Big Boss Interview

The boss of Aviva, Britain's biggest insurer, has warned that some homes being built today could eventually become impossible to insure because of flood risk.
Speaking to Sean Farrington, Dame Amanda Blanc said Britain is continuing to build homes in areas exposed to flooding, despite the growing threat from climate change. Aviva estimates 6.3 million UK homes are already at risk of flooding, a figure it expects to rise to 8 million by 2050.
She said insurance works by spreading risk across large groups of people, but once flooding becomes almost certain, cover becomes much harder to provide. She questioned why thousands more homes are still being built in flood-prone areas and called for greater care in planning decisions.
Dame Amanda also used the interview to send a message to the Chancellor ahead of the Budget, urging ministers not to fuel speculation about changes to pensions. She said rumours before last year's Budget led many savers to make decisions they later regretted.
The conversation also covers whether pension funds should invest more in UK infrastructure, the cost of regulation, why millions of people are not saving enough for retirement, and what businesses need from government to drive growth.
And, after a turbulent period at BP, where she is stepping down from the board, Dame Amanda explains why she has no intention of discussing the oil giant's recent troubles.
Presenter: Sean Farrington
Producer: Olie D'Albertanson
Editor: Henry Jones
01:55 Chancellor's speech and the end of coal mining
05:30 Aviva's £100bn UK investment and new industry
09:00 Heathrow third runway and backing big projects
11:20 Budget warning on pensions speculation
14:25 15 million people not saving enough for retirement
20:00 Are insurance premiums working for customers
22:39 Rising flood risk
25:40 Homes that could become uninsurable
26:57 Super El Niño and preparing for extreme weather
28:54 The Aviva turnaround
36:31 BP board exit and questions on leadership
45:15 Welsh Rugby Union and governance
50:10 Sexist comments at her first AGM
52:17 Opportunities for young people and business as a force for good

The chief executive of Britain’s biggest listed technology company has questioned the government’s push to build more data centres, arguing that the UK does not have the scale to become a truly sovereign AI nation.
Steve Hare, chief executive of Sage, says Britain should be realistic about where it can compete.
He argues that data centres themselves are simply infrastructure and do not give the UK control over the underlying technology. If Britain wants greater technological sovereignty, he believes it would need to work with larger economies rather than try to build the whole AI stack alone.
Instead, Hare thinks the bigger opportunity is in applications: using increasingly cheap and widely available AI models to build products that solve real problems for customers.
He points to the rapid fall in the cost of leading AI models and believes much of the value will ultimately sit with the companies building useful services on top of them.
His caution is informed partly by experience. Hare was finance director of Marconi when the dotcom bubble burst in 2001. Looking at the huge sums now being spent on AI infrastructure, he thinks much of that capacity will eventually be used, but not necessarily at today’s prices.
He is also worried about the wider UK economy.
Sage provides accounting, payroll and finance software to millions of small and medium-sized businesses, giving Hare a close view of what is happening inside companies. Its data suggests profits are rising faster than revenues, with many business owners holding on to cash rather than investing.
Hare says uncertainty around tax and economic policy is making that caution worse. He is particularly critical of repeated speculation over capital gains tax, which he believes risks pushing entrepreneurs to build their next businesses elsewhere.
He also points to Britain’s long-running problem with scale. The UK creates large numbers of new businesses, but relatively few grow into major global technology companies before being sold, often to overseas buyers.
Hare is due to meet the new prime minister at Number 10 and says the government now needs to make some difficult choices.
His central message is that stronger growth is the only sustainable answer to rising spending pressures, borrowing costs and the demand for higher public revenues.
And his advice to both business leaders and government is simple:
“Be bold and be paranoid.”
Presenter: Sean Farrington
Producer: Olie D'Albertanson
Editor: Henry Jones
01:47 AI hype and the pace of change
08:14 How AI will change work
09:18 Growth as the UK's biggest challenge
15:03 Tax speculation and entrepreneurs moving abroad
19:35 Apprenticeships and employment rights
23:49 The prime minister's tough choices
27:20 Britain's scale-up problem
28:49 Data centres & why the UK cannot be a sovereign AI nation
36:02 Lessons from the dotcom crash
41:02 Be bold and be paranoid

Sir Jim Ratcliffe says he has lost confidence in Britain and can see no circumstances in the near future in which he would return and reinvest his wealth in the UK.
Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s wealthiest businessmen and founder of one of its biggest industrial companies, is now a tax resident of Monaco. He argues that high and frequently changing taxes, energy policy and a lack of long-term political decision-making have damaged Britain’s ability to attract investment.
“I don’t have any confidence in the UK, really,” the INEOS founder tells BBC business editor Simon Jack for this episode of Big Boss Interview.
One consequence, he warns, could become apparent this winter. Ratcliffe says Britain could run short of gas during a prolonged cold spell, potentially forcing industrial users to shut down. The UK imports much of its gas and has relatively limited storage, he says, leaving it competing on international markets with countries including China.
His warning comes as production from the North Sea continues to decline. INEOS operates the Forties pipeline, which Ratcliffe says was built to carry around one million barrels a day into Grangemouth but is now handling 178,000. “It’s just going to shut,” he says, while describing Aberdeen as “closing down”.
He blames an effective tax rate of around 80% on North Sea production for discouraging investment and says the government should approve the Jackdaw and Rosebank projects.
He also calls for a fundamental change in government spending priorities. Ratcliffe argues that Britain should reduce welfare spending substantially and redirect the money towards artificial intelligence and robotics, warning that the UK risks falling behind the United States in technologies that will shape future economic growth.
In terms of priorities for the govt? "Immigration is clearly one," he says, pairing it with North Sea energy and tax as the questions no one in Westminster will confront. He points approvingly to Donald Trump's "landslide win", won, he says, on "immigration and tax" — and returns to the same charge that runs through the interview: "Nobody's tough enough to deal with the immigration problem. Nobody's tough enough to deal with the benefits problem. But somebody needs to do it, otherwise it ends in a bad place, doesn't it? The country goes broke."
Presenter: Simon Jack
Producer: Ollie Smith & Olie D'Albertanson
Picture: EPA/Shutterstock
02:00 Sir Jim Ratcliffe joins the podcast
03:15 Exploiting North Sea reserves
06:08 Carbon taxes, dumping and the deindustrialisation of Europe
10:22 "I don't have any confidence in the UK"
11:52 The wealth exodus, non-dom changes
14:57 Britain "on the slide" and the need for tougher politicians
17:56 Cutting the benefits bill to fund AI and robotics
19:07 Universities, "woke" and Oxbridge admissions
19:33 80% of world energy is still fossil fuels
22:14 End of pod

The executive chair of Paul Smith says working from home “just doesn’t work” for young people and has urged the government to stay out of decisions over where employees work.
Ewan Venters argues that younger workers risk missing the informal learning and mentoring that comes from being around more experienced colleagues. He traces his own career back to joining Sainsbury’s at sixteen and learning from senior business figures by working alongside them, describing the experience as his “university education”.
Venters says he is a “huge fan” of flexibility, but believes individual businesses rather than government should decide how it works. “Let business figure out the flexibility,” he says. “Please, let’s not have government intervention on whether you can work from home or not.”
He says the government’s approach to employment rights will be one of the things he watches most closely.
Venters took over as executive chair of Paul Smith after joining the board to review a business that has recorded losses for six consecutive years. He says previous management failed to respond quickly enough to structural changes in fashion retail as the wholesale market consolidated. “Quite frankly, they did take the eye off the ball,”.
The changing retail landscape also leads Venters into a critique of pre-pack administrations. Paul Smith is among the creditors affected by the restructuring of Harvey Nichols, and Venters describes the use of pre-packs as “dubious in terms of ethics and way business gets done”. He says suppliers could recover only a fraction of what they are owed and questions the impact on smaller brands.
We asked Frasers Group, who bought Harvey Nichols out of administration, for a response, but they have not replied at the moment.
Internationally, Venters points to the US as one of Paul Smith’s biggest opportunities. He says the brand is growing four to five times faster there than anywhere else in the world and is preparing to open on Madison Avenue.
He also calls for the return of tax-free shopping for international visitors to Britain, arguing that its removal has damaged growth.
Presenter: Sean Farrington
Producer: Olie D'Albertanson
Editor: Henry Jones
00:00 Will and Sean intro the pod
03:00 Ewan joins the pod - explains why he's at Paul Smith
05:27 Losses and what went wrong at Paul Smith
07:24 Recovery plan.
10:34 Jobs, productivity and AI
16:27 Harvey Nichols and pre-pack administrations
21:26 America Growth Strategy
23:42 WFH and back to the office
29:16 UK Budget and Tax-Free shopping

Artificial intelligence will help cure cancer within our lifetimes, according to Rene Haas, chief executive of Arm, the Cambridge-based company whose chip designs sit inside almost every smartphone on Earth. There are more than 350 billion chips using Arm technology have shipped worldwide.
Haas says health is the "killer app" for the technology. Drugs can take 20 years to develop and around 95% of research and development efforts fail. He argues AI will shorten both the time it takes to discover new drugs and the time needed to test them, with some human trials eventually supplemented or replaced by AI modelling. "I believe in our lifetime, AI will help cure cancer," he tells BBC Economics editor Faisal Islam.
But the ambitions Haas describes run into a physical constraint: the world cannot manufacture enough chips to meet demand. He says the industry is in an "absolutely supply-constrained environment" and expects that pressure to continue. Memory chip prices have risen sharply, smartphones are becoming more expensive, and handset demand is under pressure. Asked whether the shortage is simply a temporary bump, he says: "If it's a bump, it's a really, really big bump."
The expansion of AI infrastructure is driving much of that demand. Large AI models require vast amounts of memory and computing power, while technology companies are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new data centres. Haas says new semiconductor fabrication plants can cost tens of billions of dollars and take two to three years to build, limiting how quickly additional supply can come on stream.
That constraint also shapes his view of some of the more ambitious proposals for AI infrastructure. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have both talked about the possibility of putting large-scale data centres in space, but Haas says the immediate problem remains much closer to Earth: "We need more fabs before we can put a data centre in space."
Haas also says a correction in technology company valuations or investment levels is possible. He lived through the dot-com crash and draws a distinction between that period and the current AI boom, arguing that today's computing capacity is being heavily utilised rather than sitting idle. A fall in valuations, he says, would not necessarily mean a collapse in demand for AI, which he believes will become embedded across businesses and everyday technology.
Arm itself is also changing. After decades of licensing chip designs to other companies, it has begun supplying complete data-centre chips of its own. Haas says demand for its new Neoverse product rose from around $1 billion to more than $2 billion within five months, with customers including Meta, Oracle, Cloudflare and SK Telecom.
Presenter: Faisal Islam
Producer: Olie D'Albertanson