Lord Young kicks off entrepreneur week
LORD Young is set to deliver one of his first major speeches as prime minister David Cameron’s new enterprise adviser, after the launch today of Global Entrepreneurship Week.
The peer, who was employment and trade secretary as well as president of the board of trade in Margaret Thatcher’s government, was unveiled as the government’s new “Enterprise Tsar” earlier this month, taking over from Lord Sugar, of The Apprentice fame.
Prime Minister David Cameron has tasked him with producing a “brutally honest” report on how red tape affects small companies.
Lord Young, who is also the prime minister’s adviser on health and safety, will be speaking at the Institute of Directors headquarters in central London tomorrow.
Global Entrepreneurship Week 2010, which is set to be launched at Google’s UK headquarters with a speech from Dragon’s Den businessman Peter Jones, is an annual event encouraging entrepreneurship. The event, founded by Enterprise UK in 2004, now takes place in 101 countries, with over 8m participants.
Prime Minister David Cameron said of the week: “Global Entrepreneurship Week is a fantastic opportunity for us to inspire the innovators and entrepreneurs in our country – and in the current economic climate that is incredibly important. The future of our economy depends on a new generation of entrepreneurs coming up with ideas, resolving to make them a reality and having the vision to create wealth and jobs.”
Lord Young said when he was appointed that British firms should be able to become prosperous through better government support from officials.