and to create best practice models that then encourage other people to follow. It is all about diffusion—that is another way to put it.

Is there any dissent from that view?

Just that there are specific tools that are useful for demand-side policies. We can all talk about demand, but if we do not actually make use of tools—I come back to procurement—we do not actually create the markets for these companies that are wanting to make investments, and those investments then do not even get diffused through that market creation potential. The United States, for example, has the SBIR programme, where every Government Department—Defence, Energy, Health—has to spend between 3% and 5% of its budget on procuring in innovative solutions from small and medium enterprises. Historically, this has been how those small companies scaled. So instead of glorifying the role of small companies and saying that we should support them, the question is why do we not allow the tools that we have to help those companies grow around these priorities? The idea is to have priorities and, instead of just spreading out support to small companies, to set the priorities and use public loans, guarantees, subsidies and procurement policies to help steer our investments, so that we are actually achieving the transformations that we want—net zero, reducing the digital divide, and a stronger and healthier population.

Professor Coyle, do you have anything to add?

Diffusion often happens through supply chains. Leading companies will ask their suppliers to adopt new technologies once they have done so themselves. So that is a supply-side way that diffusion spreads.

We are all looking towards the spending review expected in June. What scale of funding should this Government dedicate towards driving the industrial strategy?

There is a macroeconomic judgment in that, which I am not going to go anywhere near. To go back to where we started this conversation, the scale of investment that is needed is quite large, and it is not just public sector investment. The UK private sector has under-invested relative to its own value added as well, and this has been going on for decades. If you compare internationally, our investment performance has been poor for a long time, and that is quite a lot to catch up. How that translates into a one-year or five-year spending envelope is a different question, and priorities will have to be set, which is part of the reason I am advocating for the focus that we were just discussing. You have to start somewhere, so you pick some areas of the economy—some sectors, if you like—where you think you can have easy wins. But the other aspect of this is getting value for the money that is being spent, and that requires joining up Government policies across different areas. The focus today is industrial strategy, but there is also the new towns work that is going on—economies happen in places, so that has to join up. And all the work on the health of the population has to join up as well. So it is not just how much is being spent, but how effectively it is all being spent. That comes through the joining-up of Government policies, which we have also not seen for a long time.

The numbers really matter. Had the UK invested the OECD average on the public investment side over the last two decades, we would have invested $500 billion more. We have massively under-invested, but what we do not want is just helicopter money; we need institutional capacity. What is critical in any country—it is not just about industrial strategy—is that national system of innovation. For example, Catapult centres have been created in the United Kingdom, basically copying the Fraunhofer institutes in Germany, but we massively underspend on them. The way they have been structured has also not been as ambitious. In the Fraunhofer institutes, the scientists do not ask industry what they need; they think together about what the future of the auto industry might look like. There is real dynamism between the science and industrial communities. Similarly, with public banks. We now have the national wealth fund, which is very important, and hopefully the Government will continue to back it. But, again, we have had very little patient, long-term finance in this country. We brag about financial services, but we have had problematic financial services and finance. We have impatient finance. We have not had the finance that has allowed small companies in Germany, through the KfW, to become medium-sized companies. So we need to give much more attention to institutional design and find where the gaps are. We also need to break down this dichotomy. When we talk about the market, it is not the same thing as business. The market is an outcome of how businesses govern and how public institutions are governed. Instead of thinking of public institutions as just fixing market failures, the dynamics that we have been talking about are creating and shaping markets. In my view, corporate governance in this country is part of the problem. For example, when Thames Water does not reinvest its profits back into infrastructure, and the profits are financialised in terms of giving them out as dividend payouts and, in some cases, share buy-backs, that is part of what we should be looking at. We need both public and private working together, but governance structures are very different globally. Charlie, you were part of John Lewis, which is a co-operative. That is very different from just maximising shares.

If you start from the point of view of how much money there should be in a spending review, the answer is almost certainly going to be not enough; that is probably the only way to see it with the current state of public finances. So I really do agree that you have to approach this in a broader way and think about public and private investment, and my colleagues have made that point very well. I would add that there are different forms of investment, and something that is consistently missed is how far money can go on the demand side. As an example, Be the Business has done a load of evaluation work. We are not-for-profit and we work with small and mid-sized businesses to stimulate growth and productivity. Over several years now we have made initiatives on the ground—really practical things—supporting leaders of small and mid-sized businesses in their leadership, the development of their own ambitions, and tech adoption. We took one group of 2,600 of those businesses, where we had three years prior and three years post data on performance. What we showed was that there was £1 billion of additional gross value added from our interventions, which, by the way, were very cheap. If you reached 50,000 businesses, you would probably be talking in the order of adding £20 billion of value to the economy. That speaks to the point about AI adoption. We run workshops with businesses in local communities, supported by people like Microsoft, who have helped us a lot with this, and we get fantastic results. You get people on the way towards tech adoption. It is ground-level stuff; it does not cost much money, but it has a huge impact and it gets people started on growth. So, on the spending review, I would say that, yes, the big numbers are important, but they will never be big enough. You have to create the ecosystem, but please do not forget the demand side. And I am also banging the drum for diffusion.

Professor Coyle, I think you would probably add something about competition policy as well.

It is absolutely vital. It is easy for people in business to confuse regulation and competition policy, because competition policy sometimes stops them doing things they want to do, but they are very different tools. There is a mountain of evidence that it is very important to keep markets competitive because that is how businesses scale up and grow. We are not going to have a healthy AI sector in the economy if our thriving very small businesses—the median number of employees in the sector is 10—cannot enter and grow into digital markets. So the competition aspect on the supply side, on the structure, is absolutely vital. Q17            Matt Western: What are your thoughts on how the Government should go about putting money into an industrial strategy? I am particularly interested to hear your thoughts on the approach taken by other countries. Perhaps one of the things we are most familiar with is Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Do you have any thoughts on this, Professor Coyle?

It is quite variable, and it depends on exactly what you think the gaps or the problems are in different places around the country, or in different sectors or supply chains in the economy. I am based in Cambridge, so I know a lot about the life sciences and tech sectors there, and what they need in order to grow is the ability to build labs and housing, the skills of mid-level technicians, some infrastructure investment and some transport investment. That will be very different from what is needed, for example, in northern English cities like Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, where you can see the potential for a big increase in productivity across the area from creating a single labour market connected by better transport. That will involve different sectors, such as advanced manufacturing and materials, but it will also involve all the supply chains and what is often called the everyday economy. That is a different type of investment. So it is really a question of the analysis. You pick your priority areas and identify what the specific needs will be for those areas. That in turn determines what the ask is of Government in terms of public investment.

I had the honour to work with Gina Raimondo, the Secretary of Commerce in the United States, on the CHIPS Act. It was a very interesting opportunity to learn both the positive and negative lessons of what got us silicon valley. Huge amounts of public investment went into silicon valley, and without it we would not have any of the technologies in our smartphones such as the internet, GPS, touchscreen and Siri. But, ultimately, because some contracts were badly structured, we socialised risks but privatised rewards, and I have written a whole book about this called “The Entrepreneurial State”. The reason Gina came to me was to ask, “How can we do it better this time?” It was very interesting how the CHIPS Act ultimately had much more of a good deal—a symbiotic, reciprocity, mutualistic deal, if you want—in terms of that public programme and the $300 billion to semiconductor companies. There were conditions that those companies had to reinvest their profits and not just do share buybacks. Globally, $7 trillion—that is a lot of money—has been used for share buybacks over the last 10 years, which means a lack of reinvestment. They also had to improve working conditions and use energy-efficient supply chains. So it is not about micromanaging companies; it is about saying, “What is the direction of the economy if we want more inclusive growth, with less inequality and more sustainable growth around net zero? How does any public-private relationship, even around tech and semiconductors, become an opportunity to help steer things?” We maybe disagree a little about the sectors. I am originally from Italy—I have UK citizenship, Italian citizenship and US citizenship—and they have all the different sectors that we have here, and probably have a lot of competitiveness as well. But they have had huge problems, again, in terms of how public and private have worked together. When you have a parasitic relationship where private companies are just receiving funds without there being conditions around what is required from the private sector, then you end up with low productivity, low investment and low growth. That is similar to the UK. By actually having some goals around net zero, the question all of a sudden becomes, “What does that mean for the types of digital services?” If we look at what happened during covid with AstraZeneca, it was super-interesting that that particular vaccine ended up being quite different from the other vaccines, because the goal set by the researchers was that they wanted a vaccine that could be produced globally. We needed to vaccinate the world, so the conditions were on knowledge sharing, and that required a particular type of innovative collaboration that would not have existed had that not been the goal. So I do not think there is a contrast between thinking about sectors and thinking about goals, but by having clear goals and directions, all of a sudden the relationship between these public programmes, procurement grants, loans and so on is different, and potential reciprocity is created between public and private actors.

Charlie, I am conscious of time, so before you go, perhaps you could briefly answer this question about Government strategy. Professor Mazzucato was talking about loans versus grants. The UK and France spend similar amounts of money, but the UK tends to go more on the basis of loans, and France more on the basis of grants. Which do you think is better, and how should Parliament be judging success? What criteria should Parliament use?

The thing is, when the Government is providing money, whether it is in the form of a loan or a grant, in some ways you create the wrong dynamics, because everyone is looking to qualify for the grant or the loan. Actually, what you should have is businesses that are really hungry to make an investment because they are going to get a great return on it. Frankly, you can end up distorting the market if you do those things. There are too many examples where Government has come up with schemes. Tech adoption was one. Help to Grow: Digital provided £5,000 loans to implement different tech adoptions, and there was very disappointing take-up. That is because there is a misunderstanding of the psychology within a business. If somebody comes along and says, “I’m going to give you £5,000, basically without many strings attached,” the business person says, “Well, I could take that, but I have so many other things on my plate, and there are so many issues with tech adoption, that it does not look very attractive to me. I am very busy anyway, so I’ll move on to the next thing.” I do not think there is any way to short-circuit the importance of creating leadership and stimulating that leadership within businesses and within communities of businesses. The only thing I would add to your prior question—again I defer to my colleagues about the supply-side economics of this—is that other countries that generally do industrial strategy better also have stronger industry bodies, and often stronger connections between trade unions and industry bodies, than we have here. There are some very good bodies here—I will not mention them—but those other bodies tend to be stronger and, in some of those countries, it is a requirement to be a member of them. That creates the mechanisms where you can aggregate leadership of businesses, so that you can then engage better with some Government programmes on a more level basis. That is something that is missing in the UK. I have seen so many occasions where business and Government are both trying to tackle something important, and they just keep going past each other and not really engaging. Industrial strategy has to be about bringing this together. You have to think hard about how you create the conditions where that is most likely to succeed.

There has been progress in terms of institutions. Again, thinking about a national system of innovation and all the different types of institutions, it is high-quality universities, of course, but also more midstream, with those science and industry linkages through institutions like the Catapults, which are very important. Then, on the demand side, it is about rethinking procurement. As I mentioned before, there is SBIR in the US. We have SBRI here, but again it has been underused. It is more about how all these different institutions align and co-ordinate, and that really is the power of what I call mission-oriented industrial strategy. We have just put out a report about global insights in Brazil, Sweden and the US and what it meant for these institutions to work better together, so that the sum is bigger than the parts. Take a public bank: it can just give out loans, which, as Charlie said, will probably just go to the companies that are asking for help—maybe they need help because they have not been investing enough. Or you can have a public bank that is more mission-aligned and that makes sure that those loans are being used to actually push the frontier of what is happening in the country. Companies that need, for example, to reduce the material content of production to meet carbon neutrality goals might require that finance to reach something difficult. So instead of just giving out loans to stay in place, it is about using strategic, mission-oriented loans to help companies to actually reach objectives that the country requires in order to transform the direction of growth—and we should remember that growth does not just have a rate; it has a direction. If you do not do that, you just end up with lots of different instruments and lots of different projects, but the country itself does not transform. You do not get inclusive growth, and you do not get sustainable growth.

Charlie Mayfield, what is your view? Do we have the right institutions in this country or not?

We have some of the right institutions, undoubtedly.

What are we missing?

We should be looking to drive more growth through the regions. Areas where you have some more developed mayoral authorities are already showing potential in terms of being able to actually create better conditions for growth. There is potential for us to do more through them. I mentioned the work we have done in Be the Business. We are a not-for-profit organisation and we have limited funding, but despite that we have managed to create a lot of GVA and healthy improvements. I would love to use ourselves, and the other organisations we can crowd in, to support mayoral authorities to drive a growth strategy at a local level. That would also have the advantage of not being dependent on taking years to do investments, planning, infrastructure and so on. It could be delivered really quite quickly. We should be using those more to drive some of the growth.

Just in the final few minutes we have on this panel, Professor Coyle, what would you add to this story about institutions?

I definitely agree about devolution. The UK differs from other countries in being highly centralised, and this means a loss of information about what matters to local economies. The mayoral authorities are obviously going to be a good vehicle for reversing that. The other thing is the industrial strategy council, which will be on a statutory basis. We are one of the few countries that has not had a permanent body of that kind. The reason it is important is partly to monitor the Government and hold it to account, but also to reduce the uncertainty and the policy churn which, as I said right at the start, is one of the reasons that investment is just that bit riskier in the UK, compared to other countries.

I am really sorry that time is against us on this panel, and we have to pull stumps there. I feel like we have only just got going, but thank you so much for giving this inquiry a flying start. We would be incredibly grateful if we could continue to draw on your advice over the weeks to come, before we finalise our report to Parliament ahead of the comprehensive spending review. That concludes this panel.