‘With partnership and collaboration, Labour has the chance to change how business delivers for Britain’

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“Policy is not just about ‘intervening’. It is about shaping a different future: co-creating markets and value, not just ‘fixing’ markets or redistributing value. It’s about taking risks, not only ‘de-risking’. And it must not be about levelling the playing field but about tilting it towards the kind of economy we want.”

These are the words of the eminent economist Marianna Mazzucato in her 2018 book The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. 

Mazzucato has long advocated a greater role for the state in collaborating with the private sector – an approach which is clearly the intent of the new government. As Rachel Reeves set out in her paper ‘A New Business Model for Britain’, she believes that “A modern state must be more active, making and shaping markets that are essential to a nation’s resilience and future prosperity.”

‘Fundamentally rethinking how we work together to achieve common goals’

From delivering the infrastructure required for net zero, to developing the world-leading technologies in AI and life sciences, Labour has been clear that these are things that must be done in partnership between government, business and workers.

Creating the ‘New Business Model for Britain’ outlined by Reeves is an enormous challenge. It will require fundamentally rethinking – across Whitehall, Westminster, The City, boardrooms and workplaces – how we work together to achieve common goals. But we believe it is not an insurmountable challenge.

At Headland, greater collaboration is something we have long advocated. We believe that businesses cannot solve problems in silos and that rather than starting with the immediate challenges they face, business must work in collaboration with its workforce, its customers, regulators, competitors and government to solve ‘Grand Challenges’ faced by wider society.

Through our ‘Collaborative Corporate’ report published last year, we have set out a new way of thinking about how businesses can work in tandem with different groups to achieve wider aims.

In Labour’s new Industrial Strategy, the new government will set out in more detail how it wants to approach achieving its missions. But the mechanisms through which business and its workforce engage with government also needs to change if we are going to achieve true partnership working.

‘Partnership in practice’

That is why, working with Demos, we have launched the Business Partnership Council and our first discussion paper, Partnership in Practice. 

The paper offers initial recommendations, analysing the different barriers to good collaborative policy making. It is seeking views from the voices of business, labour and government to inform proposals for how we can reduce policy instability, create shared institutions across the economy, tackle short-termist thinking in both government and business, and set ourselves on a path to deliver a mature, co-operative policy-making landscape.

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The council, which will convene over the coming months, will seek to address some of the points Mazzucato sets out – how do government, business and workers go about ‘co-creating markets’, how do they build consensus on what risks to take, and how do they work together to build the kind of economy we want.

By truly collaborating across business, workers and civil society, this Labour government has the chance to fundamentally change how we deliver for the people of Britain. We hope that this work will go some way to supporting that change.

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