Neil Carberry writes to the Chancellor calling for a coherent national workforce strategy to underpin efforts to boost economic growth

"As you prepare to deliver your first Budget, there will be no shortage of calls for new funding, fresh incentives and policy reform. I can only imagine what your call sheet looks like.

But if I could ask for one thing, it wouldn’t be another individual initiative or a slight shift in taxation that makes it fractionally easier (or harder) to run a small business, it would be a coherent national workforce strategy.

Britain’s economic challenge is well understood. We haven’t seen a period of sustained economic growth since the financial crisis. We need stronger productivity, solid capital investment, and businesses that can invest and compete. Yet too often, we discuss the people challenges standing in the way of those ambitions as though they were separate problems.

Skills shortages sit in one policy conversation, economic inactivity in another. Workforce health, employment regulation, migration, management capability and the impact of AI each have their own initiatives and debates.

Employers don’t experience these issues separately. Nor do the people working for them.

A business struggling to recruit may also be failing to develop the skills it already has. Someone returning to work after illness may need flexible job design as much as employment support. And an organisation investing in AI will see limited returns if it doesn’t also rethink how work is organised and how people are managed.

The government has taken steps to address many of these challenges. There are worthwhile ambitions across employment, skills and industrial policy, and those efforts deserve recognition.

But expecting individual reforms to add up to a coherent workforce strategy is a triumph of hope over experience.

Piecemeal reform may deliver individual successes. It will not, on its own, produce the sustained improvement in productivity and economic growth that the UK requires.

What we need is an approach that starts with the economy Britain wants to build and asks what kind of workforce, workplaces and management capability will be needed to deliver it.

That means connecting skills policy with the realities of business demand. Linking employment support to workforce health and job quality. Thinking about AI not simply as a technology investment, but as a challenge of job design, skills and leadership. And recognising that getting someone into work is only the beginning: helping them stay, develop and progress matters just as much.

It also means being clear about who is responsible for bringing these policies together, how progress will be measured and what happens when different priorities pull in different directions. It also means recommitting to the important role of discussion on practical impacts of changes with both businesses and trade unions, with a focus on solutions that work for both employers and employees rather than a commitment to ideologies that feel irrelevant to so many workers and businesses across the country.

Coordination cannot simply mean asking Whitehall departments to talk to one another more often. It requires shared objectives, clear accountability and a willingness to make choices.

But government cannot deliver this alone.

Employers have to step up too. Better productivity depends on businesses investing in their people, developing capable managers, designing jobs well and making effective use of the skills they already have. Public policy can create the conditions for success; what happens inside organisations determines how much of that potential is realised.

This is where the people profession has an important contribution to make. Its value is not simply in helping organisations comply with changing rules, but in connecting workforce decisions to business performance — and bringing evidence, expertise and professional judgement to some of the most consequential choices employers face.

At the CIPD, we want to help the profession make that contribution impossible to ignore.

I don’t expect the Chancellor to announce a complete national workforce strategy in a single Budget. Nor would another grand document, on its own, solve the problem.

But I would like to see a clear commitment to bringing the different strands of workforce policy together, with employers and the professions involved in shaping and delivering the result.

Because the test of Wednesday’s announcements should not simply be whether each measure is welcome in isolation. It should be whether, taken together, they move Britain towards a more productive, capable and resilient workforce.

A workforce strategy isn’t an optional extra to an economic growth strategy. It’s how we make one work."

Neil Carberry  
Chief Executive 
CIPD