As Secretary of State, I was privileged to meet with some exceptional business owners and leaders, and there is no doubt that they want to see the highest standards, whilst urging ‘good’ regulation rather than ‘more’ regulation.  

There’s no doubt in my mind that corporate directors need to be held to greater account for failure, including clawback of bonuses and even prosecution.  I would like to see consideration given to Risk Directors and HR Directors given board positions to better consider the interests of stakeholders and employees.  

After recent corporate failures of major companies such as Carillion and Thomas Cook, as SoS for BEIS I undertook a fundamental review of corporate governance, supported by the comprehensive work on audit of Sir John Kingman, the CMA and Sir Donald Brydon.  

I believe audit needs to become a separate profession, with its own professional qualifications.  We need to see more competition in audit, which could come from sharing the work between different firms, where one may specialise in areas such as climate exposure and diversity performance. 

It is my view that the Stewardship Code needs to hold asset managers more strongly to account for their oversight of the businesses they invest in. For too long, companies have avoided proper scrutiny by asset managers of bad business practices, which often only come to light when the company is in financial difficulty.  

For the UK to be the best place in the world to grow a business, we need to ensure the ‘few bad apples’ don’t give UK business a bad name. 

Our Red Tape Challenge will give businesses large and small the chance to propose simpler and more logical regulations.  And our plan to give greater powers to the Small Business Commissioner will be a boost to those millions of SMEs that are the lifeblood of our economy.