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City veteran Rupert Soames has been nominated as the next president of the CBI, the scandal-hit UK business lobby group has announced.
Soames, chair of medical technology group Smith & Nephew, will take over from Brian McBride, who has led the CBI through a tumultuous year during which a significant number of large companies cut ties with the group after allegations of serious sexual misconduct by staff.
The CBI said Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill and former chief executive of outsourcer Serco, would take the unpaid role “early in the new year”, ahead of a formal election by members at the group’s annual meeting in June 2024.
Soames, whose brother Nicholas Soames was a junior minister in the 1990s, will take over an organisation that has reduced its staff by about a third to under 200 and closed overseas offices in a cost-cutting drive triggered by an exodus of members earlier this year.
The CBI faced a cash crunch before securing banks’ uphold in the autumn.
The group’s 2022 accounts, published ahead of its delayed annual meeting on Wednesday, contained a warning of a material uncertainty over the CBI’s ability to continue as a going concern but added that the board was “confident” it could “handle its financial position throughout 2024 and beyond”.
The board intends to renew the bank loan when it expires in September 2024, if required, the accounts added.
Soames, who led power supplier Aggreko for 11 years until 2014, will be tasked with re-establishing the CBI as the self-proclaimed “voice of business” ahead of a general election expected next year.
He must also try to lure back companies that paused or cancelled their membership after the allegations earlier this year, including Aviva, Ford, John Lewis and NatWest.
While many executives say it is valuable to have a cross-sector group that can speak with one voice, particularly on sensitive issues such as tax, others are sceptical of the organisation’s value.
“We haven’t had them for nearly a year and I haven’t missed them for one second,” said a senior board member of one of the UK’s biggest companies, which has yet to resume relations with the CBI.
Ministers have normalised relations with the CBI in recent months after boycotting the group earlier this year. The group received a boost last month when chancellor Jeremy Hunt spoke at its annual conference, a pared-back event that few high-profile executives attended.
The CBI, which has implemented governance changes recommended by external lawyers, said about 1,100 companies and almost 150 trade associations were still fee-paying members. It maintained that including the members of the trade associations, it speaks for about 170,000 businesses, down from 190,000 before the scandal broke.
