You could eat your dinner off the spotless factory floor of Toyota’s plant near Derby. The stacks of components and equipment are as rigorously organised as the main meeting room, which features a diagram of how to leave the room exactly as you found it, including placement of the chairs.

Maybe the factory management are making an extra effort because they are hosting a visit of John Hutton, the Business Secretary, to mark 15 years of Toyota car production in the UK. But actually no, the floor is permanently gleaming clean and the contents are always arranged with military precision in order to instil a sense of discipline into Toyota’s workforce, or members as they are termed by the company protocol, so that they follow rules and check quality throughout the production process.

Toyota is a manufacturing success story that Mr Hutton is keen to endorse. After touring the factory, the head of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (formerly the Department of Trade and Industry) went on to drop in on another industrial beacon – Rolls-Royce, just down the road.

This is manufacturing for the modern age, clean, new, international and, in Rolls-Royce’s case, with highly advanced engineering.

In other parts of industry the picture can seem a little less glitzy, with lower-tech manufacturers losing a cost battle with eastern producers and seeing production drift overseas.

Labour has always been keen to emphasise that it will not intervene in the changing nature of industry and mostly it has not. Instead, it tries to offer a supportive role for business that revolves around providing a stable economic climate, grants for technological or small business development and morale-boosting cheerleading.

Along these lines, the Department for Business is working on its next strategy for manufacturing. A new advisory group is to meet early in the new year and fresh policies are planned for the summer.

Mr Hutton says: “I think there is a lot of myth about manufacturing. You hear people say we are living in a postindustrial economy. No we’re not, that is for the birds, that’s ludicrous. We are the sixth-largest manufacturing country in the world. There has been painful change affecting many communities, but we have a success story and we have world-class sectors.

“Most other countries in the world would kill to have companies such as Rolls-Royce.”

Seventy-five per cent of the UK’s research and development spending is directed to manufacturing, Mr Hutton says. There is also something positive to see from the imminent sale of Land Rover and Jaguar by Ford, Mr Hutton thinks. “It is encouraging that there has been such strong, worldwide interest in buying Land Rover and Jaguar,” he says. “That says to me that there is a belief that motor manufacturing in the UK is a good place to invest in.”

Along with encouraging the best of manufacturing, Mr Hutton is keen to emphasise the importance of enterprise and the fact that Britain, as he sees it, has far more of an entrepreneurial spirit than many of its international competitors. “I want Britain to be the most enterprising economy in the world, that is my ambition,” he says. “Enterprise is a good healthy thing, it is an ambition thing, it is a fundamentally human thing and we have lost all of this claptrap about private sector bad, public sector good. That is the old, old politics.”

It is hard to argue against enterprise, but it can also be hard to know exactly what it means in concrete terms beyond the formation of small businesses. However, Mr Hutton says that there are several thousand more companies in existence now than several years ago – a testimony, he says, to the spirit of enterprise.

There is a slight hiccup with entrepreneurs at the moment in the shape of planned increases in capital gains tax. Small business warns that this will dampen the enterprise culture, although, not surprisingly, Mr Hutton is not openly critical of the Treasury.

“I understand the concerns of business, but I think there is a very strong case, and I have always said this to business, for the simplification of capital gains tax,” he said. “Clearly business has concerns with particular aspects and the Chancellor and the PM are discussing the best way forward with a variety of stakeholders.” Perhaps the wish to promote enterprise is the reason Mr Hutton’s department acquired its long and, some would say, tautological name.

Energy is not in the department’s title and the area does not have a full-time minister. However, Mr Hutton says that it is his priority by a long way. “It is as high as you would want to put it and then rachet it up two or three more places, put it up into another league and then you are getting close to where it is.” he says.

“Energy is becoming an increasingly politicised commodity. We have the huge challenge of climate change to address, but we have the parallel but equally significant challenge of making sure that Britain is as energy independent and self-sufficient as we possibly can be. Energy independence will be just as big a challenge as climate change. That is the context in which we will be making all our decisions about energy policy. We need multiple technologies, all low-carbon, and we need the widest possible range of partners.”

The biggest energy decision will soon be taken when the Government decides on whether to approve new nuclear power. Bookmakers are not taking many bets on the answer being no. However, any rebirth for nuclear will be achieved via market mechanisms rather than any revival of government planning.

Mr Hutton said: “It is hoped that carbon pricing will be enough of an incentive. My gut instinct always is to look for the market solution first.”

It is more than two years since Tony Blair said that the future would be nuclear – speaking at a CBI conference that was disrupted by Greenpeace protestors. The green group’s legal challenge to a quick consultation forced a fresh dialogue that finished in October. Now many in the energy industry and in business in general are saying that the need for new nuclear power is urgent as Britain looks towards an energy gap in a few years.

“The nuclear issue is one which has been pending for a while now and I accept that,” Mr Hutton says.

In the intervening time since Mr Blair seemed to set the UK on a nuclear course, the public has become more open to the technology, Mr Hutton believes. “I think the majority of the public are much more open-minded and pragmatic than the antinuclear campaigners,” he said.

However, it is not a gradual intellectual switch that has brought about the acceptance, but old-fashioned concern about the power over energy supplies wielded by countries such as Russia. Energy independence is now becoming a political imperative.

Britain has often become frustrated with the EU’s slow progress on opening all member countries’ energy markets to competition, although there are more signs of movement.

On other issues in Europe, the UK has had more success. Earlier this month, to the chagrin of the unions, the UK Government won a victory in blocking a directive to give agency workers the same rights as permanent employees. Europe is currently proposing that agency workers have the same rights as full-time employees after six weeks of work. However, after this month’s failure to agree, that draft directive is not likely to be debated again in the near future.

Britain’s opposition is a sore point with the unions, which believe that an increased use of agency workers is changing the shape of work for the worse, with workers suffering erosion of their rights and conditions of employment. The unions also feel that they are owed action on agency workers from the Warwick agreement struck between Labour and the unions before the last general election. However, Mr Hutton is clear that that is not going to happen.

He said: “We won’t accept a deal that is not in the UK’s interest, we will not accept a deal that undermines essential labour market flexibility. Effectively the worst outcome of all would be to penalise or somehow impose an extra charge and therefore make uneconomic agency work itself, which many companies regard as an important way of filling temporary vacancies and so on.

“In the UK . . . about half of agency workers go on to find full-time employment within about 12 months or so. A very substantial chunk of those are people who have been long-term benefits claimants. Agency work is a kind of bridge between benefit and full-time employment and I am definitely not going to pull up that bridge for tens of thousands of workers who will only find a way back into full-time employment through agency work.”

It is a pretty new Labour conclusion; the minister is more than willing to face down union demands, while steering the country down the road of nuclear energy, the enterprise economy and the gleaming factory floor.

CV

Born: May 6, 1955

Education: Westcliff High School for Boys, Essex, and Magdalen College, Oxford

Career: Joined Northumbria University as a senior law lecturer in 1980. In 1992 he was elected MP for Barrow and Furness after failing to win the constituency of Penrith and the Border in 1987. From 1994 to 1997, he served on the Commons Select Committee for Home Affairs. He was private secretary to Margaret Beckett from 1997 to 1998. That year he was appointed Parliamentary UnderSecretary of State for Health and Social Care. In 1999 he became Minister of State with responsibility for social care at the Department of Health and in 2001 took on responsibility for health. He entered the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in May 2005, replacing Alan Milburn, his close friend and former flatmate. Six months later he was appointed Secretary of State for Work and Pensions after the resignation of David Blunkett. He was appointed the first Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) when the new department was created by Gordon Brown in June 2007

Family: Married to Heather Rogers, an official in Alan Milburn’s private office, he has three sons and one daughter from his first marriage

Interests: Football, cricket, films, music and history

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