CBI Dinner
After recording Dragon’s Eye on the budget negotiations and the issue of a caretaker administration (or not), I head off to the CBI Dinner at City Hall.
This is the annual dinner and a massive attendance for it. The guest speaker was Sir David Varney who was previously Chief Executive of British Gas and Chairman of MMO2, the mobile telecom company. He is now Chairman of the merged HM Revenue and Customs and a senior adviser to Gordon Brown. He had some interesting things to say about streamlining decisions in the public sector and was critical of how the government often operates in hermetically sealed boxes, for example, where a next of kin dies a person may have to contact 20 or 30 agencies rather than just one. The Chair of CBI Wales, Peter Griffiths, was critical of the Chancellor’s failure to address challenges to British competitiveness and hoped that the private sector was going to have an increasing role in the provision of public services in our country.
The evening was rounded off by a fast and furious comic delivery from Rod Woodward providing a welcome balance to the thought provoking contributions that we had earlier.
Congratulations to David Rosser, Director of CBI Wales, for a very worthwhile and successful event.
