Championing the UK as a good investment

We work with companies seeking to enter the UK, playing an important role in strengthening trade and investment relationships. During the year, we arranged trade visits for Indian and Chinese companies looking to invest in the UK, and also held a Japan-UK exchange event with the Confederation of British Industry and Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This year, our North West practice hosted two roundtables in collaboration with the China British Business Council, where local businesses and trade bodies shared their experiences of investing in China.

Our Businesses Leading Britain (BLB) research has shown that the 1,000 fastest-growing medium-sized enterprises are major contributors to employment and wealth creation across the UK. Collectively over the past three years, they have increased revenues by £30 billion and added 182,000 jobs to their employment headcount. Our BLB research has been used by government, policymakers at a national and international level, the European Investment Bank as well as Deloitte clients to inform discussions and decision-making.

The economic impact of our work – growth and job creation

Our impact on the UK economy stems from the work we do with clients, bringing together the skills and expertise across our service lines and industry groups to help them address opportunities and challenges. Through this work, we encourage investment in the UK, support companies in their ambitions to expand and export their goods and services, and have a positive impact on job creation.

This year, we helped Metro Bank – the first new UK high street bank to receive a licence in more than 100 years – to achieve a significant number of planning consents for new branches. We’re supporting the bank in its mission to grow to 200 stores, creating jobs and funding local businesses. We have also been playing a big role in creating a creative and digital hub in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, advising Innovation City on its plans to attract start-up businesses to the area in a bid to create thousands of jobs and wide-ranging economic benefits for the local community.

As a firm, we contribute to UK GDP through the services we provide and also through our own recruitment programme. During FY15 we employed 14,278 people across the UK, a 6.7 percent increase on FY14, and announced plans to expand our operations in both Cardiff and Belfast. We are one of the biggest private sector employers in Wales and announced the creation of 700 new jobs at our Centre of Excellence in Cardiff. Our Belfast office is investing more than £30 million over the next five years creating a further 338 jobs across a range of services including digital and analytics as well as finance, pensions and actuarial consulting.

Supporting social enterprise

Every day Deloitte helps businesses to grow and develop. Our Social Innovation Pioneers programme, now in its third year, uses the skills of our people and the firm’s resources to support the growth of the social enterprise sector. To date, 2,000 of our people have provided 15,000 pro bono hours to our Pioneers, helping 58 social businesses address some of their key business challenges; supporting them to grow to scale, create jobs and attract investment. The pro bono projects we have worked on this year have included strategy advice, financial planning reviews, digital support, organisational redesign, analytics and tax advice. Working with these companies has been a key factor in changing our own supply chain and procurement channels. In the tender for our Total Facilities Management contract this year we addressed areas ranging from environmental targets to ensuring the bidder’s on-site workforce is paid above the London Living Wage.

The digital economy: Responding to disruption

Every year, we witness huge advances in technology that bring great benefits to business and consumers. Yet such changes are also causing major shifts in the UK labour market. Our London Futures research estimated that some 35 percent of jobs across the UK will be made redundant by technical advances over the next 10 to 20 years. The UK must prepare to deal with the coming changes and work to ensure that new jobs created by technology outnumber those being eliminated. The report was used to create and inform discussion and debate on dealing with this challenge.

Investing in digital and innovation is, and will remain, a core part of our business. Technology is allowing companies to collect masses of data, and the challenge is finding ways to manage this in a way that provides meaningful information. We are working across a range of sectors: from better managing our road and rail networks to avoid congestion, to helping sports teams analyse how best to form their defence and attack.

This year, we have been advising the BBC to help take it to the forefront of digital innovation. The world’s largest public service broadcaster asked for our help to create an application that will allow each individual audience member to tailor the content they receive.