The CBI is right. The UK needs a growth plan | Nils Pratley

Business lobby head deserves response after government sloth on green investment and tax incentives

The CBI billed it as a major speech", which is a judgment best left to others, but, yes, Tony Danker, the director general of the CBI, made a couple of excellent points on Monday as he addressed the current obsession in UK boardrooms: where is the national plan for growth?

First, it's time for the UK to stop congratulating itself of having built so many offshore windfarms, and understand that a subsidy arms race", as Danker put it, is under way in green investment. The dramatic phrase may sound like a plea for corporate handouts (and, up to a point, it is) but it is also a widely held assessment of President Joe Biden's misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act. A $369bn (298bn) package to direct subsidies towards green technologies is enormous and has the potential to change the investment landscape and increase the gravitational pull of the US. It is a hard piece of legislation to ignore.