Government business hotline condemned as a ‘gimmick’

A scheme to give the heads of the UK’s top 50 companies a personal hotline to government ministers has been condemned as a divisive gimmick by one of construction’s leading figures.

Bob White, former chairman of Mace and co-founder of Constructing Futures, said he thought the plan to assign huge corporations a ministerial “buddy” would do little to help the construction industry in Whitehall.

The business department has said the plan is at a very early stage, but spoke of “a need for strategically important companies to have a single point of contact in the government”.

White told Building: “There are particular priorities that we should, as an industry, go to government with, and we should go as a single voice, to a single voice.”