PRESS RELEASE : Campaign News – CBI mis-representing its members on EU
The press release issued by Vote Leave on 2 November 2015.
The CBI – which describes itself as the ‘Voice of Business’ – has always taken an unquestioning pro-EU stance. Its leadership campaigned for the UK to join the euro and is now gearing up to help lead the campaign for the UK to stay in the EU.
Fiddling their figures to boost support for the EU
On the authority of a 2013 YouGov survey that it commissioned, the CBI has claimed that ‘8 out of 10 firms say UK must stay in EU’. But our research shows that this survey is likely to be highly misleading. YouGov has confirmed that the CBI did not supply them with ‘any business characteristics data’ or ‘any population data’ for the 2013 survey. This prevented the weighting of the data to reflect the characteristics of either the CBI’s membership or British businesses. This means that:
– Just 39.5% of respondents to the survey were small or medium sized enterprises (SMEs). According to government figures for 2013, ‘99.9 per cent of private sector businesses are SMEs’.
– Only 20.5% of respondents had fewer than 50 employees. According to government figures for 2013, 99.2% of British businesses had fewer than 50 employees.
The parallels with the CBI’s deeply flawed membership surveys during the euro campaign are striking. In the late 1990s, the CBI was one of the leading campaigners for the UK to join the euro.
Leaked minutes from the CBI Economic Affairs Committee in 1998 revealed that the CBI had ruled out ‘a completely random survey of businesses, which would be the ultimate gauge of firms’ attitudes to UK membership of EMU’, because ‘complication might arise if the outcome turned out to be less pro-EMU’ than the CBI’s own stance.
Nevertheless, the CBI consistently claimed that between three quarters and four-fifths of British businesses supported the adoption of the single currency. The CBI advanced its claims by relying on deeply flawed surveys, which often excluded businesses with fewer than 10 employees, thus excluding 95% of all British businesses in 1999.
The CBI fiddled their figures on the euro and now they are at it again on the EU
Reality – business is divided
A FSB survey released last month found that 41% of its members would vote to leave the EU. Similarly, in a recent Business for Britain poll of SMEs, over 40% of respondents stated that the EU hinders their business, compared to 20% who said it helped.
Misrepresenting its own membership numbers
The CBI’s claim that it is the ‘Voice of Business’ is in itself misleading. It claims to ‘represent’ over 190,000 businesses but in fact many of those are not actually members of the CBI, they are instead part of other trade associations that are affiliated to the CBI. For example, the National Farmers Union (NFU), which is affiliated to the CBI has over 55,000 members. The CBI claims that all these farmers are businesses that it represents, but they have never actually joined the CBI and almost certainly don’t realise that the CBI claims to speak on their behalf. This means that nearly a third of the CBI’s claimed members are actually members of the NFU not the CBI.
The CBI has refused to answer any questions from us about how many actual members it has and who they are. Because of this secrecy it is very difficult to work out who they actually represent. But in a new research note we estimate that they actually only represent about 2,216 firms or 0.4% of the total number of businesses in the UK.
The CBI fiddles its figures to artificially boost the number of businesses that it claims to represent. It fiddled its figures on the euro and is now doing the same on the EU. It cannot be trusted.
