Follow Obama says CBI

The government must improve the way it communicates its economic recovery plans, or businesses will continue to be confused.

Richard Lambert, CBI director-general, said the government should take a lesson from the Obama administration's approach and set up a website to explain in detail the importance, timeframes and effects of recovery initiatives, and to track their progress.

Lambert said: "The government appears to have been fighting a series of forest fires rather than building a platform for economic recovery. There’s little sense of a coherent strategy about what’s happened to date.

"Also, it’s hard to remember – let alone distinguish between – the welter of initiatives that it has launched in the past couple of months. The big ones that could really make a difference, such as the measures announced on January 19 to get credit flowing, have got lost in a thicket of much less ambitious announcements aimed at small firms, motor manufacturers and the like.

"Finally, there’s not nearly enough precision about when all this noise is going to get converted into action. Very few of the initiatives have yet been given clear start-up dates. If you ask business people around the country whether they have noticed anything actually happening at the coal face, the chances are that most of them will shrug their shoulders.

"What is needed is a better sense of the big picture: an overview of what has been put in place and of what each initiative is intended to achieve, together with the dates at which each one can be expected to kick in.

"The website unveiled by the Obama administration offers an excellent template. The Prime Minister should ask Alistair Darling and Lord Mandelson to click on to www.recovery.gov, and to produce something similar for the UK in the very near future."