SATURDAY ESSAY

presiding over major technologically advanced programmes on which our industrial wellbeing depends.

There is a tendency to talk about industrial strategy as though it was about industry – 12 per cent of our economy. If you are really going to talk about wealth creation across the economy, you have to talk about efficiency in the public sector just as prominently as excellence in the service sector.

Each government department has a responsibility to explain what its own industrial strategy is because they all sponsor industries in different ways. I believe it should have to answer to a collective forum of Ministers as to what it sees its opportunities are in furthering wealth creation, often incidental to the main function that it may have of running a health service or whatever it is responsible for.