Events have moved so fast in the past few days – with overworked civil servants frantically working out how to renegotiate trade deals and rewrite the statute books – time has been at a premium at Whitehall.
So much so that as of today the department charged with breathing new life into business in the wake of Brexit hadn’t even get round to realising it’s got a new title, let alone explaining how its new role will pan out in practice.
As well as booting out business secretary Sajid Javid, Theresa May used the reshuffle to rename and reboot his old department as the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
Yet today, according to the official government website, it still remained the plain old Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.
Perhaps, though, that slip is symbolic of a department that is facing major question marks about how it will play a role in guiding businesses along the future government roadmap that is currently hastily being pulled together.
The new, “improved” BIS is being headed up by Greg Clark, who effectively has swapped places with Javid, after moving from the DCLG as communities secretary.
Clark describes himself as “thrilled” to have taken on a department “charged with delivering a comprehensive industrial strategy, leading government’s relationship with business, furthering our world-class science base and delivering affordable, clean energy and tackling climate change”.
Some have interpreted his arrival and the new “industrial” language in the title as a sign that May will take a more interventionist approach in tackling business strategy than David Cameron and Javid, whose tactic, in many respects, was to let companies to get on with it.
May, who has already made a point of speaking out against foreign takeovers of UK firms, will no doubt have been interested to hear Clark greet the proposed £24bn takeover of British blue chip giant ARM Holdings by the Japanese as a “huge vote of confidence in UK economy” .
But that thorny issue aside, he now has a big task on his hands to convince business leaders the new department has any real clue about the way ahead, amid a backdrop of civil service chaos, especially considering BIS was already facing budget cuts even before the Brexit bombshell.
Alongside May’s other new appointments, the MP for Tunbridge Wells must try to tackle angry calls from the business community to provide certainty where confusion has reigned in the turbulent past few weeks.
According to those who attended a crisis summit called by Javid just days after the referendum vote, there was pretty much nothing coming back by way of a Plan B, although at least Javid, unlike many other ministers, didn’t just simply go to ground.
With the appointment of Liam Fox at international trade and David Davis as Brexiteer in chief, brought in to help guide us out of Europe whilst somehow keeping up the message that the UK is still open for business, May has at least set out the machinery for that Plan B. But how it becomes a plan for business is not clear.
For a start, what does the PM’s decision to give leadership over the issue of UK skills development back to the Department for Education mean at a time when the issue of a lack of skills has never been more of an issue for the food and drink industry, the largest manufacturing sector in the UK.
And as if Clark’s job is not big enough, he has to do it at the same time as trying to save the planet now that the Department of Energy & Climate Change has been abolished.
Whilst in some ways linking the role of Business with that of Energy & Climate Change makes a lot of sense – considering the huge role and responsibility of industries such as food and drink in the big questions facing the environment – it has also set alarm bells ringing.
The last thing businesses will want to see is a more interventionist approach on energy and climate change, considering the already spiralling costs they face. But many - from within business as well as campaign groups – will worry whether BIS’s new title and the culling of DECC is simply the first sign that green issues will kicked into the long grass in this post-Brexit era.
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