Stephanie Flanders
Thank you. Well David do you want to add a few words to that?
David Godber
Well I think from my point of view I was pretty delighted. One, the Secretary of State comes to an event such as this. Two it’s really nice to see so many people, friends, colleagues, acquaintances in the room. It’s a pleasure to have you all here.
I think, I will take you back to 7/7 when something quite terrible happened in London and I was actually in a room with Sir George Cox and a number of the HMRC team talking about R&D tax credits while ambulance sirens were flying by the door of the hotel meeting room in which we were residing for the morning with no idea what was going on outside at the time. And the resilience of the UK and the resilience of London was not only outside in London that day but also inside the room. Because there were some very specific changes being carved out in a number of the recommendations that found their way into Cox, found their way into the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s breakfast room, found their way into the pre-budget speech and then cascaded out over the past year.
And for those of you who haven’t read Cox please get a copy. It is a road map, it is a direction in which a number of industrial partners, organisations, the RDAs are moving, the Design Council has played a major part in that, as have other very notable organisations such as the DBA. Graham Hitchen’s presentation on IDX which started out as the National Design Centre for Design Innovation was part of that outcome in the very first instance that the LDA’s taken up on, in conjunction, collaboration, hip to hip with the Design Council moving forwards and I think what I’ve seen in the last year, post-Cox is an amplification of real genuine positive action which is transcending the industry on products, on services, on design industry, everyone has an opinion but designers actually do something about it and I think what Cox has actually done in the last year is to actually take that forward into action and what the Secretary of State said about the R&D tax credits, which we’ve been a major part of as an industrial organisation.
£970 million of credits have been claimed yet it is still probably the most unclaimed credit in the UK and the setting up of the centres of excellence as specialists are going to accelerate that which should attract inward foreign investment, it should secure a base that we still have resident in the UK of talents. If you’d like somewhere for furniture manufacturing please come and find a corner of my factory - I think we can find some space.
But I think it’s incredible to watch not only the commitment over the past year but the action and the results and a number of organisations, a number of you have a part to play in that and certainly anything we can do myself as an individual, the organisation within which I reside, we are firmly committed to the UK also. To make sure that we do have a robust and sustainable plan for the future.
I think the last thing I would say is we need to take the myopia out of investment plans. The BRICs, as we call them, South America, China, Russia, India - all of the countries that are kind of in the conversation of developing countries in these areas - you know they have a lot to learn and they are learning it here, make no mistake and I think if we can, kind of, keep up the momentum of the five major points of Cox then we’ve got a fairly good foundation on which to work and moving forwards.