Less about pubs, get people back to work, says billionaire James Dyson

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Less about pubs, get people back to work, says billionaire James Dyson

The vocal Brexiteer explained that his company – now headquartered in Singapore – had to make job cuts to adapt to challenges brought by the pandemic.

The British billionaire who made his fortune with the invention of the bagless vacuum cleaner, James Dyson, urged the UK government to talk less about pubs and do more to get people back to work as the economy takes a blow following the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 programme on 7 October, Dyson insisted that entrepreneurship should be encouraged and could be a way out of the crisis.

“I think we have got to recover our economy, we have to encourage entrepreneurship and wealth creation and it will be hard work,” he said, although did not specify how he thought this should be done.

“I think we should talk less about pubs and more about how we get people back to work and how we get entrepreneurs and businesses active again.”

The UK's hospitality sector has been one of the hardest hit by the crisis. In a 25 September statement, lobby group UKHospitality said that a quarter of businesses in the sector could fail in the next three months without further support. The group said this could result in over half a million additional jobs lost.

Dyson, a vocal Brexiteer, explained that his company, which is now headquartered in Singapore, had to make job cuts as it adapted to the challenges presented by the pandemic.

“What we recognised right at the beginning in late January, early February, was that the shops were going to shut, our factories would close, so we took a decision to sell direct, rather than sell through shops that were shut,” he said. “Unfortunately quite a number of jobs were therefore made redundant.”

He also said that people should not be working from home because “you need the interaction of other people to make progress and above all, you can’t train people when they’re at home”.

When asked for his thoughts on the possibility of more lockdown measures being announced in the coming weeks by the government, he said he would urge real caution.

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