Head of the CBI in Wales, Emma Watkins, on the pressure of representing Welsh business.
Since her appointment as head of the CBI in Wales in January this year, Emma Watkins has felt the spotlight shine on her. At just 34, Emma is Welsh spokeswoman for the largest business lobbying organisation in Britain, and it’s her job to represent the views of its members to both government and the media. Having returned from lobbying Westminster, she had forgotten quite how high-profile the job is since she last worked in the CBI’s Welsh office five years ago. Emma says, “When you work for the CBI everyone wants to talk to you, everyone wants to listen to you and everyone takes what you say seriously. Since coming back to Wales and taking up this job in the last couple of months, the amount of attention that has been focused on the CBI and on me has been quite a lot and it’s something that I hadn’t really remembered.”
Emma was appointed head of the CBI in Wales after her predecessor David Rosser went on secondment to the Welsh Government as its director of innovation and anchor companies. In her eight years working for the CBI Emma says that the job is more challenging than ever before but that the CBI has a much stronger voice now. “When I first started working for the CBI we were in a very comfortable economic position and nice things were happening for businesses” she says, “but I enjoy my job a lot more now because I feel like I’m making much more of a difference.”
The pressure of speaking for so many business people when economic growth has become so high on the agenda is something that Emma, who describes herself as a shy teenager, still finds challenging. Not that this is apparent upon meeting her. As you would expect, in person she is very composed, articulate and highly professional in dress and manner.
Her initial interest in business was sparked at a young age by her father, a small business owner who ran a post office and then a small craft shop in St Davids, Pembrokeshire where she grew up. She says, “I used to see him go to the bank and talk about loans and overdrafts and remember him with his big account book and I saw how business was important.”
Influenced by her father, a staunch Labour supporter, Emma became increasingly aware of the role and power of politics. After completing her degree in Modern History at Cardiff University she went on to study the MA in European Politics and Policy Making. She maintains that whilst being interested in politics, she never foresaw her career leading towards the world of lobbying. “Did I decide at the age of 18 that I wanted to be a lobbyist? No. I was always interested in politics but it wasn’t planned.”
Emma’s interest in lobbying was first sparked by her role as a researcher in the Welsh Government, where she worked for four years before taking up a job as Welsh head of policy in 2003. She says, “I learnt from the inside what it’s like being on the outside and I realised that lobbying was a really interesting area for me.” It was knowledge gained working inside Welsh government that she feels has given her an advantage over other CBI officials. Emma says, “Things that I would take for granted working in the assembly, knowledge about how the preliminary session worked or how the statements worked, are like gold dust when you work outside.”
The move to head of policy at the age of 26 was a daunting one for Emma as she had never studied economics and didn’t have any formal background in business. She says, “I didn’t feel I knew enough to talk about profit and loss and balance sheets and things like that. But I soon went out and started talking to business owners and learnt an awful lot.” She continues, “You can spend hours studying an economics text book but that will never teach you as much as spending an hour with a small business owner, for example.” David Rosser, director of the CBI in Wales at the time, says, “Having vast economics knowledge can be helpful but it’s not essential. What’s much more important is having the persistence to keep pushing for what our members demand. Emma had that determination in bucket loads.”
Having lived in Wales all her life, in 2007 Emma says she started to get bored with her life and fancied a change. When an opportunity came up to work for the CBI in Brussels as principal policy adviser she grabbed it, relishing the opportunity to put what she had learned during her postgraduate study into practice. “I still remember the day I left Wales via London and I didn’t look back.”
However Emma soon found that lobbying the European parliament was a different beast compared to working for the CBI in Wales. She says, “In Europe there’s 700 MEPs whereas we’ve got 60 government members, and there’s the language issue. You’ve got to think, why would a French socialist representing a certain part of Southern France want to talk to a British business organisation about something? So you had to really make a case to go and talk to them.”
Working abroad had its perks and Emma enjoyed the European working culture. She says, “It was less pressurised in Brussels, there was more people doing the job and the culture out there is very much that once it gets to six o’ clock you all go off for a drink. A lot of the work in Brussels is done in the networking in bars and pubs.”
After three and a half years she started to miss the UK and “small things like baked beans and Lucozade.” She moved back for the chance to work for the CBI lobbying Westminster, an opportunity she describes as the missing part of the jigsaw puzzle. It’s a job she left to take up her current position as head of the CBI in Wales.
Emma believes that the role of the CBI is more important than ever in attracting investment into Wales, something that is currently lacking. She says, “Back in the 70s and 80s we were able to compete on the basis of cheap land and labour but we can’t compete on that basis anymore because Eastern Europe, China and India are miles ahead of us in that respect. So we really have to compete on different grounds now.”
She believes that we need to make Wales a better place to start a business by giving people the right skills and building a more efficient transport infrastructure. Emma says, “I think we need to have a business friendly environment here and we need people with the right skills. Our roads should be what the gateway to Wales should be, fast moving to allow people to get their goods to market and staff to work. You only have to look at the tunnels around Newport to know that they’re not fast moving.”
She also believes that recent headlines surrounding RBS Chief Executive Stephen Hester’s possible bonus, have encouraged hostility towards business. She says, “I think if you look at the headlines there’s a lot of business bashing around and talk about corporate capitalist fat cats and negative connotations of business. I think that’s unfortunate because, setting aside the issue of executive pay and bonuses which is a separate issue; business does an awful lot of good for us. Business pays corporation tax which goes to pay the schools and hospitals, businesses employ people who then pay taxes as well.
Emma’s position as head of the CBI in Wales will last until David Rosser decides to come back. Emma would like to stay working in Wales and for the CBI. She says, “For me it brings together my interest in politics and business. If David does come back I’ll have to make some very difficult decisions about whether to leave the CBI or leave Wales.”