CBI letter: read lobby group president’s message to members in full

theguardian.com:

Brian McBride, the president of the Confederation of British Industry, published an open letter to its 190,000 members after weeks of revelations about its culture and the behaviour of senior staff, which were first reported by the Guardian.

Here is his letter in full:

“Dear members and partners,

“I wanted to talk to each of you directly and openly about the crisis that has engulfed the CBI. About how this organisation, for almost 60 years an active and proud champion of British industry, let down its own people, and deservedly lost your trust in consequence. And about what steps we are taking to give you reason to consider trusting us again.

“Whether that is possible, I simply don’t know. That is, of course, for each of you to decide. Whichever decision you each make, I believe that it still necessary and valuable to share directly with you, our members, and to industry as a whole, all that we have learned about what went wrong in our organisation, and what we could have better done to prevent these terrible incidents from ever having taken place. These findings are based both on our own analysis, and on the independent investigations conducted at the CBI board’s request by the law firm Fox Williams, when allegations were first raised to us by the Guardian newspaper.

“CBI senior leaders and board members, as you can imagine, have experienced many difficult emotions since those events, the most serious of which date from some years ago, became known to us. The greatest of these emotions is a collective sense of shame, for having so badly let down the enthusiastic, ambitious and passionate people who came to work at the CBI. They rightly expected to be able to do so in a safe environment, and we failed them.

“When the initial