Businesses are “crying out for stability and competence” and are turning in droves to Labour after losing hope with the government the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury has said. Speaking to the Guardian before a speech by his boss, Rachel Reeves, at the Labour conference, Darren Jones said the scale of renewed corporate interest in Labour meant he was spending almost the entire event meeting business leaders. After persistent government chaos and U-turns since Brexit, Jones said multinationals were “just crying out for stability and competence and they’ve not got it”, as they realised Labour was a better bet. “I think businesses started clocking that some time ago, which is why you’re seeing such a big presence of them here,” he said. “My entire schedule for conference this year bar, I think, maybe one or two fringes is engaging with business.” The Bristol North West MP, whose examination of business leaders as chair of the business select committee helped him move to the frontbench in September’s reshuffle, will spend much of this conference reassuring companies about Labour’s fiscal rules, which allow borrowing only to invest, not to improve services.
With this has come choices that have dismayed some Labour members, such as refusing to scrap the two-child limit on benefit payments. Jones said such decisions were difficult. “It is insofar as, of course you would want to lift that cap, because it would have an immediate effect for people that need it,” he said. “But it isn’t in the sense that unless we are fiscally responsible with the economy, and unless we have a Labour government, we’re not going to do anything for young people across the country.” This focus means every frontbencher’s speech from the conference main stage will have been vetted in advance by either Jones or Reeves. Jones said that while Treasury teams were sometimes seen as “the blocker for reform”, he hoped to make his role more creative. “My job isn’t just about putting red lines through things that they might want to say,” he said. “It’s about working with those teams to help us get to the right place. Our fiscal rules are fundamental, but we also want to change the country. “There’s this strategic role to being chief secretary as well as being in charge of public spending, which is: how do we get the economy moving? How do we reform public services? How do we deliver capital projects better?” In her speech on Monday, Reeves will announce that Labour’s £8bn “national wealth fund” for green investment will involve projects having to attract at least £3 of private sector investment for every £1 from the fund. This would be, Jones said, a new approach to such projects: “It’s not just a case of saying: ‘Hey, I’d like to build this thing. I’m going to write you a cheque for it.’ That’s not how our investment programme is going to work.” A former technology lawyer before he won his seat in 2017, Jones is particularly keen on using tech, including AI, for “customer service reform” in public services like arranging benefits and school places, arguing this could be a boon to employees as well – potentially even bringing a four-day week. He said: “Because you do you do less of the mundane things, you’re more productive. And if your businesses are more productive, you should be getting better pay. And maybe even in the long run, working a little bit less, if that works out in the right way. So that should be a positive.”