We also went through a great deal of upheaval on the policy front – with a major surge in inflation in the 1980s, joining the ERM in 1990 and then leaving it two years later, and also having to deal with a very large public sector deficit in the wake of the early 1990s recession. Perhaps when I was appointed to the MPC in 2006, twenty years after I joined the CBI, alarm bells should have been ringing in the business community. Both my periods of involvement with national economic policy-making have coincided with periods of major economic turbulence in the UK economy! Maybe you can take some comfort from the fact that my term on the MPC finishes at the end of May – which should usher in a calmer period for the UK economy and policymaking if past experience is any guide! From a personal point-of-view, however, this has been a fascinating period to be involved with UK economic policy-making. In my view, the actions taken by the MPC from the autumn of 2008 and through 2009 played a key role in stabilising the UK economy in the face of the  1  MPC members typically undertake 2-day regional visits which include around 4 in-depth discussions with individual companies and 3 meetings with groups of business executives. Since I joined the Committee in October 2006, I have undertaken 35 regional visits of this sort. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  negative and destructive forces created by the global financial crisis.
It is a great strength of the MPC that regional visits are a key part of the activities of all members of the Committee. And in the four and a half years I have spent as a member of the Committee, I estimate that I have visited around 140 individual businesses and talked to around 100 business groups – across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.1 There are two reasons why I am particularly pleased to speak at today’s lunch. First of all, the East of England is my home region as I live in Essex and have done so for over a quarter of a century now. Second, I am always delighted to speak on a CBI platform as the seven and a half years that I spent as a CBI economist in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was a very important and formative period in my career. I have a great respect for the work of the CBI which remains the pre-eminent business organisation in the UK. That period I spent working in the CBI’s Economics Department about twenty years ago was also a period of major economic turbulence in the UK. I joined the CBI in September 1986, just as the “Lawson Boom” was getting underway. And I was the CBI’s Director of Economic Affairs from 1989 until the end of 1993 as boom turned to bust and the UK economy went through the last major recession before the global financial crisis of 2008/9.