Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade
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Negotiates trade deals, sets business regulation, and explains to anyone who'll listen why Britain is open for business. Now slightly busier than usual.
The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade is the latest name for a department that has been reorganised, renamed and restructured more than any other in Whitehall. Since 2007 alone it has been the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and now the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. Five names in 16 years. Each reorganisation promised clearer focus. Each produced a new letterhead and the same underlying problems.
Eleven Secretaries of State have overseen the business brief since 2010: Vince Cable, Sajid Javid, Greg Clark, Andrea Leadsom, Alok Sharma, Kwasi Kwarteng, Jacob Rees-Mogg (49 days), Grant Shapps, Kemi Badenoch, Jonathan Reynolds and Peter Kyle, with Reynolds returning to lead the department when it absorbed science and innovation functions in the July 2026 reshuffle. The department that is supposed to provide stability, certainty and strategic direction for British business has itself been the most unstable department in government.
The numbers explain why stability matters. UK firms invest just 11.1 percent of GDP, the second lowest rate in the G7. Only Canada invests less. France invests 12.7 percent. Germany invests 12 percent. Japan invests 18.2 percent. British workers have access to 38 percent fewer machines, buildings, robots and intellectual property per hour worked than workers in comparable economies. In manufacturing, that capital gap widens to 47 percent. A country that has spent decades talking about productivity, competitiveness and growth has systematically underinvested in the tools its workers need to deliver them.
Whole economy investment reached 18.2 percent of GDP in early 2025, the lowest in the G7. That is not a new problem. It is a structural feature of the British economy that no business department, under any name, has reversed. Productivity growth averaged 0.6 percent from 2010 to 2019, the largest fall of any G7 nation. If productivity had kept growing at its earlier pace, GDP per capita would have been approximately £15,000 higher in 2024. The department responsible for business competitiveness presided over the weakest investment and productivity performance in the developed world.
Trade tells its own story. The UK ran an overall trade deficit of £39 billion in 2025: a £242 billion deficit in goods partly offset by a £203 billion surplus in services. The deficit with the EU was £89 billion. The surplus with non EU countries was £50 billion. The government has struck three trade deals since 2024, with the United States, India and the EU. The India deal alone could increase GDP by over 0.1 percent in the long term. DBT has concluded three and paused two of the nine agreements it was negotiating. These are significant steps. They also arrive years after Brexit was supposed to unlock a new era of global trade, during which the UK's share of world goods exports has continued to decline.
The department's most dramatic recent intervention was in British Steel's Scunthorpe steelworks, where it led government action to prevent irreversible closure. That saved jobs and preserved capability. It also illustrated the reactive nature of British industrial policy: waiting until a factory is about to close before intervening, rather than creating conditions that prevent the crisis.
The department published the UK's Trade Strategy in June 2025, setting out what it called a "pragmatic" approach to surviving turbulence in a changing world. It identifies eight growth driving sectors for long term support. Whether that strategy outlasts the current Secretary of State, given the department's history, is the question every business owner reading it will silently ask.
The Department for Business and Trade can point to genuine strengths. Britain remains the world's sixth largest economy. The services sector is internationally competitive. The country attracts substantial foreign investment. GDP grew 1.5 percent in 2025, making Britain the second fastest growing G7 economy. Real wages have risen more than in the decade from 2010. These are not trivial achievements.
What concerns British business is the structural underperformance beneath the headlines. Investment is the second lowest in the G7. The capital gap is 38 percent. Manufacturing capital intensity is 47 percent below peers. The trade deficit in goods is £242 billion. The department has been renamed four times and led by eleven different people in 16 years. Energy costs for industry are among the highest in the developed world. Every Industrial Strategy, every growth plan and every export drive has promised to fix these numbers. The numbers have not moved. A department that cannot keep its own name for more than four years is asking businesses to trust it with a decade long economic strategy. The public and the business community will judge it by whether this time, finally, the strategy survives long enough to produce results.