Big Boss Interview

Sir Jim Ratcliffe says he has lost confidence in Britain and can see no circumstances in the near future in which he would return and reinvest his wealth in the UK.
Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s wealthiest businessmen and founder of one of its biggest industrial companies, is now a tax resident of Monaco. He argues that high and frequently changing taxes, energy policy and a lack of long-term political decision-making have damaged Britain’s ability to attract investment.
“I don’t have any confidence in the UK, really,” the INEOS founder tells BBC business editor Simon Jack for this episode of Big Boss Interview.
One consequence, he warns, could become apparent this winter. Ratcliffe says Britain could run short of gas during a prolonged cold spell, potentially forcing industrial users to shut down. The UK imports much of its gas and has relatively limited storage, he says, leaving it competing on international markets with countries including China.
His warning comes as production from the North Sea continues to decline. INEOS operates the Forties pipeline, which Ratcliffe says was built to carry around one million barrels a day into Grangemouth but is now handling 178,000. “It’s just going to shut,” he says, while describing Aberdeen as “closing down”.
He blames an effective tax rate of around 80% on North Sea production for discouraging investment and says the government should approve the Jackdaw and Rosebank projects.
He also calls for a fundamental change in government spending priorities. Ratcliffe argues that Britain should reduce welfare spending substantially and redirect the money towards artificial intelligence and robotics, warning that the UK risks falling behind the United States in technologies that will shape future economic growth.
In terms of priorities for the govt? "Immigration is clearly one," he says, pairing it with North Sea energy and tax as the questions no one in Westminster will confront. He points approvingly to Donald Trump's "landslide win", won, he says, on "immigration and tax" — and returns to the same charge that runs through the interview: "Nobody's tough enough to deal with the immigration problem. Nobody's tough enough to deal with the benefits problem. But somebody needs to do it, otherwise it ends in a bad place, doesn't it? The country goes broke."
Presenter: Simon Jack
Producer: Ollie Smith & Olie D'Albertanson
Picture: EPA/Shutterstock
02:00 Sir Jim Ratcliffe joins the podcast
03:15 Exploiting North Sea reserves
06:08 Carbon taxes, dumping and the deindustrialisation of Europe
10:22 "I don't have any confidence in the UK"
11:52 The wealth exodus, non-dom changes
14:57 Britain "on the slide" and the need for tougher politicians
17:56 Cutting the benefits bill to fund AI and robotics
19:07 Universities, "woke" and Oxbridge admissions
19:33 80% of world energy is still fossil fuels
22:14 End of pod

The executive chair of Paul Smith says working from home “just doesn’t work” for young people and has urged the government to stay out of decisions over where employees work.
Ewan Venters argues that younger workers risk missing the informal learning and mentoring that comes from being around more experienced colleagues. He traces his own career back to joining Sainsbury’s at sixteen and learning from senior business figures by working alongside them, describing the experience as his “university education”.
Venters says he is a “huge fan” of flexibility, but believes individual businesses rather than government should decide how it works. “Let business figure out the flexibility,” he says. “Please, let’s not have government intervention on whether you can work from home or not.”
He says the government’s approach to employment rights will be one of the things he watches most closely.
Venters took over as executive chair of Paul Smith after joining the board to review a business that has recorded losses for six consecutive years. He says previous management failed to respond quickly enough to structural changes in fashion retail as the wholesale market consolidated. “Quite frankly, they did take the eye off the ball,”.
The changing retail landscape also leads Venters into a critique of pre-pack administrations. Paul Smith is among the creditors affected by the restructuring of Harvey Nichols, and Venters describes the use of pre-packs as “dubious in terms of ethics and way business gets done”. He says suppliers could recover only a fraction of what they are owed and questions the impact on smaller brands.
We asked Frasers Group, who bought Harvey Nichols out of administration, for a response, but they have not replied at the moment.
Internationally, Venters points to the US as one of Paul Smith’s biggest opportunities. He says the brand is growing four to five times faster there than anywhere else in the world and is preparing to open on Madison Avenue.
He also calls for the return of tax-free shopping for international visitors to Britain, arguing that its removal has damaged growth.
Presenter: Sean Farrington
Producer: Olie D'Albertanson
Editor: Henry Jones
00:00 Will and Sean intro the pod
03:00 Ewan joins the pod - explains why he's at Paul Smith
05:27 Losses and what went wrong at Paul Smith
07:24 Recovery plan.
10:34 Jobs, productivity and AI
16:27 Harvey Nichols and pre-pack administrations
21:26 America Growth Strategy
23:42 WFH and back to the office
29:16 UK Budget and Tax-Free shopping

Artificial intelligence will help cure cancer within our lifetimes, according to Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm, the Cambridge-based company whose chip designs sit inside almost every smartphone on Earth. There are more than 350 billion chips using Arm technology have shipped worldwide.
Haas says health is the "killer app" for the technology. Drugs can take 20 years to develop and around 95% of research and development efforts fail. He argues AI will shorten both the time it takes to discover new drugs and the time needed to test them, with some human trials eventually supplemented or replaced by AI modelling. "I believe in our lifetime, AI will help cure cancer," he tells BBC Economics editor Faisal Islam.
But the ambitions Haas describes run into a physical constraint: the world cannot manufacture enough chips to meet demand. He says the industry is in an "absolutely supply-constrained environment" and expects that pressure to continue. Memory chip prices have risen sharply, smartphones are becoming more expensive, and handset demand is under pressure. Asked whether the shortage is simply a temporary bump, he says: "If it's a bump, it's a really, really big bump."
The expansion of AI infrastructure is driving much of that demand. Large AI models require vast amounts of memory and computing power, while technology companies are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new data centres. Haas says new semiconductor fabrication plants can cost tens of billions of dollars and take two to three years to build, limiting how quickly additional supply can come on stream.
That constraint also shapes his view of some of the more ambitious proposals for AI infrastructure. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have both talked about the possibility of putting large-scale data centres in space, but Haas says the immediate problem remains much closer to Earth: "We need more fabs before we can put a data centre in space."
Haas also says a correction in technology company valuations or investment levels is possible. He lived through the dot-com crash and draws a distinction between that period and the current AI boom, arguing that today's computing capacity is being heavily utilised rather than sitting idle. A fall in valuations, he says, would not necessarily mean a collapse in demand for AI, which he believes will become embedded across businesses and everyday technology.
Arm itself is also changing. After decades of licensing chip designs to other companies, it has begun supplying complete data-centre chips of its own. Haas says demand for its new Neoverse product rose from around $1 billion to more than $2 billion within five months, with customers including Meta, Oracle, Cloudflare and SK Telecom.
Presenter: Faisal Islam
Producer: Olie D'Albertanson

(Episode 52) The chief executive of the world's largest water company has said Veolia would consider running Britain's water infrastructure if it were taken into public ownership, opening the door to a model in which the state owns the assets but private companies operate them.
Asked whether that could mean "nationalise the assets, and Veolia comes in to manage them," Estelle Brachlianoff said: "It could be an option, yes."
She described what that could look like in practice: Veolia running drinking water facilities, wastewater treatment plants and network management under contract, as it already does in other countries. What she ruled out was buying Thames Water. Pressed on the commercial opportunity, she said the ownership model was for government to decide.
Brachlianoff leads a business with around €45 billion in turnover and 220,000 employees worldwide, including 15,000 in the UK. She says drought and water scarcity cost the British economy more than £1 billion this summer, with two-thirds of the country affected by drought and some areas coming close to rationing.
Her warning is that this is not an exceptional summer but the beginning of a pattern. Climate change means shortages will become more frequent and more severe, she argues, and waiting until the next crisis will ultimately cost households and government more.
That leads to the question she is repeatedly pressed on: who pays?
Britain needs to fix leaks, increase resilience, deal with contaminants including PFAS "forever chemicals" and prepare for rapidly growing demand, while households remain under pressure and the Treasury faces competing calls on public money. Brachlianoff accepts that investment is needed, but argues that the answer is not simply to spend more. It is to spend more intelligently.
Instead of digging up and replacing entire stretches of leaking pipe, for example, she advocates using AI to pinpoint the precise sections that are failing. She also points to greater reuse of wastewater, noting that treated wastewater already provides around 75% of irrigation water in Jordan, alongside the possible expansion of desalination.
Her claim is that technology and efficiency could allow Britain to make its water system more resilient without water bills increasing as a proportion of household income. But she acknowledges that guarantee becomes much harder if the country waits until the next shortage before acting.
For Brachlianoff, water is increasingly a national security issue as much as an environmental one. She points to the Middle East, where desalination plants have appeared on military target lists and some Veolia facilities are now protected by Patriot missile systems. Britain's risks are less dramatic, but the underlying principle is the same: without secure water supplies there is no food production, no industry and no functioning economy.
And demand is about to become more complicated.
According to Veolia, by 2030, UK data centres are forecast to consume the equivalent of the combined water use of Birmingham and Glasgow. Brachlianoff says tensions between communities and data centres over access to water are already becoming political issues in parts of the United States.
Elsewhere, the environmental case becomes more contested. Veolia says it can now destroy PFAS - or "forever chemicals" contaminants to 99.9999%, but the question of who should pay for cleaning up decades of pollution remains unresolved. Brachlianoff says the cost will probably have to be shared between government, industry and consumers.
Presenter: Justin Rowlatt
Producer: Olie D'Albertanson

Big Boss Interview brings together some of the world's most influential business leaders to discuss the opportunities, pressures and decisions that shape the organisations they lead.
This special edition features highlights from interviews available in full on BBC Sounds. Presenter Felicity Hannah revisits conversations with executives from sectors including utilities, banking, retail, technology, consumer goods and entertainment, exploring everything from artificial intelligence and digital transformation to regulation, sustainability and leadership in challenging times.
Featuring Chris Weston of Thames Water, Charlie Nunn from Lloyds Banking Group, Andrea Vidler, who leads National Lottery operator Allwyn UK, Jackie Jantos of dating app Hinge, Dirk Van de Put from Mondelez International, owner of brands including Cadbury and Oreo, and Dan Finley, the boss of Debenhams Group.