The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt

Creating Competitive Advantage in the Knowledge Economy

A few weeks ago, I was in Bangalore - India's Silicon State - meeting some of the software companies that will help to make India one of the most exciting countries in the global knowledge-driven economy.

One of those companies is Infosys. Its chief executive, Narayana Murthy, told me how he and six friends founded it nineteen years ago. They invested £150, most of it borrowed from their wives. Now it's one of the world's top computing services companies. Its employees, as you might expect, include several hundred dollar millionaires, and several thousand rupee millionaires. But they also include women from nearby rural villages, whose earnings in unskilled jobs at Infosys are transforming their economic and social position. The most difficult thing they had to do, Mr Murthy said, was to overcome the idea that if you were Indian, you could only be third world. 'We had to learn to benchmark ourselves against the best in the world,' he said. 'To partner with the best in the world, learn from them, and become the best in the world ourselves.'

The business and political leaders whom I met in India share that ambition - to become the best in the world. They believe that the revolution in information and communications technology gives them a unique opportunity - not merely to create new millionaires and a new middle-class, but above all to transform the conditions of millions of people now trapped in rural poverty.

In Sicily, the city of Catania was for years a symbol of the depressed and desperate condition of Italy's deep south. Now it's becoming a high-tech capital. Pasquale Pistorio, the chairman of ST Microelectronics, one of Sicily's success stories, describes it as 'a baby Silicon Valley' - but fast becoming 'the most competitive place in Europe for high-tech investments'.

Or take Ireland, a country that has transformed itself in a few decades from an agricultural economy to another European hot-spot for financial services and high-tech industry.

Bangalore, Catania and Dublin - and I'll come back to them later - all have something to teach us about how we create competitive advantage in the knowledge economy.

I don't intend to take time this evening to rehearse all the arguments about globalisation and the nature of the economic and technological transformation now taking place. We can return to them later if you wish. But I do want to deal with one misconception: the idea that there is a 'new economy'and an 'old economy';that only the 'new economy'- dot.com's, Internet-based companies and all that - has a future; and that the 'old economy'- manufacturing industries - are doomed to decline and death. That is profoundly wrong. The new technologies - and particularly the convergence of information and communication technologies - are transforming every product and service, every part of the production process and every sector of the economy.

Of course, employment is shifting from manufacturing to services, just as it shifted over a century ago from agriculture to industry. But the change is much more profound. The new technologies are making it possible to embed computing power - intelligence - and transmission capability - connectivity - in every object, connecting people to people and things to things, in ubiquitous networks. To take a simple example, the informatics in a modern car are worth far more than the steel. As Nick Scheele, chief executive of Ford Europe puts it, manufacturing companies are now embedding services in the manufactured object, wrapping services around objects. So the old distinction between manufacturing and services will not be a helpful way to think about the economy in future. Instead, as Manuel Castells puts it, we will see 'the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind'

The theme I want to develop this evening is the challenge to government and to politics in the knowledge economy. There are pessimists who say that globalisation means the death of the nation-state, that global corporations will always be able to trump national governments. That is pretty untenable when the American Justice Department is relentlessly pursuing the biggest corporation in the world, Microsoft, with an antitrust action, and when Time Warner and EMI are having to change their plans to satisfy the European Union's competition authorities. But it is also untenable when we see companies not only competing with growing intensity, but also co-operating, learning from each other, partnering in some markets even as they compete in others. Co-opetition, in the jargon. The same is true of countries and of governments. We partner with each other to create stable and fair frameworks for trade, to tackle environmental problems, to agree common standards and so on. But we also compete with each other to attract mobile capital and, increasingly, mobile talent as well. So there is competition, as well as co-operation, between nations.

A decade or so ago, there were real fears that competition between governments - within as well as beyond the European Union - would mean a race to the bottom. Progressive parties, in particular, worried that each nation would seek to attract investment by social dumping, lowering labour market standards, holding back on environmental protection, competing not by being the best but by being the worst.

Today I think it looks very different. When we look at the development of economies across Europe - and in Asia and South America as well - we don't see countries and regions and cities trying to compete by going downmarket. In Europe, particularly, we all know that we cannot compete on price against the low wage economies of the developing world. Nor can we sustain and improve our quality of life in Europe by employing people in low-wage, low-margin production. The issue instead is how we identify and build competitive advantage.

The global knowledge economy confronts British politics, and politicians, with three large challenges. First, to create an environment in which people and businesses can seize the opportunities created by economic and technological change. Second, to construct a legal and market framework for economic success - a framework that must be built as much at the European as at the national level. And third, to help people make sense of the economic and social transformations taking place - to tell a persuasive story about change. And these challenges must be met at different political levels - the local, the national and the European.

But faith in politics is low. Politicians are less trusted than they were a generation ago - something I was rather conscious of when I moved from business to politics three years ago. According to a recent study by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, over half the population believes that the country is becoming less democratic and even more people believe that power in Britain is too decentralised. A third aren't happy with their local council. And faith in European politics has declined sharply.

I certainly don't pretend that declining confidence in politics is all the fault of the last administration. Clearly it isn't. The public's trust in most institutions and professions has been falling for decades - and falling in many different countries. But the standing of politics will always be of more concern to progressive parties, who believe in an active role for government, than it is to neo-liberals who don't. For them, particularly in opposition, political cynicism is a convenient ally.

For us, overcoming political cynicism is vital if we are to meet the challenges of economic change. But the two things go together: the way we approach these challenges can, if we get it right, help to rebuild confidence in politics and the role of government.

The first challenge: creating local partnerships

The first challenge I defined is to create the environment in which people and businesses can succeed. Creating a stable macro-economic environment is the first, essential condition. Upon that foundation we can create the conditions for supply side success: high levels of education for people of all ages; first-class transport and telecommunications infrastructure; a favourable regulatory and tax framework. In Bangalore, Sicily and Ireland, the single most important condition for success was years of investment in educating people. It is just as important here. But rather than rehearse what we are doing in lifelong learning and other policy areas that are familiar to you all, I want to focus upon an issue that is too often neglected: how we build the 'soft'infrastructure, the institutions and partnerships that enable different places to succeed.

As the Internet takes off, so does the hype about cyberspace and virtual communities. Constraints of time and space disappear, or so we're told. Anyone can work anywhere.

The truth is that place still matters - indeed there are reasons for thinking it matters even more in the knowledge economy. I hardly need to argue the case with this audience. You know well that, whatever the opportunities created by distance learning and the sharing of knowledge in global scientific networks, they aren't a substitute for the daily conversation and collaboration between people who work and live in the same place.

Silicon Valley is the simplest answer to the idea that the Internet means the end of geography. There are very good reasons for the magnet effect that is exerted by Silicon Valley and other clusters. People want to be with other people in the same line of business. Clusters of businesses and research and educational institutions are more efficient: new ideas are shared faster, people learn and move more easily, firms both compete and collaborate more effectively. There is a growing body of empirical evidence, particularly from the economic geographers, showing that social capital matters to economic success as much as human and financial capital.

But place also matters for the simple reason that there are more and more people who can choose where they live and work. They want to live in good places, and so do the people who make the decisions about where businesses locate. In Bangalore, one of the key issues is how they hold on to more of their highly skilled software engineers, and how they attract back from Silicon Valley and other parts of the USA those Indians who, in their hundreds of thousands, have emigrated in the last decade.

This scouring of the globe for 'good places' produces new centres of growth, as I've indicated, but it also produces new sources of exclusion, as some places and some people are dismissed as valueless, excluded from global chains of production and consumption. That exclusion is most profound in much of Africa; but it affects some people and some places in every country, including our own.

But if place matters, then so does politics. Governments and public bodies aren't the only arbiters of whether a country, a region, a city or a neighbourhood is attractive - but they exert a powerful influence, for good or ill.

Remember the three places I began with. Ireland is small enough for national government and its agencies to set the strategy, lead the investment, go out and woo the talent. In Sicily, it was the partnership between a business leader - Pasquale Pistorio, chairman of ST Microelectronics - and a political leader - Enzo Bianco, elected mayor of Catania in 1993 and now Interior Minister in the centre-left Italian government. In Bangalore, entrepreneurs have been in the lead - helped by the fact that the IT sector is so new that it's not caught by India's famously Byzantine regulations. But the state governments are increasingly important. In Karnataka, and elsewhere, regional government is now working with business to change the regulatory environment, build infrastructure, liberalise telecommunications and energy, develop more skilled people and - most pressing of all - use the new technologies to change the lives of the poorest people in the poorest villages.

But the United Kingdom has been weak in local institutions, in effective partnerships between business and politics. By the mid-1990s, it was increasingly clear that the neo-liberals had completely failed to understand that markets depend upon non-market institutions. Partly as a result of that neglect, the United Kingdom is weak in social capital. We are one of the most centralised states of the European Union. London and the South East - where political power has been concentrated - is the richest region in the European Union. In every other part of the UK, standards of living are below the European average. As Stephen Byers has said recently, we cannot restrict the benefits of the knowledge economy to a 'winners-circle'limited to certain people, geographical areas and economic sectors. But we are too large a country for national government to be able to create sustainable and successful economies throughout the United Kingdom.

Politics is not a substitute for social capital. But politics has a vital role to play in its creation. Consider in Germany the strength of the Lander, the State Banks, the Chambers of Commerce with their universal business membership, the technology transfer institutions and so on. The advances made by Bavaria and particularly Munich in IT and biotechnology are no accident. They are the result of a determined effort by the Bavarian government, and their business leaders, to catch up with the USA and the UK. Public investment in infrastructure, a banking system that supports start-ups and small business growth, a speedy planning system are all helping to attract newcomers.

We are now building the new institutions that we need in the United Kingdom. Constitutional reform and economic modernisation going hand in hand. The Scottish Parliament. The Welsh Assembly. The Northern Ireland Executive. The Regional Development Agencies. Stronger Business Links and the new Learning and Skills Councils. In our most disadvantaged communities, through the New Deal for Communities, the Single Regeneration Budget and programmes like Sure Start for families, we are creating new partnerships - involving the public sector and business, but led by local residents. In cities, we are supporting the creation of urban regeneration partnerships between the public, private and not-for-profit sectors.

These local partnerships work. I was recently in Bristol, where I heard how a few local business leaders responded to the debate about urban regenreation after those shocking riots in St Paul's in 1981. They looked around the country and in the United States, finding out what makes urban regeneration work. They recruited chief executives to a new Bristol Initiative and began to develop a vision of wealth creation and civic pride. But the breakthrough only came when business and council leaders -previously indifferent or hostile to each other - sat down together and found they all cared about Bristol's success. Practical results followed - including the council's decision to sell a lease on the loss-making docks to a successful private company.

It sounds easy now, but then it was almost unthinkable for those politicians. No-one in the modern Labour Party can forget Liverpool in the 1980s, dragged down by industrial decline and political incompetence. Now Jaguars are being built at Halewood, the Port is handling more tonnage than ever before in its history, and the city is a vibrant commercial centre again. Behind that success is years of hard work, creating an effective partnership between local government, the Merseyside business community, and national government.

In Scotland, the new Executive is putting in place a strategy for Digital Scotland. The Welsh Development Agency is leveraging European Union funding to create a broadband infrastructure in rural communities that would have to wait years for purely commercial services to be delivered. And each of the English Regional Development Agencies has begun to identify regional competitive strengths, and to put in place a practical strategy for developing the infrastructure, the skills, the environment to encourage new businesses and attract inward investment. Now we're increasing the RDA budgets, and giving them much greater flexibility about how they invest that money.

Institution-building, creating social capital, is a slow process. But it is a vital part of building an economy that is both dynamic and inclusive, across our entire country. Making a success of this new approach is a big challenge to business. We need business leaders who can see beyond the short term, who are willing to engage in the often frustrating process of creating effective local and regional partnerships, and who will invest their time and skills in creating an environment that will be better for them and for everybody else.

But it is also a challenge to all of us in politics. A networked economy needs networked politics as well. Building strong partnerships in neighbourhoods, cities, regions and nations can't be done through tribal politics. We need politicians and political processes that reach out beyond party boundaries, help to build consensus and draw people in. Moving beyond tribal politics was one of the core values of new Labour. But in government, we had to learn the lesson that we can't devolve power from the centre as a government, while hanging on to it in the centre as a party. Those mistakes undoubtedly fed many people's cynicism about politics.

At the same time, however, we have been practising a different kind of politics - for instance in our most disadvantaged communities. We know, from years of bitter experience, that local regeneration does not work if it is imposed from the Town Hall, or if local councillors - of whatever party - pursue partisan ends. Local regeneration starts to work when the local council and the councillors make the effort to be real partners, helping local residents to set their own priorities, bringing in private business, creating public services that work in very different ways. Some councils and some councillors have been working in this way for years. But others find it very threatening. It means, for instance, that councillors, who have been elected as representatives of their neighbourhood, have to help create alternative centres of power. It means that the professionals who run the statutory services will be challenged by local residents who may have a very different view about priorities and what quality really means. By insisting upon locally-led partnerships, and investing in capacity-building in local communities, we are using the power of national government to ensure that local politicians and public services professionals do indeed create new ways of working.

So that is the first challenge: the creation of new locations of political power to support new locations of economic power.

The second challenge to politics is to create an effective market framework for the knowledge economy. That has to be done within each nation - but, increasingly, it has to be done within the European Union too.

We have great strengths in the UK as a knowledge-based economy. But in a world increasingly organised around huge economic regions, we could not fulfil that potential outside the European Union. We remain the largest single destination for foreign direct investment into Europe - and the high-tech sectors are a growing proportion of that investment. But it is precisely because we are within the European Union that we can attract that investment. The entrepreneurs and investors coming to the UK from the USA, from Australia, India and elsewhere want to work with our science base. They want to partner with leading British companies and find new skilled people. They want to work in an English-speaking country with a good business environment. But above all, they want a launching-paid into the wider European market - and it is only as part of the largest market in the world that we can hope to rival the scale and dynamism of the USA.

Even the most hostile Euro-sceptics in British politics claim that they want the UK to benefit from the European Single Market. But if we really want to be economic players in the European market, then we have to be political participants too.

Market economies don't exist in a vacuum. They exist within a cultural and institutional context, within a framework of rules and law. That framework is national. But increasingly it is European.

I realise that new Labour - not to mention the Third Way - is regarded with some scepticism by British intellectuals. But as we have tried to wrestle with the huge questions facing modern politics - globalisation, the transformation of economic systems, whether we can create a fairer society as well as a more dynamic market economy - we have had a profound influence upon the political debate across the European Union.

Ten years ago, the left parties of the European Union were overwhelmingly concerned about 'social dumping' - about how to protect the European social model by holding out against liberalisation and economic modernisation. Even five years ago, the debate was about the creation of a European economic government to offset the emerging new European monetary system.

Today, the debate is very different. The centre-left parties - in government in 12 of the 15 member states - are instead seeking to improve both justice and efficiency by investing in people's skills, modernising our welfare states to bring more people into the workforce, pursuing structural economic reforms that will create jobs in private services and new businesses rather than looking to subsidised public employment to cure Europe's persistent unemployment.

The Lisbon Summit was a watershed. Europe now has a new ambition - to become in the next decade the world's most dynamic knowledge-driven economy. We have a process for turning the aspiration into action, with the next milestone the Swedish summit in March. Economic reform is not only on the agenda, it is being vigorously pursued by the Commission and by member states.

We haven't imposed our views upon our European partners. But we have certainly influenced them.

We have helped to create the new process of benchmarking and peer review, which helps national governments learn from each other as we modernise our welfare states and labour markets. We are helping to create a new framework of state aid rules that will enable national governments, through public-private partnerships, to overcome the shortage of venture capital. We have helped to secure the e-Commerce Directive - vital to our ambition to see a true single market in Europe for e-commerce. We are helping to write the new Telecommunications Directives - directives that will shape multi-media markets for the next decade - so that they benefit people and businesses across the European Union. And we are using our close relationship with the USA to create rules of the game between two of the three great regions of the global economy - for instance, by helping to broker a deal between the USA and the European Union on the vexed issue of data privacy.

Above all, as the Prime Minister's recent speech in Warsaw demonstrated, we are proposing institutional reforms that will enable the Union to function with a hugely enlarged membership, helping to secure peace and prosperity in Central and Eastern Europe, and fulfilling the European Union's potential as the world's largest economic and political partnership of democratic states.

Agreeing European standards is vital if we are to maximise the gains of the single market. But that does not mean that we should be trying to create a single European economic or social model. Subsidiarity is a political necessity. A diversity of economic, social and political practice across the European Union allows different places to build upon their own particular cultural and historical inheritance. But it also allows for innovation and experimentation, as different countries and localities respond to change in an economy where we are all 'learning by doing'.

European politics is certainly about promoting our national interest. But we do that through partnership, not through isolation. And just as tribal politics in local councils damages the process of local economic and social regeneration that I spoke about earlier, so the tribal politics of the Thatcher government - and, despite his best efforts, John Major's government too - damaged the process of economic and social reform in Europe.

Telling a compelling story

But building partnerships, and creating effective market frameworks, locally, nationally and in Europe, aren't the only challenge to politics. All governments need a compelling story about what they're doing and why. Before the 1997 election, new Labour had a story - about modernising ourselves, modernising politics and modernising the economy. In government, we haven't always been as clear. Creating a stable economy, sorting out the public finances and then investing in public services - yes. But we have to link that narrative to the economic and technological revolution taking place - and to our driving values.

Consider the state of our economy. A long period of sustained growth and low inflation. Long-term interest rates at German levels. The number 1 destination for foreign direct investment into Europe. Above all, over a million more people in work. But there is not - or not yet - the optimism about change and the future that is so striking in the USA. One commentator even suggested recently that instead of experiencing 'joblesss growth', we may be in the midst of 'joyless growth'.

If that is so, and there is some evidence for it, then it stems from the insecurity created by the new speed of change. It is all very well for highly-educated, entrepreneurial young people to see their future as 'free workers' - hiring themselves out for the most exciting opportunities, building a stake in a business through share options, confident that if one business fails, another will succeed. The press, typically, crowed as boo.com failed. The staff knew that what they'd learnt in the process made them more valuable, not less, and had only to decide which of the competing offers they'd accept.

But it is very different if you have been made redundant from mining, or steel, or car manufacture, or textiles, or any of the great industries that used to provide most full-time employment, particularly for men. It is very different if you are the son or daughter of one of these redundant workers - with no hope of getting a job in the old industries, and no sign of any acceptable alternative. It's tough if you've always worked or expected to work full-time, and you want to support your family, to move into part-time employment, even with family tax credit in the pay packet. And it is uncomfortable in the service sectors - private and public sector - where a job for life is no longer on offer, where the pressures to raise productivity are intense, and where new technologies and new demands from the people you serve are a daily source of stress.

We must never underestimate how frightening and how painful change is to people who see not just their jobs disappearing but old landmarks and old values as well, and who no longer trust old institutions, including old institutions of government.

Last year, at the conference on progressive government in Florence, President Clinton said that on most of the difficult issues that had confronted him during his presidency he had made the case and won the argument with the American people. But not on globalisation and global free trade. The result is not just opposition, at Seattle and the failed attempt then at a new world trade round. It is a rise in support for protectionism in many countries and many sectors of the economy.

Renewed concern with identity is also a response to globalisation. The politics of identity wears a positive face - as people assert ties of loyalty to family and community, pride in their distinctive place and culture. But the dark side of identity politics is the rise in racism and xenophobia, the scapegoating of outsiders for the ills of globalisation. These 'outsiders'are people displaced from Central and Eastern Europe as well as the people who are leaving Africa or the Indian subcontinent or China and seeking, legally or illegally, to come and work in Europe. Many of these migrants are the victims of a very old global industry - trafficking in human beings. And precisely because these new waves of migration do not respect national boundaries, no one country can deal with them on its own. We need a European approach, one in which people in the European Union can have confidence. We do not have a limitless capacity to absorb demographic change without creating very serious economic and social strains, so there needs to be immigration controls that are fair as well as effective.

But we also need to recognise the value that migrants bring to our own societies and economies. As more and more companies are recognising -and as Silicon Valley vividly illustrates - diversity helps to make a dynamic, creative culture. Increasingly, we can see that the growing diversity of our own country is another source of competitive advantage. Cosmopolitan cities, where almost every language has a home, attract new investment and new businesses. And our British Asian community gives us direct ties of family and culture to the Indian sub-continent and other parts of the Pacific Rim.

Progressive politicians have much more to do to win the argument about globalisation. Perhaps the most difficult message is that change won't stop. Economists talk about more 'job churn'and 'business churn'.What they mean is more jobs created - and more people made redundant. They mean more businesses starting - and more businesses closing down.

Not surprisingly, people who face losing their jobs expect government to protect them. Take the textiles industry for example, where tens of thousands of jobs are being lost every year - the direct result of years of under-investment, intense foreign competition, and pressures in the high street. People who've been in the industry all their lives believe that we could save those jobs if only we had the will to act. The will, in particular, to ban foreign imports. We can't. Quite apart from our international and European legal commitments, putting up trade barriers in textiles, or other sectors that face intense international competition, would damage our own producers. It would cut developing countries off from the trade opportunities that are helping them to become more prosperous - condemning their people to poverty and, as it happens, throttling new markets for our own goods.

What we can do - and we are doing - is to continue to reduce trade barriers in other regions of the world, so that more open markets in Europe are matched elsewhere. Develop a world trade system that effectively meets the needs of the poorest countries of the world. Create a more stable global financial system to avert the risk of another financial crisis in emerging markets.

And there is much we can do - and we are doing - to help our own firms become more competitive; create the high-value, fashion goods that retailers need delivered fast; use new technology more effectively right across the supply chain; move into technical textiles - the cross-roads of textiles and the new technologies - where the UK is a world leader.

But while higher productivity, better management and faster innovation will keep some textiles firms and jobs in business, it won't save them all. So the second part of the strategy is to ensure that every worker facing redundancy is helped, and quickly, to get the new skills they need for a new job. Employment is at an all-time high, but there are still a million vacancies across the country. And with predictions of 300,000 IT shortages by 2003, there are real opportunities out there.

Nonetheless, that is a hard message for people to accept. One British trade union official I met recently - to discuss problems in a different sector - would not accept anything I was saying about the impact of technological change. 'Even one job lost is one job too many,' he said. But as long as we are creating more jobs than we are losing - and that is precisely what is happening - I believe he is wrong. The unions who are getting this right are not only defending the jobs their members now have, they are helping their members train for new jobs. As an officer of the German trade union, IG Chemie, puts it: 'It's not the new technology I fear. It's the old. That's what will cost us jobs.' But as long as the press - and some trade unionists - persist in the belief that government has a magic wand to save jobs, the harder it will be for us to help people accept change and take advantage of new opportunities.

Abstractions about change won't convince people. Creating opportunities for people and their communities will. So rather than recite the list of what we are doing to open doors for people who have been locked out of our economy for years, let me end with another story. A few weeks ago, I went to the women's access to computing course run by Leicester College - a free course tailored to school hours and largely used by women who've been bringing up children on income support. I asked Sue what had attracted her. She told me her 6-year-old boy had come home from school one day, and told her he'd been playing with the mouse. 'What's your school doing with mice in the classroom?' Sue asked. When her little boy explained about the mouse and the computer, she decided it was time to catch up with him. Not only did she do the year-long access course, she's now moving from income support to an education loan and starting a degree in computing science. It is a huge step forward.

There are thousands of people like Sue. Thousands of people who don't lack any innate capacity - but whose families, or schools, or local economies for whatever reason have never enabled them to find and fulfil their potential. Thousands of people for whom redundancy, unemployment and income support are giving way to new skills, new jobs and new businesses. Our job is to make sure that those doors open for everybody in every community and every part of our country. That, fundamentally, is how we build and sustain competitive advantage ... but above all, it is the way we create a better society.

Other speeches by The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt

• Chemicals Industry Association (23/01/03)
• Women in IT Conference (22/01/03)
• Awards for Responsible Capitalism (27/11/02)
• E - Summit (19/11/02)
• Daycare Trust Conference (13/11/02)
• Asian Trader Awards Event (12/11/02)
• T&G Manufacturing Conference (11/11/02)
• LGA Economic Regeneration Conference (05/11/02)
• Quoted Companies Alliance Dinner (30/10/02)
• The British Retail Consortium Annual Dinner (29/10/02)
• Leading Edge ICT Seminar (22/10/02)
• European Union - Challenges and Opportunities (16/10/02)
• The Government view on Business and the Environment (10/10/02)
• 100 Group Speech (08/10/02)
• Institute of Public Policy & Research Manufacturing Project Speech (23/09/02)
• The Royal Television Society (10/09/02)
• Science Strategy Document Launch (23/07/02)
• Full and Fulfilling Employment (11/07/02)
• Invest UK Annual Review of Operations 2002 (10/07/02)
• Company Law Speech (05/07/02)
• Celebrating Excellence in the Knowledge Economy (03/07/02)
• Royal Society of Chemistry Parliamentary Links Day (25/06/02)
• Labour Market Speech to MEPs (19/06/02)
• UK Labour Market (29/05/02)
• National Federation of sub-Postmasters Conference (21/05/02)
• Intellect Launch (16/05/02)
• Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership Report (13/05/02)
• Research Councils UK Launch (01/05/02)
• British Chambers of Commerce Annual Conference (22/04/02)
• Russian Economic Forum (18/04/02)
• Housebuilder of the Year Awards (28/03/02)
• Statement to the House of Commons (06/03/02)
• Reforming Europe's Economy: Obstacles and Practicalities (04/03/02)
• Trade & Industry Dinner (27/02/02)
• Social Enterprise & Co-operatives: 21st Century Businesses (26/02/02)
• Keele University (21/02/02)
• Women in Rural Enterprise Conference (07/02/02)
• The Lisbon Agenda - Delivering Jobs and Prosperity for all (06/02/02)
• NCVO Annual Conference (06/02/02)
• TUC Flexibility for All Conference (05/02/02)
• QED Annual Review (24/01/02)
• The Future for Manufacturing Industry (23/01/02)
• Women in Science - the 10th Anniversary of the Daphne Jackson Trust (21/01/02)
• The Annual Dinner of The British Israel Chamber of Commerce (16/01/02)

(the following are available from the archive)
• Free Trade For a Fair, Prosperous World (24/07/01)
• Business in the Community Awards for Excellence (11/07/01)
• Business And Society - Roles and Responsibilities (09/07/01)
• Statement at the Press Launch of Enterprise for all (18/06/01)
• Business Unlimited : Investing in South Africa Conference (14/06/01)
• AEEU Conference (13/06/01)
• Regulating UK Communications (22/03/01)
• "The UK Online: The British Government's approach to e-business" (19/01/01)
• European Telework 2000 'New Ways of Working' Conference (13/09/00)
• World Congress on Information Technology: "Better Government: The Vision and the Challenges" (14/06/00)
• Microsoft Government Leaders Conference (07/04/00)
• e-Commerce Strategy Presentation by the Minister for e-Commerce, Harvard Information Infrastructure Project (14/03/00)
• Business Link National Conference (19/10/99)
• The CBI & Real Business Magazine 9th Growing Business Awards (06/12/01)
• Proshare Awards Speech (04/12/01)
• Building a high productivity, low carbon economy (04/12/01)
• Yorkshire Forward Business Lunch (30/11/01)
• "Made in Sheffield" Dinner (29/11/01)
• Free and Fair Trade for Peace and Prosperity (06/11/01)
• "Building a Stronger World Community Through Trade" (25/10/01)
• "Economic Reform in Europe : more important than ever." (24/10/01)
• TUC Congress (10/09/01)