(Bloomberg) — Keir Starmer is set to meet with US business executives including Blackstone Inc. President Jon Gray, JPMorgan Asset Management Chief Executive Officer Mary Callahan Erdoes and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan on Thursday as the British prime minister seeks to attract investment to boost Britain’s flagging economy.
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“The number one mission of my government is to grow our economy, so that hard-working British people reap the benefits,” Starmer said late Wednesday in a statement issued in New York, where he’s attending the United Nations General Assembly. “More foreign investment is a crucial part of that plan.”
The Labour premier has spent much of his near three months in office highlighting the woeful state he says the previous Conservative administration left the country in. He and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves have also repeatedly pointed to a £22 billion ($29 billion) fiscal hole they need to fill this year, signaling tax rises are likely in the budget on Oct. 30.
But the negative messaging has itself become a potential drag on the economy, with consumer confidence suffering its sharpest fall in 2 1/2 years. Businesses have expressed concerns about a lack of policy detail to guide their planning, and a survey by S&P Global found on Monday that companies are putting off investments as they await details in the budget. Moreover, gross domestic product has stagnated in three out of the last four months.
All that has led to criticism about the new government’s gloomy messaging, which both Starmer and Reeves sought to arrest this week at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool.
“We have to have an accurate diagnosis of what the problem is and then our job is to say what are we going to do about it,” Starmer told BBC TV on Wednesday.
The UK government said late Wednesday that Blackstone has confirmed £10 billion of investment in Blyth, northeast England, to create what it billed as one of the largest artificial intelligence data centers in Europe, creating 4,000 jobs. The proposed deal was first announced earlier in the year when Rishi Sunak’s Conservative administration was still in power.
Starmer was due late Wednesday to meet individually with Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock Inc. The guests invited to Thursday’s round table meeting with Starmer included Adebayo Ogunlesi, CEO of Global Infrastructure Partners, Macquarie Group CEO Shemara Wikramanayake, Bank of New York President Robin Vince, Nuveen Asset Management CEO William Huffman, Carlyle Group CEO Harvey Schwartz, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and Brookfield Asset Management Chief Financial Officer Hadley Peer Marshall.
Britain is set to host hundreds of investors at an investment summit next months as Starmer seeks to sell his message that the UK is open for business.
The government has also set up two new bodies — GB Energy and the National Wealth Fund that are designed to use government spending to crowd in private investment. At conference, Reeves hinted at potential changes that would take them off the government’s books, a change in accounting treatment that Andy King, a former senior official at the Office for Budget Responsibility, has said could give her £15 billion more headroom for borrowing.
While Starmer refused to be drawn on details of what may be in the budget, he told Channel 4 News that he’s “always, long believed in borrowing to invest.”
Growing the economy is “what I’m going to be judged on at the end of this term in government,” he said when asked about Reeves’s remarks. “And I know that, and therefore we look to measures to grow the economy.”
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