Lord Elliott on the Jobs Foundation: “We want to be around for decades to come”

Christopher Jackson

Lord Elliott greets me in the lobby at his offices, his manner as ever meticulously polite. In Alan Halsall’s memoir Last Man Standing there is this description of Elliott: “You could see him always working three or four steps ahead – he reminds me of a chess grandmaster in that respect.”

Elliott’s name is rightly respected in Westminster, not just for his masterminding – alongside Dominic Cummings – the successful Vote Leave campaign in 2016, but for his work on No2AV and the TaxPayers’ Alliance, among many other things.

His latest project is the Jobs Foundation. I ask him how it started. Elliott speaks very carefully often pausing to fish out the right word from the ether; he is an extremely considerate and subtle interviewee. “I have always had a big belief that business plays a hugely important role in society and providing for our country’s prosperity but also for family prosperity,” he tells me. “In some ways it is frustrating for me that business gets such a bad rep when it does so much good.”

Elliott is keen to point out that business is predominantly a benevolent force: “Of course there are bad apples in business – as in all walks of society whether it’s the public sector, charitable bodies, schools or religious organisations. You always have that. But if you look at attitudes towards the business community, business leaders and entrepreneurs are held in lower regard in the UK compared to most of the Western countries.”

So what does business particularly contribute to our society? “Without businesses you wouldn’t have four in five jobs in the private sector created – and frankly, you would haven’t one in five jobs in the public sector. They wouldn’t be there because essentially every pound that gets into the Exchequer at some point started with a business through corporation tax or business rates or VAT. Or it’s their employees paying the income tax or NI that’s all originated thanks to the work of a businessman.”

It’s an important point – and seems especially important now that the NICs have been raised so dramatically in Rachel Reeves’ first budget. So how did the Jobs Foundation start? “Together with Georgiana Bristol, my co-founder, I started thinking about a form for the Jobs Foundation. We wanted to focus on jobs and the importance of work – and getting people from disadvantaged backgrounds into work, and helping them with social mobility through that. We thought: ‘What is the key thing that is missing in this area?’”

Elliott and Bristol surveyed the terrain and saw much to applaud. “You have some absolutely brilliant businesses who excel at this at the moment. There are many examples whether its Timpson’s with ex-offenders or whether its Itsu or Pret who work with homeless people. What nobody had done is to actually work out what’s the best practice in this area. So if you are a business who wants to make a special effort in terms of helping people into work rather than going through the trials and tribulations of setting something up from scratch, then we are the charity who will be at the heart of all that.”

For Elliott, this is a cross-party endeavour, and especially relevant under the still relatively new Starmer administration. ”One of the priorities of the new government is to get two million people from worklessness into work. This would mean reducing the worklessness of the UK from the current level of 25 per cent to 20 per cent – and if you can get those people into work, then there might be the need to reform the role of Job Centres for example. I am sure that is part of the solution – but we also need to recognise that that won’t happen without businesses playing their role. That’s a conversation we want to champion.”

What is emerging is a charity with support from all sides of the political spectrum. It’s often forgotten how good Elliott is at forging consensus – the chair of the Brexit campaign, for instance, was Gisela Stuart a Labour MP. At the Jobs foundation, Nick Tyrone (“he is quite vocal on Twitter and still an ardent Remainer”) is leading on policy. “All of us come together with the central belief that business has a hugely important role to play in terms of social mobility,” Elliott says.

So how will it work and what progress has been made so far? “We launched the charity in September 2023. We then went into a building phase, purposefully keeping below the radar because we wanted to build the organisation and not get dragged into political debate during the General Election campaign that everybody knew was coming up. We stayed below the radar and during that period we have been doing three things. The first thing is building our network and we want to reach 1000 people by the end of 2024: we are more than half way there at the moment.”

Elliott continues: “Secondly we have been doing our foundation research which is headed by Nick Tyrone. We are going into four parts of the country to really get into the detail of the contribution that business makes to those local communities. We have picked a city, Sheffield; a town, Loughborough; a coastal community, Hartlepool; and a more rural area, Pembrokeshire to take a deep dive in all of those areas. That has never really been done before. Once that is published and once we have reached 1000 people at the end of the year we will have reached the end of what we call our phase 2.”

And phase 3? “In 2025 we will enter the public domain. By that point we will then have the idea of that best practice for getting people from poverty into work. This means that when it comes to us engaging in the policy debate in Westminster and Whitehall, we are not just talking from theoretical experience or having read some polling. We have actually got a deep understanding about any government proposals and be able to make constructive observations. It doesn’t really matter which party is in power: we want to be around for decades to come.”

So what kind of insights is the research currently producing? “Two key things. The first point is we found a huge desire and pride among the business leaders we spoke with about what they do in this area. Many of them don’t have specific schemes to take people out of poverty and unemployment; they do this naturally as part of what they see as being their social good as a business. But they want to do more: and that’s where the Jobs Foundation comes in.”

And the second point? “We have found that by looking at four separate areas that often when you hear policymakers from all parties and all political dimensions talk about the role of business in specific communities they talk about it with a one size fits all approach. What we have found is that, for instance, in Sheffield the role of the two universities is very important. But you don’t have that in, say, Hartlepool which is a very different ecosystem. At the Jobs Foundation we want to go down into the detail of local areas.”

Over time, Elliott expects the Jobs Foundation to look at very side of the equation of jobs including socio-economic groups (“we will have a focus on getting young people to work”) as well as sector analysis.

I ask where Elliott stands on the apprenticeship levy? “This has come up in most of the conversations we have had with businesses over the course of the past year. What’s interesting is that at the general election politicians speak with such clarity and force about it, but the tenor of the political debate doesn’t represent on either side the nuance that we have had from those conversations. Some businesses rave about the levy: they love it and think it’s a brilliant scheme and really want it to continue in its current form.  Other business leaders rant about and say it’s a terrible scheme and it doesn’t help one bit and they see it as being an additional tax which is no use to them whatsoever.  It strikes me we are still on the learning process on this.  It is probably now time to look into it more deeply and find out which bits work, and which bits don’t. That’s not a bad thing in policy terms.”

I ask what it was which sparked Elliott’s interest in politics and business. “I remember in the 80s when I was growing up sitting around the Sunday lunch table and hearing debates between my grandfather and my dad. They were both very fine men. My grandfather was an ardent Thatcherite. He had set up a small business after the war and he worked for Schofields which is now part of John Lewis.”

And his father? “My Dad was a social worker and very involved in difficult aspects of peoples’ lives. He was a trade union rep as well which sounds like he was part of the militant faction of Labour, but he wasn’t. It was a clash of two well-meaning people but two very different outlooks on the world. That really sparked my interest in politics overall.  It was my grandfather with his passion for business and setting up a small corner shop after the war and working his way up through Schofields which sparked my interest in the role of business in society.”

It is an image in microcosm of Britain: entrepreneurial and socially conscious all at the same time. When these things clash it can lead to the Punch and Judy politics which every political leader has derided once in a while. But what if the two tendencies could somehow be resolved, and become a fruitful conversation?

That’s what is happening here and there’s no doubt that the Jobs Foundation is set to be a fascinating chapter in the career of one of our most influential political figures. As 2025 unfolds, you can expect Elliott and Bristol to be front and centre of a conversation we desperately need to be having.