LORD KARAN FARIDOON BILIMORIA, founder of Cobra Beer and crossbench peer, made history when he became the first person from an ethnic minority background to be elected president of the Confederation of British Industry on June 16, 2020 – right in the middle of the pandemic.
The CBI, which has 190,000 members and employs seven million people, is regarded as “the voice of British industry”. Its membership includes FTSE100 and FTSE250 companies, as well as SMEs.
As CBI president throughout the pandemic, Bilimoria has been instrumental in initiating and convincing the government to provide free lateral flow tests to businesses and citizens and to encourage regular lateral flow testing – to have mass testing as opposed to mass isolation.
At the beginning of the pandemic, he was also one of the first in the UK to call for the government to provide guaranteed loans to SMEs to enable them to survive. And also, one of the first, over a year ago, to call for the government to work with the same urgency they did for the vaccination task force, to help bring antiviral treatments with urgency. This was achieved – and “we have the Merck and Pfizer antivirals available, with Pfizer having shown in trials, 89 per cent prevention of hospitalisations and deaths,” he said.
He has also been instrumental in helping the government with trade deals including rolling over 66 EU bilateral deals, as well as with the Australia and New Zealand Free Trade Agreements and initiating the negotiations on the India FTA.
“We’re obviously helping our members and our businesses to survive and to get through to the spring and then, with the help of the government, providing the bridge to get through the crisis and the pandemic to when we can bounce back,” he pledges. “So I’m very confident that when the pandemic is behind us – as it will be – we will be able to bounce back. And I have that confidence for a number of reasons.
“One is the vaccine should work. Secondly, I believe that the treatments (for Covid patients in hospital) are getting better and better.”
He is greatly encouraged that the British Swedish company, AstraZeneca, which has partnered the development of the Oxford vaccine, is “headquartered in Cambridge”.
He was confronted by nothing short of a war situation but then Bilimoria is sustained by the memory of his late father – Lt-General Faridoon Noshir (“Billy”) Bilimoria – who rose to become the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Central Army Command of the Indian Army.
Following CBI tradition, Bilimoria first served as vice-president for a year. He will be president for two years, after which he will revert to being vice-president for a year to help his successor take over.
In his year as vice-president he was already working a 14-hour day when he was brought low by Covid. After feeling very rough for a few days, he recovered and is now doing “more than 14-hour days”.
He believes he was picked because the CBI “wanted to break the mould, because normally the president is a FTSE 100 chairman, a more senior individual in age. They wanted someone more entrepreneurial and with a more global background. And it also happens that I’m a member of the ethnic minorities, so they wanted to do something different.”
One of the “four pillars” of his presidency is his determination to improve ethnic minority representation in boardrooms across Britain. The model he wants to adopt is the 30% Club, which defines itself as “a global campaign led by chairs and CEOs taking action to increase gender diversity at board and senior management levels”.
The aim was to ensure that at least 30 per cent of board members were women. The club’s mission statement declares: “We believe that only those organisations that foster truly inclusive cultures – cultures that embrace women who look, act and, importantly, think differently – can reach their full potential to positively impact their people, their markets and their communities.”
In 10 years, the proportion has gone up to 33 per cent on the boards of FTSE companies, according to Bilimoria. “I don’t think that would have happened without the 30% Club.”
He says he wants to change the “race ratio”.
“The race ratio is something where we are going to be leading the way in Britain. We will encourage for this to be implemented around the world.”
He refers to the independent review in 2016 by Sir John Parker into the ethnic diversity of UK boards. “That set a target for every FTSE company to have at least one ethnic minority director by 2021; and every FTSE 250 company to have at least one ethnic minority director by 2024. A review of the Parker report early in 2020, before Black Lives Matter, showed that with FTSE 100, almost 40 per cent still do not even have one ethnic minority director. And with the FTSE 250, almost 70 per cent did not have even one ethnic minority director.
“As the first ethnic minority president, I want to champion diversity in business across the board – diversity of backgrounds, culture, mindset, approach. And that makes for much more creative, richer work in decision-making. And it’s proven as well. McKinsey’s did a report just recently that showed that firms in the top quarter that embrace diversity are 36 per cent more profitable than the bottom quarter. So it makes business sense, as well as is the right thing to do."
He argues: “Diversity on its own is no good, unless you have inclusion between mentoring and the culture of companies. So we’re promoting that. And we want the ethnic minority pay gap to be reported as well.”
“Look at the cabinet,” he remarks. “This is the most diverse cabinet in history, let alone Rishi (Sunak) and Priti (Patel) holding the great offices of state. They are there because they are the best people for the job, making for very effective government.
“But they happen to be from the ethnic minorities. Rishi Sunak, everyone acknowledges, is doing a tremendous job.”
The government is said to have consulted the CBI before launching its furlough, bounce back, job retention and other schemes aimed at helping businesses get through the pandemic. While CBI executives talked to senior treasury officials, Bilimoria and Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, the organisation’s first female director general – she was replaced by Tony Danker at the start of 2021 – had meetings with Sunak.
“We’ve been instrumental in contributing towards virtually all the measures,” confirms Bilimoria. “The CBI is in such a strong position to be the premier business organisation in the UK. We have this wonderful collaboration with government where they listen to us and work with us and that’s the only way it can work. The government cannot do this alone. It needs to work with business.”
Prime minister Boris Johnson told the CBI “virtual” annual conference in 2020 – it drew 9,000 people in place of the usual 1,500 – that “the Number 10 door and government’s door is always open to CBI, which is great. You know that shows how much he appreciates the collaboration and wants it to continue”.
Bilimoria’s three other pillars include “championing entrepreneurship”; also championing universities and business working closer together, particularly with a view to improving research and development, and innovation. And then the final one is the global aspect, particularly with having been the founding chair of the UK-India Business Council. “I really believe Britain has always been a global power – and a global trading nation. We want to be one of the top three recipients of inward investment. We’re an open, outward looking economy. And I want to champion that as well.”
One of his priorities is to “turbo charge” the UK-India relationship. In India, a fellow Parsi and close friend, Cyrus Poonawalla, established the Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer. The firm has been making billions of doses of the Oxford vaccine not only for India but for many low and middle income countries.
“In many ways, he deserves a Nobel Prize, because of the tens of millions of lives that he has saved over the decades. In the past, the vaccines that he has produced were exported all around the world, including to Africa, to Asia, all over and at an affordable rate, which is why I say that he has saved tens of millions of lives.”
He goes on: “I have always said that if there is a special relationship that the UK has, it is with two countries — one, of course, is the US; the other is with India.”
Referring to the Confederation of Indian Industry, he sums up: “The CII is our sister organisation in India, and we have such a close relationship with them to the extent the CII office in the UK is based within our offices.”
Bilimoria, who belongs to the Zoroastrian faith, has the distinction of being the first Parsi in the House of Lords. How he manages to fit in all his public duties is a mystery but Bilimoria wears more hats than is available in a well-stocked haberdashery.
He takes a close interest in the welfare of students – especially international students. He is chancellor of Birmingham University, chairman of the advisory board at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for International Students, and president of the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA).
“The soft power of international students is extraordinary,” he maintains. “Today, there are more world leaders who’ve been educated at British universities at any one time than in any other country, apart from America. And in some years, there will be more from the UK than there are from America. That is the amazing power. And quite apart from world leaders, there are leading scientists and other people in huge areas of different countries who’ve been educated at British universities. Those are generation-long links.”
His own family, he points out, is an example.
Bilimoria, who was born in Hyderabad in India on November 26, 1961 was educated initially at Osmania University in the city of his birth and later at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read law. He tells GG2 of his family connections with British institutions.
“My mother Yasmin was at Birmingham University. My uncle Fareed Italia, my mother’s brother, did his PhD also at Birmingham University. My maternal grandfather Squadron Leader Jamshed D Italia was at Birmingham University, too.
“My paternal grandfather Brigadier Noshir D Bilimoria was a cadet at Sandhurst,” he says.
And in Bilimoria’s own family, his sons, Kai and Josh, were at Eton. Kai went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and graduated in theology and management studies. Josh has moved to the LSE from Edinburgh University, where he studied history. His elder daughter, Zara, who went to Wellington, is now working at Sotheby’s, after doing English and philosophy at Bristol University. And his younger daughter Lily, has spent lockdown at home with her father and her mother, Heather, but normally she would be at boarding school.
The number of students coming from India fell sharply when Theresa May, as home secretary, removed their right to work for two years after completing their postgraduate studies. She insisted on including them in the migration figures, ignoring the fact the vast majority returned home after their studies in the UK. After a campaign by many people, including Bilimoria, this was restored by a more liberal-minded Boris Johnson. The numbers from India started to rise again until the pandemic caused chaos with university life. In the long term, the ambition is to increase the number of international students from 485,645 in 2018- 2019 to 600,000 by 2030, which would bring in £35 billion into the British economy.
“You get amazing students from countries like India,” enthuses Bilimoria.
He is also chair of the Memorial Gates, built at Hyde Park Corner in London in 2002 to commemorate the armed forces from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean who fought for Britain in two world wars. He firmly believes colonial history should be taught in schools. “A big part of the purpose is the commemoration of the five million who served from south Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in the first and second world wars.
“But it is also there to educate the young in this country – the schoolchildren – about this contribution. They should be aware that without that service and sacrifice, we wouldn’t have the freedoms we have today. And the good news is that we now have a very, very good relationship with the Royal British Legion. We’re working with them on the education programme to get this message out in the curriculum. Children all around the UK should learn about this sacrifice, which will mean they know about their history.
“The reality is this is our history. This is the history of this country, and children need to know about the enormous contribution of these five million individuals. Without them, those wars would not have been won. And we would not have the freedoms that we enjoy today. And that is something that one needs to know about, to learn about, and be inspired by and be grateful for. Hopefully from this year, we’ll be able to get this taught in schools.”
That people like him are playing such a crucial role in the life of the nation helps to create role models and the ethnic minorities to feel British, he agrees. “We are British Asians. Our identities are made up of being British and Asian. In my case, also being Indian and Zoroastrian Parsi – that’s all part of my identity."