Britain risks ‘terminal decline’ unless ministers back business, warns Wrightbus boss

Christopher JasperSat, June 13, 2026 at 9:02 AM UTC

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Jo Bamford, owner of Wrightbus, says there is a disconnect between London and rural communities - Jamie Lorriman

Britain faces "terminal decline" unless Labour adopts a more pro-business approach to entrepreneurs, the owner of Wrightbus has warned.

Jo Bamford, whose bus manufacturer employs 2,500 staff in Northern Ireland, said an ignorance of corporate Britain in the Government and among London's civil servants was holding back growth.

Bamford, a scion of the JCB digger empire and son of its founder Lord Anthony Bamford, is one of Britain's leading industrialists, having acquired Wrightbus in 2019.

He said Labour needed to do more to back UK start-ups or risk hollowing out swathes of the country and consigning their residents to the scrap heap.

"If you don't start getting people working hard and don't start having businesses that they can come into, you just go into terminal decline," he warned

"We've got to have jobs for communities which will create taxpayers who will fund the schools and the police force. They are left behind, the tertiary towns, communities outside of London. There's a disconnect at the moment."

JCB, based outside Uttoxeter in rural Staffordshire where it employs 7,000 people, and his own Wrightbus venture, were examples of how businesses in the provinces could anchor entire communities, he said.

"If that goes, the town is gutted and gone and the schools are gutted and gone. You bring the worklessness in and the parents are in despair, the children are in despair," he added.

Wrightbus was acquired out of administration by Bamford seven years ago.

Before his ownership, the company was best known for pioneering the infamous "bendy bus" and London's so-called "Boris bus", which tried to revive the "hop on hop off" design from the original 1960s Routemaster.

Since then, Bamford has pushed the boundaries of bus design even further with a new fleet of hydrogen-powered vehicles and has also founded hydrogen producers Ryze and Hygen Energy.

But Bamford said that despite owning Wrightbus, one of only two UK busmakers and among a handful worldwide to produce a range of traditional and net zero models, he has struggled to get a hearing in Whitehall.

"I've never met the minister of transport," he admitted. "I met the head of buses once. This is the guy coming up with the bus policy for the UK. I'm one of the only people in the world with a hybrid, diesel and battery bus, and he won't see me.

"I go and talk to them and they go, no, you're wrong. But I've been doing this my whole life, and I'm not sure what you've done before."

Britain's political class, from the 650 MPs to the Civil Service and government-appointed quangos, also have a lack of business know-how, which was holding the UK back, he added.

"You've got these 650 people standing up and saying, yeah, I've managed loads of people before and I know how to do it," he said. "But none of them do.

"It doesn't matter what political stripe they are – who has got any experience? I think there are 72,000 people in the Ministry of Defence. Has our minister of defence or our shadow minister of defence ever managed more than 10 people in an office?

Bamford, standing on one of his new hydrogen refuelling systems, says he has struggled to get a hearing in Whitehall - Jamie Lorriman

"Look at the committee on climate change, which the Government is mandated to listen to. I think barely one of them has ever been an engineer. Most of them are commentators or civil servants who have done PPE. And they are designing our plan on energy transition."

With the illustrious Bamford name behind him, there is always speculation about his relationship with his father Lord Bamford and the wider JCB empire.

Last month, Lord Bamford named George Bamford – Bamford's brother and previously a luxury watch designer – as successor to the JCB business.

Bamford said he's not bitter about the move because his own ambitions lie in building a global hydrogen player to match the success of the construction equipment giant, of which Wrightbus could be a part.

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"George is my brother, he has my full support and so does my dad," he said. "I left JCB 10 years ago and did my own thing. I have my own plan and that's what I want to do.

"I haven't done a brilliant job yet but I haven't done a bad job. It was just me and a desk in Oxford, and it's now two and a half thousand people.

"JCB is a fabulous business, but I'm 48 years old, I've got young children. It would have been a bit boring, wouldn't it? Imagine, having to sit there for the next 10 years."

Not content with being major industrialists, the Bamfords are also major political donors.

They have handed more than £10m to the Tories – and also funded Reform UK.

But Bamford says it would be wrong to view him as a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative and that what he most wanted was to see "competency" in government.

"You can have your own personal views, but business should be apolitical," he said. "I gave a little bit of money years ago to Nadhim Zahawi who was my local MP.

"But my job is to play what's in front of me and to get on with all of them, Labour, the Tories and all the other bits and bobs."

He added: "I'm not going to pin my colours to anyone. I want the roads to be fixed, I want the NHS to work. Then you can decide whether you want to have a slight left or slightly right bent on it."

Bamford said Britain's 4.7 million family-owned businesses – employing between a handful of people and many thousands – get particularly short shrift.

However, his recent criticism of Labour's inheritance tax, which will hit family businesses like JCB, had been misinterpreted, he admitted, and said he had no desire to quit the UK.

"I want to live here, I want to invest here and I want my children to be here," he said. "I don't have a problem paying tax. But I get p- - - - - off paying tax and not getting good services.

"I feel it's a bit of a con job to be honest. You get to a tipping point – and I do know lots of people who are looking at their exit plans."

Bamford was speaking at the launch of the X75, a machine designed to refuel hydrogen-powered diggers and tractors on building sites and farms.

He predicts that hydrogen will become mainstream as Britain weans itself off natural gas. With the national grid already limited by capacity, any expansion in the power supply will be quickly swallowed up by energy-hungry data centres, making mass-electrification impossible.

Rather than electrifying buses, trucks, diggers and tractors, he said, such vehicles could be hydrogen-powered, reducing electricity consumption and taking the pressure off the grid.

He said that a single order for hydrogen-powered buses could kickstart the entire sector if mayoral authorities were prepared to order the 17,000 vehicles required over the next decade en masse, rather than in dribs and drabs.

That could establish Britain as a leading player in hydrogen, from production through storage, supply and hydrogen-powered vehicles and equipment, before China comes to dominate just as it has in electric cars and batteries.

He said: "You've got 10 Labour mayors who should be seizing on this plan. You'd have 10 factories employing hardworking people, each in a tertiary town.

"We chuck loads of subsidy at lots of people who just do one little element of it. The reason I'm in every element is I'm trying to drive down the cost base so that's the same as diesel."

However, he said senior civil servants and key figures in Whitehall today would be unable to countenance the adoption of such an interventionist industrial strategy."They'd look at me like I'm a monster with two heads."

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Source: “AOL Money”