The report also warns that Britain’s planning system is one of the biggest barriers to both domestic and overseas investment. It will call for urgent action to speed up the time needed to deliver energy infrastructure as Britain transitions to net zero.
It is understood that the Government will accept all six of Lord Harrington’s recommendations, which include strengthening government accountability, fixing the current disjointed approach to investment and beefing up the Office for Investment, a dedicated body that works across government to attract investment into the UK.
The Treasury declined to comment. Lord Harrington declined to comment.
Why Jeremy Hunt must take a leaf out of Emmanuel Macron’s book to boost Britain’s growth
Analysis by Szu Ping Chan
Emmanuel Macron presides over a country that has arguably turned red tape into an art form. Yet when it comes to doing business, many of the world’s top chief executives and chairmen would rather deal with the Élysée Palace than Downing Street.
That’s according to a major review of the UK’s global attractiveness expected to be published on Wednesday alongside the Autumn Statement.
Its author, Lord Harrington, has spent the past six months talking to more than 200 global leaders about what motivates them to invest.
Executives often cited France as an attractive country to put money into, not because its tax regime is competitive or because doing business there is easy but because the French president makes an effort to pick up the phone.
Many told Lord Harrington that they had become accustomed “to receiving texts directly from President Macron, being invited to the Palace of Versailles and having ‘the red carpet rolled out’,” according to extracts of the report seen by The Telegraph.
By contrast, investors seeking to do deals in Britain are most often greeted by “willing amateurs” and passed from department to department. Those who do persevere must then navigate Britain’s tax system, a regime compared to “the world’s worst maze” by one entrepreneur.
Lord Harrington, a former business minister, remarks that a “striking number” of businesses all say the same thing: keeping in touch is the “foundation of winning investment”, the report commissioned by Jeremy Hunt reads.
The strategy has helped France attract the most inward foreign direct investment (FDI) projects in Europe in 2022 for the fourth year running, with 1,259 new projects or expansions, according to EY. The UK was a distant second, with 929 projects.
The Harrington report warns that Britain’s disjointed approach to investment often leaves executives dealing with a revolving door of senior ministers and civil servants.
One major investor expressed frustration with “having to troop from department to department to meet different secretaries of state covering different areas of responsibility related to their investment, many of whom will have changed office before an agreement was secured”. This “added up to a sense of investment and investors not being prioritised at the highest levels of government”.
