Roundtable with Jaee Samant, Director General, Business Group, Department for Business and Trade
Join us for this roundtable event focusing on the supporting growth in non Industrial Strategy priority sectors
Sectors outside the Industrial Strategy’s eight priority areas, such as food, hospitality and retail, employ a significant share of the workforce, underpin economic activity across the UK, and play a crucial role in local growth, high street vitality and supply-chain resilience. As people-intensive sectors, they are also key to efforts to support inclusive growth and economic participation. However, many of these sectors have faced prolonged productivity challenges and been squeezed by labour shortages, rising costs, and tight margins.
This roundtable will explore how government and industry can strengthen collaboration, address barriers to investment and support sustainable growth in sectors that fall outside the Industrial Strategy sector plans yet remain central to the UK’s economic performance.
Key points for discussion:
- Where government and industry can collaborate to support growth, productivity, and resilience?
- What are the key enabling conditions for these sectors? And what are the successful partnership models that could be scaled or replicated
- What steps could to taken to help crowd-in further investment across the sectors?
Speaker
Jaee Samant was appointed the Director General of Business Group in January 2025. She was previously the Director General for Public Safety at the Home Office between November 2021 and December 2024.
She was the Director General for Market Frameworks at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) from 2017 to October 2021. She joined the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in 2013 as Labour Market Director. Before that she was the Home Office’s Crime Director from 2009 to 2013.
Jaee has been a civil servant since the early 1990s and has worked in a wide range of strategy and policy roles at the Department of Employment, the Department for Education and Employment, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Cabinet Office and the Home Office. She has had secondments to the BIG Lottery Fund and the BBC.
Jaee spent some of her childhood in India, Singapore and Hong Kong before moving to the UK at the age of 12. She worked in banking for a year before joining the civil service.
Please note attendee numbers at roundtables are strictly limited to ensure everyone is able to contribute to the conversation. Invitees are carefully selected in line with WIG's charitable purpose, to bring a range of views and perspectives. If you or a colleague would like to be considered for future roundtables in this series, then please feel free to email us at [email protected].