Rishi Sunak has today been re-heating his plans to make maths mandatory and it not the only thing going down well with the nation’s number-crunchers. In accountancy firm Deloitte’s quarterly survey of the UK’s leading Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), business confidence rose significantly at the start of 2023. It marks the largest increase since the Covid vaccine roll-out. Starmer will need to bring out his best canapés to best Rishi in sucking up to his core coalition of corporate elites.
The survey also reflects a positive view from industry leaders on Rishi Sunak’s record in government. Concerns over Brexit frictions have decreased in the wake of improved EU relations and the announcement of the Windsor Framework deal – they’re reaching their lowest level for six years. As expectations for inflation over the next year have also decreased, from 5.8% to 4.2% – meaning executives now expect Rishi to meet his pledge to half inflation. Sum-loving Sunak won’t need his abacus to work out that achieving his other four pledges might not be so easy…
According to Civitas research fellow Christian Stensrud, Deloitte, the firm responsible for last week’s famous ‘leaked’ memo, took at least €24 million from the EU in 2015. The US company was involved in €45 million worth of EU auditing and consultancy last year and Stensrud’s number-crunching reveals at least €24 million of this went straight to the firm. During the referendum campaign David Sproul, chief executive of Deloitte in the UK, warned of the “unsettling effect” that the vote was having on business and the firm claimed Whitehall needed to hire 30,000 extra civil servants to cope with Brexit. Shrinking EU means somebody needs a new revenue stream…
