Digby Jones, Baron Jones of Birmingham

Jones was born on 28 October 1955 in Birmingham, England. He was educated at Bromsgrove School where he was Head Boy. He read Law at University College London as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy on a University Cadetship, graduating with upper second class honours. After graduation, Jones worked for 20 years at Edge & Ellison, a firm of lawyers based in Birmingham, culminating in serving as Senior Partner from 1995 to 1998.[1]

Jones was Chairman of the West Midlands Regional Council of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), and became the first serving regional chairman to be appointed CBI's Director-General, serving from 1 January 2000 to 30 June 2006. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2005 New Year Honours for services to Business.[2] He then acted as an adviser to Barclays Capital, Ford, Deloitte and JCB. He served as the unpaid UK Skills Envoy from 2006 to 2007.

Jones was a non-executive director for the IT contractor iSOFT from 2000 until his resignation in July 2005, when he stayed on for one year as an adviser. Following the collapse in the value of iSOFT and investigations into its accountancy practices, Jones said "there is a limit to what a non-executive can know... They have to rely on what advisers tell them and what the executive team tells them. It is important that people understand this."

On 29 June 2007, Jones became Minister of State for Trade and Investment in both the newly created Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Foreign Office. He was appointed as a Government Minister in a move to create a government "of all the talents".[3] As he was not a parliamentarian at the time, Jones was made a life peer, and became a member of the House of Lords. It was suggested that he was taking the Labour whip in the House of Lords, but he chose not to join the Labour Party. He was gazetted as a peer on 10 July 2007 as Baron Jones of Birmingham, of Alvechurch and of Bromsgrove in the County of Worcestershire,[4] and took his seat in the House of Lords that same day.

Formally styled The Lord Jones of Birmingham, he sat as a Crossbencher in the House of Lords.

Jones had considered running for Mayor of London after being encouraged by a group of prominent businessmen. He was also approached by the Conservative Party about becoming its candidate, but rejected this idea.[5]

In April 2008 Jones announced his intention to resign as Minister of Trade and Investment later in the year.[6][7] He resigned in October 2008 and was appointed to be a UK Business Ambassador for UK Trade & Investment.[8] In testimony to the Public Administration Committee he said that his time as a junior minister was "one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences" anyone could have and that he had been amazed by how many civil servants he thought deserved the sack.[9]

On 16 January 2009, in a subsequent blog entry on the Daily Telegraph's blogsite, Jones was described as "the walking personification of the spirit of big business at its corporatist worst".[10]

On 20 September 2013, he spoke at the UK Independence Party conference in London as a guest speaker, addressing the conference on business and economic matters.

On 29 September 2014, Jones introduced the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, before his keynote speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. He said that Osborne "deserves a personal pat on the back" for having "stuck to your guns and did what was right for our country." In response to any rumour regarding a possible defection, he also confirmed "I don't do party politics" and "business is my constituency."[11]

On 31 August 2020, he retired from the House of Lords.[12]

Jones is a Corporate Ambassador for the Cancer Research UK Corporate Ambassadors. He is President of the Diversity Works initiative – a programme led by the disability organisation Scope, a Diamond Ambassador for Mencap's WorkRight initiative, designed to spread the message of equality for disabled people, a Vice-President of Birmingham Hospice, and a Patron of Lifecycle UK, Ladies Fighting Breast Cancer and Get A-Head, the cancer charity fighting head and neck diseases. He is an active supporter of Ovarian Cancer Action, the Royal Navy's Royal Marine Charity, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He is the Patron of the Thomas Edington Scholarship of the University of Western Australia in Perth.

He is also a Vice-President of the Friends of the British Library, a charity which provides funding support to the British Library.[13]

Jones is a Vice-Patron of the National Museum of the Royal Navy. The National Museum through its six museums tell the stories and preserves the rich heritage of all aspects of the Royal Navy.

He was a non-executive director of Leicester Tigers.[14] He is a Vice-President of The Birmingham Civic Society and was President of the Speakers Trust and their Speaker of the Year in 2008.

In November 2006, Jones was appointed "Business Adviser" to the Duke of York, receiving £1,000 a month from the royal payroll for working one day a month. This position ended upon his appointment as a Minister in July 2007.

Jones is the chairman of the Advisory Board of X-Force, the Social Enterprise helping Veterans into self-employment.

Jones is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia.

Jones is Chairman of the Guernsey Policy & Economics Group.[15]

Jones is a Fellow of University College London (2004); an Honorary Fellow of Cardiff University (2004); and an Honorary Doctor of the University of Central England (2002), the University of Birmingham (2002), the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (2003), the University of Hertfordshire (2004), Middlesex University (2005), Sheffield Hallam University (2005), Aston University (2006), the University of Hull (2006), Queen's University, Belfast (2006), Warwick University (2006), Bradford University (2006), Thames Valley University (2006), Wolverhampton University (2006), the University of Nottingham, Loughborough University (2007) and Honorary Fellow of Cardiff Metropolitan University (2013).

Jones has said of trades unions:

They are in danger of withering on the vine of irrelevance. They are backward looking and not on today's agenda.[16]

and:

The trade unions put their members first and not the country. Labour is always in thrall to the unions. People keep banging on about cash for peerages, but the unions have bunged money to the government for years.[16]

In July 2016 Jones said "There's not going to be any economic pain. If there are job losses, they will be very few."[17]

In January 2019 Jones said "I actually campaigned for Brexit and I made it very clear in every speech I gave we would be economically worse off."[18]

Jones was the guest on BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs, broadcast on 21 May 2006. He won BBC One's Celebrity Mastermind with a 9-point margin finishing on 33 points on 5 January 2011. Jones nominated Winston Churchill on BBC Radio 4 Great Lives.[19]

He presented the BBC Two programme The New Troubleshooter where he "helps businesses realise their potential, ruffling feathers and bruising egos along the way as he gets stuck in and delivers his analysis and advice", taking over the mantle of John Harvey-Jones who presented the original series Troubleshooter.[20]

In July 2014 he presented a programme on BBC Radio 4, The Business Covenant.

In 2020 presented a programme looking at how businesses are getting ready for Brexit on Times Radio.[21]

In 2011 Jones published his first book Fixing Britain: The Business of Reshaping Our Nation (Wiley) which was shortlisted for the 2012 CMI Management Book of the Year.[22]

In 2017 Fixing Business: Making Profitable Business Work for the Good of All, was published in April 2017, also with Wiley.

Jones is a supporter of Leicester Tigers (officially Leicester Football Club), Aston Villa FC[23] and a member of the Reform Club.

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• CBI annual report & accounts, 2007
• Lord Jones of Birmingham on TheyWorkForYou.com