My message to ambitious British businesses looking for growth is simple: get involved with the UAE, writes Lord Mervyn Davies

I have sat in boardrooms from Hong Kong and Singapore to Mumbai and New York, and watched economies rise, stumble and reinvent themselves. Few places have impressed me as consistently as the United Arab Emirates. 

Today in my first major event as the new UK chair I will convene the UAE UK Business Council Plenary in London, taking place alongside a major conference: the Abu Dhabi Investment Forum. It is a timely opportunity to bring business leaders from both countries into the same room and set out what we can achieve together.

The UAE presents the UK with many opportunities. It sits at the heart of the new and modern economy being built around us. It is where trade, energy, capital and technology meet: a gateway to Asia, Europe and Africa.

For British companies looking to grow, there are few better partners. The foundations are strong. Trade is worth around £25bn a year. More than 14,000 British companies export their products to the UAE. Some 1.5m British visitors travel to the Emirates annually, over a hundred thousand of Britons live and work there.

And our ties go back long before the UAE’s founding in 1971, so this is a deep and multi-layered relationship.

As minister for trade and investment, I learned that investment is about relationships as much as returns. Long term capital ultimately comes from people who trust you. The UAE-UK Sovereign Investment Partnership, signed in 2021 demonstrates this. It has led to 159 investments supporting an estimated 200,000 jobs across the country. That is real capital at work in British towns and cities.

As UK chair of the Business Council I want to see us build on the achievements of the SIP and agree a dedicated UK-UAE free trade deal that supplements the accomplishments of the UK-GCC free trade agreement. 

As chairman of Holland & Barrett, I also see the relationship from the high street. Our customers care about the price and availability of goods, and that depends on supply chains that stretch across the world. This year has been a reminder of how much those chains rely on stability in the Gulf. A fifth of the world’s oil and a third of its fertiliser pass through the Strait of Hormuz. When it is disrupted, shoppers in Britain feel it. Throughout these months the UAE has kept its ports, airports and economy running, and that matters to British businesses and British households alike.

My ambition for the Council is to build on that foundation. I want more of Britain’s leading companies, from the FTSE 100 to the fast-growing firms coming up behind them, around the table. I want the Council to be the place where ideas become deals, in artificial intelligence, clean energy, life sciences, retail and advanced manufacturing.

I have spent my career looking for partners who combine ambition with reliability. In the UAE, Britain has one. My message to British business is simple: get involved. The opportunity is real, and the best of it is still ahead.

Lord Davies of Abersoch is UK chair of the UAE-UK Business Council, a former minister for trade and investment and chairman of LetterOne and Holland & Barrett