UK’s Starmer rolls out red carpet for investors at major summit in London
Former Google chief Eric Schmidt and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink will be there, but Elon Musk has been snubbed
[LONDON] British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will host a major international investment summit on Monday (Oct 14), with his government going all out to attract foreign direct investment that will help drive economic growth.
The 62-year-old, who took office in July after the last general election, has long made this a priority in the three months since he succeeded Rishi Sunak.
And his message to senior executives from the likes of LVMH, Aviva, BlackRock and GSK when he meets them at the event in London will be to pump their money into the UK and help create thousands of jobs in the process.
The summit will take place a day after the UK launched a first formal strategy for industry since 2017, which many British manufacturers have been calling for in order to give some certainty over the new Labour government’s policy direction over the long term.
Details of the new industrial strategy will be laid out in a consultation document, known as a green paper, that will be published on Monday.
Starmer, who marked 100 days in office on Saturday, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves are using the investment summit to inject some confidence into the slack UK economy. The government is expected to announce commitments worth billions of pounds from many companies.
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More than 300 business executives, bankers, fund managers, government officials and other guests will be present at the conference.
Among the high-profile speakers are former Google chief Eric Schmidt, who will take part in a fireside chat with Starmer; BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Aviva CEO Amanda Blanc; and Brookfield Asset Management CEO Bruce Flatt.
Executives from some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, including Singapore’s GIC, are also expected to attend.
The government, however, has snubbed Tesla chief Elon Musk, who’s also the owner of X, amid plenty of discontent over Musk’s recent controversial posts on the platform.
The timing of Monday’s summit has also been questioned by some, given that Reeves is due to announce her first Budget on Oct 30. Some surveys show that many local and foreign investors are holding back as they are uncertain about the future levels of the UK’s corporate and capital gains taxes.
Earlier this month, Starmer told a gathering of ministers and mayors in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that the UK would see more foreign investment in the coming months.
In September, US private equity firm Blackstone confirmed a £10 billion (S$17.1 billion) artificial intelligece data centre in north-east England. Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, has committed £8 billion in the UK over the next five years to build data centres across the country.
Some of these projects were mooted last year when former premier Sunak raised £29.5 billion at the Conservative government’s investment conference.
One area that should get more attention is robotics, said former prime minister Tony Blair and former foreign secretary William Hague in a joint paper in which they argued that robotics is a mere “footnote” at the moment.
They wrote that local and foreign investors should invest at least £100 million in UK robotics startups, and that the Labour government should make robotics a “critical technology” in government policy.
“They should increase funding for research and create new datasets to help to train robot health workers and surgeons of the future,” said Blair and Hague.
Shevaun Haviland, the director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, was quoted as saying in a Bloomberg report on Sunday that the government needs to send a strong message about investment opportunities in the UK.
“(We should) create a new ‘Brand Britain 2.0’ that builds on the past but looks to the future. This means putting green and digital innovation at the heart of what we do, investing in infrastructure and skills, removing the barriers to investment and putting more energy and resources into exporting,” she said.
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