Jonathan Reynolds: 'You don’t get the nice things unless you’ve got discipline'

Adjoining the office of Jonathan Reynolds is the Churchill Room. This is where he speaks to The House about his plans for the Department for Business and Trade, which is located in the Old Admiralty Building, once the headquarters of the Royal Navy. 

Reynolds beckons us over to “The Churchill Map Case”: behind heavy wooden doors, maps of the world are covered in pin marks he says were made by Winston Churchill himself when directing fleets. The Business Secretary is clearly excited about his new workplace.

“To me, you don’t get the nice things unless you’ve got that discipline. There’s maybe a need to explain part of that”

His glee is at odds with the tone of Labour’s first months in government, widely characterised as gloomy – from the two-child benefit cap row to a cut in the winter fuel allowance. So, at this Labour Conference, will his party start to sound a little less depressing?

“The message is going to be ‘change has begun’,” Reynolds replies. “I think it is both fair and necessary to talk about the inheritance because it is challenging. For a department like this one, everything from steel to compensation for postmasters was in that Treasury reserve that was overspent.

“But the point – and I understand what you mean about the need to stress this – is that when you’re fixing your foundations, that’s not just about that short-term problem that you’ve inherited. It’s about a better future.”

It sounds as if he recognises there is a messaging problem. But, like Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Reynolds continues to put the blame squarely on their predecessors in government – and stresses the need for fiscal discipline.

“You’ve seen in the last few years the last Conservative government raiding those longer-term capital budgets to meet day-to-day spending needs, so you never have the chance to break out of the high-tax, low-growth paradigm that we’ve seen,” Reynolds says.

“Sometimes when you’re on the media, you get asked: ‘Can you deliver the nice things people want when you’ve got this fiscal discipline?’ To me, you don’t get the nice things unless you’ve got that discipline. There’s maybe a need to explain part of that.”

Reynolds had a difficult media round when forced to defend the new means-testing of the winter fuel allowance. Asked to guarantee pensioners would not die of cold as a result of the move, he could not do so.

After years spent railing against similar Tory policies, how has he adjusted to being in the hot seat himself? 

“It’s challenging. But, after 14 years of opposition, I wake up every day and I want to be the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, and then I am the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. I don’t in any way minimise the scale of what we’ve got to do – this is a big, big job to turn the country around – but I want the job, enjoy the job, and I think there’s a chance to make a real difference.”

“If people follow rules, declare anything they’ve received, I don’t think it’s a particular issue”

Keir Starmer has also come under pressure from the media over his frequent acceptance of freebies and his delayed declaration of clothes donated by Labour peer Lord Alli to his wife, Victoria. Isn’t this a bad look for the Prime Minister?

“If people follow rules, declare anything they’ve received, I don’t think it’s a particular issue. You obviously have portfolios where you get invited to all manner of things, because they’re significant economic and cultural events, and they’re in your portfolio,” Reynolds replies.

“Sometimes people can get offended if you aren’t going to the events that they organise, and the system we have where ministers, MPs, disclose these things, I think, is the right one.”

Yet many of the gifts accepted by MPs are high-end luxuries most people can only dream of, and at the same time ministers are “picking the pockets of pensioners”, in the words of Unite leader Sharon Graham. It’s at least an image problem?

“But you’re being invited as someone who has responsibility, in my case, for large swathes of the British economy. I think those invitations reflect that. It’s not about some disguised remuneration for the job that you’re doing,” he insists.

Labour’s flagship “plan to make work pay” comes under Reynolds’ remit as well as Angela Rayner’s. Here, too, the Business Secretary is unhappy about how it is being covered by the media.

He makes this point when asked about a problem the FT has highlighted: how the length of time between the introduction of the Employment Bill in October and the reforms to employment status, a longer-term ambition, could incentivise firms to hire staff as contractors or casual workers in the interim.

“The first thing to say is the headlines I see on ‘make work pay’ are very far off the mark. A lot of the time it is speculation, or the presentation of maybe the law as it stands today in a way that isn’t accurate.

“If you take the ‘new deal for working people’ as a whole, it’s about 70 measures in there. Not all are employment measures that would come under this department, but the Employment Bill that we promised in 100 days is on schedule and implements half of the package. Alongside that, we intend to publish a document making clear how that fits into the wider picture.”

Work status is a “very complicated area”, Reynolds explains, and must be “separate to this legislation”. He does not say how the unintended consequences presented by the gap between the two instalments of employment reform could be avoided, preferring to point out that Theresa May and Boris Johnson failed to deliver an Employment Bill as promised.

He continues: “On zero-hours contracts, we said where people work a regular number of hours and want a contract that reflects those regular hours, we do think they should be entitled to one. If they don’t want one, they won’t be forced to have one.”

The criticism of this approach is that asking the worker to define whether a zero-hours contract is exploitative does not help – that worker runs the risk of being fired.

“Well, it’s down to the individual in terms of, it’s their right. If they don’t want a permanent contract that reflects those hours, they can refuse it, but they would have the right to do so,” he says. “I think it’s the right balance. It’s flexibility, but not one-sided flexibility.”

Reynolds will not be drawn on how long the probation period should be before ‘day one’ rights kick in, saying only: “We’ll consult on a range of options.” He and Rayner are understood to disagree on this point, though he has consistently denied reports of rifts between the two.

“I have real confidence in what we call our pro-worker, pro-business agenda. It’s not about doing a bit on employment rights and then doing a bit on planning an industrial strategy. It’s that message that everyone needs an economy that is growing more strongly, is fairly distributed in terms of the proceeds of that. I’ve always believed that. 

“Actually, the set of policies we’ve got not only deliver that – I think there’s an interesting contrast, not just to the last Conservative government but to the last Labour government.”

The House understands this is a nod to how New Labour found the joys of industrial strategy late in the day, when Lord Mandelson returned for a second stint as business secretary and intervened to help the UK automotive industry.

“You’ve seen some countries like Saudi Arabia go on a pretty remarkable journey over the last decade”

When Reynolds meets The House, he has returned only hours earlier from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he discussed a trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. 

Does he believe the reality of the modern world calls for Labour to have a stronger stomach when dealing with such regimes?

“I don’t think it’s a trade-off,” Reynolds says. “I think a GCC trade deal would be good for the economy, it would be good for our security, it would be good for peace in the Middle East.”

He continues: “If you want to make the world a better place, you have to start by engaging with the world as it is. I’m not here to be a spokesperson for any other country, other than the UK, but particularly in the Gulf you’ve seen some countries like Saudi Arabia go on a pretty remarkable journey over the last decade.”

Would he see, say, Robin Cook – the late Labour politician who pioneered ethical foreign policy – taking the same approach? “I would. I wouldn’t give it the same labels as any other era, but I do think the principle of Britain being internationalist… I do think that’s an important thing.”

Post-Brexit trade was a major focus for the Conservatives in power, but Labour would argue they failed to deliver on their rhetoric. What the UK can offer in trade is often politically difficult – from free movement to food to education – so what is it that Reynolds can do that the Tories couldn’t?

“The big thing is we’re not encumbered by the internal politics of the Conservative Party, and we’re seen to be different to them by European partners. There are some genuine trade-based benefits that can be secured. It won’t be easy, but certainly when I talk to counterparts, that is welcome.”

He adds: “The Conservatives’ obsession with Brexit meant that they really went for quantity on trade deals. Almost like the more deals you do, the more you prove we’re not in a customs union. ‘You can have a deal and you can have a deal.’ Actually, it’s got to be about quality.”

Another kind of deal is that struck by Reynolds with Tata Steel. Building on the agreement negotiated by the last government, he secured new redundancy terms and retraining opportunities. But the reality is nonetheless that the UK’s last blast furnaces are closing. Does he believe the capacity to produce virgin steel is still important?

“I think that is important. That is what I want. What I can’t tell you today is, do I have a partner in industry to deliver that? I’ve got a government which I think is the most pro-steel of any government for decades in terms of money, resources, the business environment around there…

“The frustration for me is some of the things that were possible over the last five or 10 years: there was talk of carbon capture technology around Scunthorpe, there was talk of a hybrid solution – an electric arc furnace alongside blast furnaces. I have far less options than that. I do feel a sense of anger that those decisions weren’t taken, when I compare to what was going on around the rest of the world.”

Reynolds, 44, is notable as a Labour front bencher who draws his politics from Christian socialism. The House has only a short time with the Secretary of State and little opportunity to explore much beyond his brief, but in our final minutes we turn to reports that assisted dying could be fast-tracked through Parliament. Starmer is known to back a change in the law.

“I’m not aware of any proposition to fast-track any legislation in this area. Obviously, these have always been personal conscience votes. I would have the same views I’ve always had on it, which is, I would really worry about how we would protect vulnerable people from that,” he says.

“I remember speeches from colleagues about family members, what it meant to them. I will always engage in that argument. But, as it stands, I personally wouldn’t vote for assisted dying to be introduced.”

Economic growth is the driving mission of this government. One political concern is that ministers could be blown off course by pressures unique to the Labour Party and its stakeholders, from tensions with the unions over the workers’ rights package to worries over human rights. In unison with Starmer and Reeves, Reynolds pushes the difficult message that tough decisions must be made – or a better future will be out of reach. 

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