Big Boss Interview

As France grapples with political instability, rising public discontent and student protests, Renault CEO François Provost says Europe is facing a moment of reckoning.

In this edition of The Big Boss Interview, Theo Leggett speaks to the head of one of Europe's largest carmakers about the economic, industrial and political pressures reshaping the continent.

Provost warns that European vehicle production could fall to around half its historic level after 2030 unless governments tackle the combined challenges of global competition, rising costs and industrial policy. He argues that decisions being taken today in Brussels, Paris and London will determine the future of an industry that supports millions of jobs across Europe.

The Renault boss discusses the growing competitive threat from Chinese manufacturers, the future of electric vehicle regulation, and why he believes European policymakers need a more realistic approach to preserving the region's industrial base. He also reflects on the uncertainty created by political instability in France and elsewhere in Europe, and the risks this poses for businesses making long-term investment decisions.

Presenter: Theo Leggett

04:23 Developing cars in two years and learning from China

Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than the safeguards around it, and industry self-regulation is "not sufficient any longer". That is according to Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. Speaking to Will Bain on BBC's Big Boss Interview, Mr Smith said the world should worry more about AI safety than about any previous generation of digital technology in his 33 years in the industry.

Microsoft is one of the world's largest AI developers and an investor in OpenAI. Mr Smith's comments set out a position that goes beyond the "tremendous self-regulation" praised in a recent White House AI accord.

"Right now I'd argue that AI is moving forward faster than the speed of safety," Mr Smith said. "That's not good for the protection of the public. It's not even good for the industry itself."

Mr Smith set out three measures. The first is a "safety brake or emergency brake" on any AI system controlling autonomous devices or critical infrastructure, an idea often described as a kill switch within the industry. He said it should sit in the companies running the models and in the cloud infrastructure they run on. The second is a legal obligation to report incidents: if AI agents "break loose" and break into systems, the victims should be told, as they are after a data breach.

The third measure, which he called the biggest and most important, is whether government evaluators should have to sign off frontier models before release. "Just remember, right now, your washing machine is subject to more safety rules than AI," he said. He added that cartons of milk and passenger aircraft are subject to inspection and certification.

He said the UK was the country best placed to lead. The AI Security Institute, he said, has the strongest technical capability in the world to test AI models: "It's the United Kingdom. They are the best." In his account, the US began building similar capability and then slowed down. Asked about Anthropic declining UK testing of one of its models, he said the question now was when developers should be required to satisfy a government regulator that a product is safe before it is released. He described Britain as "a bridge across the Atlantic and across the English Channel". He also noted that in Washington, people "don't look at London the same way they look at Brussels".

Mr Smith also responded to Vice President JD Vance, who had accused Microsoft of abusing the H-1B visa system more than any other US company. Mr Smith said the vice president's staff "got the maths wrong". He said about 80% of the company's 6,000 visa applications were for existing employees, every green card applicant was already employed by Microsoft, and the company hired 9,000 Americans last year.

On data centres, he said the cost of new grid capacity "should not be the neighbours… it should be the industry itself".

Presenter: Will Bain

Negative perceptions of London’s stock market influenced companies’ decisions about where to list, according to Dame Julia Hoggett, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange. Speaking on Big Boss Interview, she acknowledges that companies had delayed or considered listing elsewhere because of the narrative surrounding London, but says that reflected the mood three or four years ago.

“Markets do operate on sentiment,” she says. “We need to stop throwing shade at ourselves as a nation and being a bit surprised if it’s a bit dark, a bit chilly and a bit damp.”

Hoggett also argues that coverage of London’s difficulties does not fully reflect the scale of its markets. She says the London Stock Exchange is Europe’s largest equity market by capital raised that year, the world’s second-largest fixed-income market and its largest market for closed-ended funds. She also points to Britain’s record of creating and growing businesses, saying the country produces more companies valued at over $1bn than anywhere outside the United States and China.

She challenges the assumption that British companies will necessarily perform better by listing in the US. Citing figures for a group of British businesses that raised money there since 2014, she says many have subsequently delisted and only a minority are trading above their listing prices.

Hoggett also says regulatory reform needs to be accompanied by stronger incentives to invest in Britain. Her argument is that the country has substantial pools of savings and promising businesses, but too little domestic capital flowing into those companies.

She wants a route towards abolishing stamp duty on share purchases, which she calls “a pernicious tax”. She proposes starting with relief for UK investment through ISAs and eligible pension funds, while acknowledging the revenue the government would lose. She also advocates a 10% dividend tax credit and inheritance-tax incentives linked to pension investment in Britain.

Asked whether ISA tax advantages should be restricted to British investments, she says: “I genuinely think it’s worth looking at.” She maintains that she is not asking pensioners to accept lower returns, but wants the tax system to make investing in UK companies more attractive.

Presenter: Will Bain

Britain is "walking into a second significant energy crisis", the boss of the country's largest electricity generator has warned. Simone Rossi, chief executive of EDF in the UK, told the BBC's Business Editor Simon Jack on the Big Boss Interview that household bills are forecast to rise by around 20% in January. Customers still owe more than £5bn from the last crisis, four years ago.

Gas is driving the rise. Gas prices are up 25%, while the electricity part of the price cap is 4% lower than in January. His advice is blunt: where you can, choose electricity over gas. He blames wars hitting the world's two biggest gas suppliers at once (Russia and Qatar), which he calls "almost unthinkable".

Closer to the UK, he is asked whether ministers should approve the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields, he says: "Green light. Absolutely. No doubt about it." With most homes heated by gas and most cars running on petrol or diesel, weaning Britain off fossil fuels will take decades. Until then, he argues, producing oil and gas at home keeps jobs and tax receipts in the UK and pollutes less than importing it. "It's a no-brainer."

Nor does he expect relief soon. Ed Miliband promised bills £300 lower by the end of this parliament. Mr Rossi expects them to stay stubbornly high until 2030. Britain built an energy system for rising demand, but demand fell even as the economy grew by 30% and the population by about 10 million. The cause, he says, is deindustrialisation. The fixed costs of the grid are now spread across fewer users, and "somebody's got to pay".

That explains the paradox of cheap renewables and expensive bills. Wind and solar are the cheapest power to produce, but cost is not the same as value. Electricity is hard to store and does not travel well, so every wind farm far from where people live needs costly cables, grid and storage. Last year Britain paid wind farms to switch off nine terawatt-hours of power while importing more than £40bn of fuel.

His answer runs against intuition: more demand means lower bills. Ten million electric vehicles, two million heat pumps and more data centres would spread those fixed costs more widely. He wants ministers to move more policy costs from bills into general taxation, extend the zero VAT rate on electricity beyond April, and introduce a proper social tariff. Bills, he says, have become "a tool to pay for a lot of stuff", and that makes them regressive.

Then there is the winter. Britain's gas storage is low, and relying on imports could mean "staggering" prices at peak times. "If we are caught short," he warns, "basically we are naked in front of the markets."

Presenter: Simon Jack

01:15 Why UK energy bills are so high

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

01:55 Chancellor's speech and the end of coal mining

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

01:47 AI hype and the pace of change

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

Picture: EPA/Shutterstock

02:00 Sir Jim Ratcliffe joins the podcast

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

00:00 Will and Sean intro the pod

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

(Episode 52) The chief executive of the world's largest water company has said Veolia would consider running Britain's water infrastructure if it were taken into public ownership, opening the door to a model in which the state owns the assets but private companies operate them.

Asked whether that could mean "nationalise the assets, and Veolia comes in to manage them," Estelle Brachlianoff said: "It could be an option, yes."

She described what that could look like in practice: Veolia running drinking water facilities, wastewater treatment plants and network management under contract, as it already does in other countries. What she ruled out was buying Thames Water. Pressed on the commercial opportunity, she said the ownership model was for government to decide.

Brachlianoff leads a business with around €45 billion in turnover and 220,000 employees worldwide, including 15,000 in the UK. She says drought and water scarcity cost the British economy more than £1 billion this summer, with two-thirds of the country affected by drought and some areas coming close to rationing.

Her warning is that this is not an exceptional summer but the beginning of a pattern. Climate change means shortages will become more frequent and more severe, she argues, and waiting until the next crisis will ultimately cost households and government more.

That leads to the question she is repeatedly pressed on: who pays?

Britain needs to fix leaks, increase resilience, deal with contaminants including PFAS "forever chemicals" and prepare for rapidly growing demand, while households remain under pressure and the Treasury faces competing calls on public money. Brachlianoff accepts that investment is needed, but argues that the answer is not simply to spend more. It is to spend more intelligently.

Instead of digging up and replacing entire stretches of leaking pipe, for example, she advocates using AI to pinpoint the precise sections that are failing. She also points to greater reuse of wastewater, noting that treated wastewater already provides around 75% of irrigation water in Jordan, alongside the possible expansion of desalination.

Her claim is that technology and efficiency could allow Britain to make its water system more resilient without water bills increasing as a proportion of household income. But she acknowledges that guarantee becomes much harder if the country waits until the next shortage before acting.

For Brachlianoff, water is increasingly a national security issue as much as an environmental one. She points to the Middle East, where desalination plants have appeared on military target lists and some Veolia facilities are now protected by Patriot missile systems. Britain's risks are less dramatic, but the underlying principle is the same: without secure water supplies there is no food production, no industry and no functioning economy.

And demand is about to become more complicated.

According to Veolia, by 2030, UK data centres are forecast to consume the equivalent of the combined water use of Birmingham and Glasgow. Brachlianoff says tensions between communities and data centres over access to water are already becoming political issues in parts of the United States.

Elsewhere, the environmental case becomes more contested. Veolia says it can now destroy PFAS - or "forever chemicals" contaminants to 99.9999%, but the question of who should pay for cleaning up decades of pollution remains unresolved. Brachlianoff says the cost will probably have to be shared between government, industry and consumers.

Presenter: Justin Rowlatt