Ali Lyon sits down with the head of the British Retail Consortium to discuss Brexit, Labour and the changing face of retail
A lot has changed since Helen Dickinson took on her role as chief executive of the British Retail Consortium (BRC) in January 2013.
Will.i.am and Britney Spears had topped a music chart in an era that was determined just as much by CD sales and Itunes downloads as it was streaming.
After two years of post-financial crash gloom, the UK was riding an unfamiliar wave of optimism, having hosted a successful Olympic Games.
And, with the UK still in the European Union, a young David Cameron will have been preparing his fateful Bloomberg speech, in which he prepared the pitch for a referendum that would come to consume almost all the oxygen in the business and political world for much of the proceeding ten years.
But there are few areas where the pace of change has been so profound as that which Dickinson has had the responsibility of representing.
The likes of BHS and Topshop were dominant forces on the High Street and, by extension, the High Street was still the dominant force of the industry.
“My whole sector’s operating model has been thrown up in the air since I started my career 30 years ago,” says Dickinson, who before taking the helm at the BRC had been KPMG’s head of retail.
“The evolution from just retailing being the sort of distributive channel of sourcing goods from suppliers, through supply chains into shops, and selling them to their own people has fundamentally changed.
“Being a retailer now is so much more complicated for retailers, because, they don’t even have just digital and physical, they’ve got more international competition, a different consumer make-up, social media channels.”
Working with Labour
Dickinson, whose industry body represents firms from areas as diverse as major supermarkets, online retailers and high street fashion brands, is used to adapting.
But politically, the industry is in for yet another period of upheaval as it acclimatises to the new Labour government. For now, the retail veteran is optimistic.
“We feel listened to,” she says of the nascent signs of how the government has fared. “A lot of the things that retail and the BRC had been passionate about for a long time had made their way into the manifesto.
“And a lot of those have found their way into the King’s speech.”
Dickinson lists the likes of Skills England Bill, which contained a pledge to reform the Apprenticeship Levy, an “overly restrictive” piece of policy in an area crucial to retailers – vocational skills – which many “had started to see as a tax” as opposed to the incentive it was designed to be.
Also putting Labour in Dickinson’s good books was news of the Crime and Policing Bill that resolved to make assaulting a shop worker a new, specific offence in response to a major spate of violence in shops, which doubled between 2022 and 2023.
Her interactions with Rachel Reeves and business secretary Jonathan Reynolds have been positive too. “They invested their time in us and have an optimistic agenda,” she said.
“If I was sitting with Sue Gray, I would tell her it’s great to have these policy plans, many of which we support, but they need to fix the machine that sits behind engagement with business.”
But glowing as her initial prognosis is, it is accompanied with a note of caution. “If I was sitting with Sue Gray, I would tell her it’s great to have these policy plans, many of which we support, but they need to fix the machine that sits behind engagement with business,” she says, bearing the scars of the past six years of government engagement. “The need to ensure they consult with us properly and across departments [and then roll it out effectively].”
It was that inability to be organised and see the bigger picture that was one of Dickinson’s main frustrations with the last administration, a subject on which she doesn’t hold her punches.
She tries to remember the number of prime ministers she served under – the public relations representative sitting to her left dutifully chimes in to say it is six: a number that pales into comparison compared to the ten business secretaries she has engaged with since 2013, who worked in four different department names.
“Not only was it the change in personnel, though that didn’t help, there was this culture with the last government of ‘we know better than you’. There was an arrogance to it whereby they felt they didn’t need to listen to us because they didn’t need to take us seriously,” says Dickinson, who was awarded an OBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours.
Beyond Brexit
The change in government has also solicited a groundswell of interest in what it says about the future relations with our largest trading partner; a topic that barring a few noticeable exceptions, was conspicuous by its absence throughout the general election campaign.
Shortly before the election the British Chamber of Commerce was the UK’s first major business group to put its head above the parapet, calling on politicians to “stop treading on eggshells” and renegotiate a better deal with the European Union.
It was a demand that Jonathan Reynold’s pushed back on when addressing delegates on the day, saying any renegotiation wouldn’t be worth the “instability” such a move would cause. But would the BRC prefer to see a Labour Party more punchy on its demands for a new settlement?
“They just want [the relationship] to be as simple and straightforward as possible.”
“Retailers are pragmatic about it,” Dickinson says. “They just want [the relationship] to be as simple and straightforward as possible. They’re not sitting there and going, ‘we need a new deal or a customs union or to go back in the single market’ – they just want some practical reality for it to work.”
It is this unstinting focus on pragmatism over ideology that explains how she has managed to keep her two hundred-strong army of members happy during the course of a period of such radical and all encompassing change.
Does she have another decade in the tank?
“Every time circumstances change, it feels like a new job, with a whole different mind sent and a different agenda,” she says.
“I guess I’ll go when I’m no longer contributing.”