Cable promises leaner, greener DBIS

3 Jun 10
Business Secretary Vince Cable today pledged to slim down his department while investing more in science and green innovation

By David Williams

03 June 2010

Business Secretary Vince Cable today pledged to slim down his department while investing more in science and green innovation.

In his first speech as a Cabinet minister, Cable also told an audience at the City of London’s Cass Business School that cutting red tape would help the economy more than any programme of government investment.

Although the speech was light on policy specifics, Cable set out his broad priorities for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which has been tasked with finding £836m of savings this year as part of a £5.7bn overall public spending cut.

The secretary of state rowed back from an earlier pledge, made before he entered government, to abolish the DBIS’s predecessor, the Department of Trade and Industry.

‘Today the DBIS is very different,’ he said. ‘So my civil servants can relax – briefly.’

However, he announced a commitment to significantly trim down the 74 DBIS quangos, with 13 already earmarked for abolition, mergers or funding cuts. A further 20 would be shut down or merged over the next year, Cable said.

Declaring that the DBIS was the ‘Ministry of Science’, Cable outlined an investment strategy focused on green technology and scientific research, which carried echoes of the priorities set out by the previous government in its growth strategy and final Budget.

Although he said the government should not be ‘trying to micro-manage the economy at the level of individual companies’, Cable argued for ‘picking winners’ in terms of the skills and sectors of the economy he would support.

Cable said he was convinced of the need to begin cutting the fiscal deficit now, and added that there was not enough money left for the government to continue to stimulate the economy through public spending.

But he calculated that cutting business regulation could release £20bn into the economy – a sum roughly equal to the department’s total annual spending.

He also set out three issues he would address around banking: whether to split retail and investment banking; the question of a levy on banks to cover the implicit guarantee of a public bail-out; and the need for banks to lend more freely to business.

However, he stopped short of spelling out exactly what the new government would do before the Banking Commission is launched.

Cable also pledged to ‘resolve the nagging problem of the Royal Mail’, bringing in private capital and share ownership for workers.

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