Christine Seib says that the Treasury's sudden desire to invite insurers to the high table is just an empty gesture
It must be so tedious to have to play politics. The office variety is difficult enough to negotiate, particularly in these fraught times of drunken work Christmas parties. Imagine having to do the real thing with real politicians, who are far more slippery and self-aggrandising than most of us can manage even in our most Machiavellian moments.
Yet that is exactly what Lloyd's is doing right now - all because Chancellor Gordon Brown suddenly wants to be buddies with the City.
After 10 years in which he has moulded a Treasury that has ridden rough-shod over the financial sector, that swept away regulation only to produce a new tangle of red tape, and put paid to any friendly relationship that companies might have had with the taxman, our Chancellor has No 10 within his grasp. It has no doubt lately occurred to him that it might be helpful to have big business on side.
The invitations to October's first meeting of Brown's high level group on financial services must have come as a surprise to some of Britain's biggest insurers, whom the main man has never granted an audience.
This is despite the fact that the financial services sectors' contribution to GDP during the Chancellor's tenure has risen from 6.5% to 8.5%. In the same period, manufacturers, the ones that the Chancellor probably sees as doing real work, not just effete pen pushing to make great wealth for the few, have seen their own contribution fall from 21.7% to 13.6%.
The City's contribution to the country's coffers - something close to Mr Brown's heart - is also impressive. The £12bn in income tax raised from the financial services' workforce makes up 12% of all income tax receipts, three times their 4% share of the workforce by number.
If the Chancellor has seen the error of his ways, all well and good. The trouble is that the high-level group appears to be a lot of show but little substance. It took about six months for the Treasury to attract sufficient interest from the City for it to feel comfortable in announcing the group's membership. Insiders say that the agenda for the October meeting was decided just days before the event, and only when advisers pointed out that busy chief executives might be miffed to turn up and find out that nothing had been planned. The Treasury has undertaken to consider insurers' concerns on the corporate tax rate and their ability to compete, but few people have any faith that Britain's tax-and-spend Treasury will take action.
As a side effect of the meeting, Lloyd's chairman Lord Levene, a member of the high-level group, has been tasked with looking at the modernisation of the insurance market.
Never mind that that job is already being ably done by the Lloyd's mark reform group, led by Dane Douetil, and that Lloyd's chief executive Richard Ward has thrown his support behind transformation attempts kicked off by the 'group of six'.
What the Treasury wants is, suddenly, to be seen to be taking an interest, and Lord Levene is far too consummate a player in the echelons of power to do anything but smile politely and get on with it. He has so far appointed one member to his new committee. It is, of course, politic for Lloyd's to comply with the Chancellor's wishes.
Surely I can't be the only one sceptical that the Treasury's lamentably late intervention will result in great change. IT
