The Labour government has had a rethink on its rebranding of the DTI as the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry and restored its original title.
The swift move involved no more than enlisting “a man with a screwdriver” to replace the sign outside the department’s headquarters in Victoria Street, London, said trade and industry secretary Alan Johnson.
He told the Financial Times that the CBI’s opinion of the title as “old-fashioned corporatism” had touched a nerve and that unions “weren’t keen on it either”.
Johnson said DPEI had attracted “various descriptions … penis and dippy” and that he had not thought of the idea.
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He said that there had been “a view somewhere” in government that a new name was needed to reflect the change from the DTI which ran monopolised industries in the 1970s.
A spokesman for the DTI said: “The secretary has been listening to feedback from stakeholders who had identified concerns about the loss of the word ‘trade’ in our name.”
