Three challenges for the Chancellor!

Sir Digby Jones, the UK Skills Envoy and former director-general of the CBI has three things he'd like to see from Gordon Brown on 21 March:

“We've got to ensure that companies base themselves here in the UK. This is important because companies based here are more attuned to UK decision making processes and tend to create employment here - especially skilled and professional employment. The UK tax system needs reform to encourage this, both by looking at a rate reduction from the current 30% level and also by reducing UK tax on overseas income.

If companies aren't based here, they won't be paying any UK tax and it is better to get something rather than nothing at all.

My second area is that we need to see investment in improving UK skills. The Chancellor is quite rightly kicking employers to help solve the problem of the seven million people who can't read and the 11 million who can't do arithmetic. This is going to cost money - and the government needs to provide it. Why?

Three reasons:

• The problem has arisen in the first place because of the failings of the UK education system - half of our school children leave school with less than grade C GCSE in English and Maths.

• Smaller businesses simply haven't got the resources to pay to solve a problem not of their making and they employ a major part of the UK workforce.

• The colleges of further education, who need to train people, do not currently have the number of trainers needed. They need more money.

The third thing I'd like to see is an exemption from inheritance tax for private houses. Of course there would need to be a cap - perhaps £500,000 - but it's not fair to penalise savers. People need to be given an incentive to save and charging 40% inheritance tax takes that incentive away."



Sir Digby Jones is the UK Skills Envoy (a non party-political and unpaid position). He is Senior Adviser to Deloitte; Senior Advisor to Barclays Capital; Corporate and Governmental Affairs Advisor to Ford of Europe and the Premier Automotive Group and Senior Advisor to JCB. Sir Digby was Director-General of the CBI from 2000-2006.