Our breakfast panel for ‘Jobs and Investment’

The Jobs Foundation launched its latest report, Jobs and Investment: Using Untapped Capital to Boost Productivity and Growth, at a breakfast panel chaired by our Communications Director Jamie Booth. The panel brought together Simon French, Chief Economist at Panmure Liberum, Alys Denby, Features and Opinion Editor at City AM, Lord Harrington, Chair of Make UK and author of the Harrington Review into Foreign Direct Investment, and Andrew Allum, the report’s lead author.

The report’s central argument is straightforward: the UK’s chronic underinvestment in domestic businesses, running at roughly £100 billion a year below the OECD average for over three decades, is a primary driver of the productivity gap. The solution it proposes is less conventional, lying not with institutional or foreign capital, but with the British public.

Andrew Allum set out the scale of the problem. Britain has been in the bottom quartile of the OECD for investment every year since 1993, with a cumulative deficit now approaching £2 trillion. The report identifies 13.5 million British households – those with between £10,000 and £250,000 in net investable wealth – as an underutilised source of productive capital. A survey of 2,000 such investors found that 78% identified barriers to investing more, but 83% said they would mobilise cash if the right reforms were in place. The report’s four pillars address this directly: better investment education; wider access to high-risk, high-return asset classes currently gatekept by wealth thresholds; tax and regulatory reform; and greater policy stability to support longer-term investment horizons.

Simon French focused on why capital is so badly misallocated in the first place. The UK’s long history of defined benefit pensions removed investment decision-making from individuals for generations, with lasting consequences for financial literacy. The £2.2 trillion sitting in household cash is not irrational – people value liquidity – but it is far from optimal. French’s prescription was conditional tax relief: linking the pension tax reliefs already distributed by the Treasury to where that capital is actually deployed. The UK has done this before, through the PEP and the dividend tax credit, and has since dismantled those incentives almost uniquely among comparable economies. The case for revisiting that approach, he argued, is now compelling.

Alys Denby gave the debate a human edge. The productivity gap is not an abstraction: it is why doubling living standards, which took 28 years between the 1960s and 1990s, now takes nearly 80. That has consequences, political as much as economic. She was direct about the cultural factors compounding the problem: the British obsession with property as the default store of wealth, and a middle-class tendency to steer talent towards “safe” service-sector careers rather than wealth-creating ones. She was more optimistic about the direction of travel among younger investors, for whom fintech has made participation in markets feel routine rather than daunting.

Lord Harrington drew on his experience of the Harrington Review to make a different but complementary argument. Investors, he found, do not shy away from the UK because of its fundamentals, but instead because of the process of investing. Planning delays, departmental silos, policy uncertainty and the absence of any central authority empowered to resolve competing interests all erode confidence over time. The answer he proposed is a properly resourced government concierge function, with genuine ministerial backing and the power to deliver clear decisions within reasonable timeframes. Ireland’s ability to put a formal offer in front of investors within 30 days, he noted, is not a question of policy advantage, but instead of organisation.

The Q&A that followed covered stamp duty reform, the FCA’s role in broadening retail access to investment products, retail infrastructure bonds, and the case for raising pension contribution rates towards Australian levels. Across all of it ran a consistent thread: the diagnosis is not in dispute; what is missing is the political resolve to act on it.The Jobs Foundation will be pressing the case for the report’s recommendations with policymakers, businesses and media in the weeks ahead.

The full report is available here.