See also: UK under pressure, part 1: How Britain’s economic and political crisis is affecting business travel
“I’ve never voted Labour in my life but that might change at the next election,” said one travel industry grandee privately at a recent BTN Group event. He is not alone. Opinion polls consistently show Sir Keir Starmer’s party 25 points and sometimes much more ahead of the Conservatives. The imminent appointment of a fifth Tory prime minister in six years, and third in 2022 alone, following last week’s resignation of Liz Truss is unlikely to help.
Despite Opposition clamour for a general election, there is nothing to indicate the next Conservative PM will agree to one significantly earlier than the due date of January 2025. Nevertheless, those in or connected with the travel industry are turning their thoughts to the implications of a potential, and at this point likely, change of ruling party for the first time since 2010.
Accordingly, the UK’s Business Travel Association is stepping up its engagement with Labour. However, chief executive Clive Wratten (speaking, like all interviewees for this article, before Truss’s resignation) said increased dialogue is happening not only because of a possible change of government but also because “with the issues of the last two years we have been focused on those in power.”
BTA does not fear the current iteration of Labour. “My conversations with those in the Labour party relevant to our sector over the past few months have not suggested a huge amount of change,” says Wratten. “There’s a real commitment to a strong aviation sector within the UK. Labour supports business travel for exporting around the globe.”
At its annual conference last month, Labour pledged to be green as well as red, which could conceivably translate into curbs on aviation. Again, Wratten considers this unlikely. “We need to make clear we’re all being responsible citizens but at a pace that is reasonable and doesn’t hold our economy back from growing or being disproportionately penalised against other countries,” he says. “Talking to Labour more now, what I hear from them is quite a strong business agenda, so therefore they have to balance being sustainable but also growing Britain.”
One pressing challenge for business travel which stands a good chance of easing under a Labour government is restrictions to free movement of people between the UK and EU resulting from Brexit. Many kinds of productive work (in other words, travelling for anything more than attending a meeting) now require a work permit for a UK passport holder entering an EU country or vice versa.
The music industry is one sector hit particularly hard by the new rules, making touring Europe for performers fraught with bureaucracy and expense. At the same BTN Group event, Matt Bold, campaigns and policy officer for pressure group UK Music, said that his organisation is trying to persuade the present Conservative government to work bilaterally with individual EU member states to create more work permit exemptions. “Just because of the optics of it, the UK government doesn’t really like talking to the EU but it does really like doing country-to-country negotiations,” he said.
Bold believes a change to a Labour administration less ideologically hostile to the EU could lead to a change of approach. “UK Music is campaigning for a cultural touring agreement with the EU – effectively a rolling work permit exemption,” he says. “We had some really positive meetings at the Labour party conference, which could end up being more and more important, and they’re really on board with this idea of building a more holistic set of exemptions.”
Meanwhile, for those in the business travel sector who would like to see airport expansion, changes within the present government might reap dividends.
“The new transport secretary [Anne-Marie Trevelyan] has talked about a third runway at Heathrow being back on the agenda when I thought it was completely off the agenda,” says Tim Coombs, managing director of Aviation Economics. “But if the Tories are going after something that’s positive in terms of economic growth, they might throw that into the mix, although how that fits with trying to present themselves as net zero, I’ve no idea.”
Wratten says: “The vibes are good if you support expansion at Heathrow as we do.” However, given the frequency with which the Conservatives change not only policies but personnel, including defenestrating yet another PM since the Heathrow idea was resurrected last month, it would be dangerous to assume a new runway is anything like a done deal.