LONDON, 25 August 2026 — EBM NEWSDESK ANALYSIS By Anthiong Gill
The chief executive of one of Britain’s oldest listed engineering groups says Hunting will not make another major investment in the UK, warning that taxation and unpredictable energy policy have destroyed confidence. The significance goes beyond one North Sea supplier: Britain says it wants industrial investment at precisely the moment some established companies are moving their capital elsewhere.
‘Why would I make a big investment here?’
Hunting chief executive Jim Johnson has delivered a remarkably stark verdict on Britain as a place to invest, saying the country has become “uninvestable” after years of changing energy policy and increasingly punitive taxation of North Sea oil and gas.
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Subscribe“The reality is that Britain has become uninvestable,” Johnson said. “Everything your politicians have done has shown me that we cannot trust them. So why would I make a big investment here?” He added that another major UK investment “will never happen”, describing Britain as less investable than Venezuela.
The language is deliberately provocative, but the capital allocation behind it is harder to dismiss. Hunting, founded in 1874 and one of the London Stock Exchange’s longstanding industrial companies, makes precision-engineered equipment used in oil and gas, as well as aviation, defence, power generation and space. Its latest results show a business increasingly orientated towards North America, South America, the Middle East and Asia rather than its home market.
That makes Johnson’s warning particularly awkward for a government attempting to persuade markets that Britain can rebuild its industrial base — a challenge EBM examined as Andy Burnham’s economic programme began attracting scrutiny from bond markets.
The North Sea tax problem
At the centre of Hunting’s complaint is Britain’s tax regime for oil and gas producers. The Energy Profits Levy is currently charged at 38%, on top of the 30% ring-fence corporation tax and 10% supplementary charge, producing a headline tax rate of 78% on upstream oil and gas profits. The levy is scheduled to remain until March 2030 unless its price mechanism ends it earlier.
The government has argued that the levy captures exceptional profits generated by elevated energy prices and that Britain must simultaneously accelerate its transition towards cleaner energy. Ministers are also designing a permanent Oil and Gas Revenue Levy that would apply only when prices exceed specified thresholds after the existing windfall tax ends.
Johnson’s argument is that repeated changes have made long-term investment calculations almost impossible. That distinction matters. Companies can price a high tax rate into a project; it is harder to price regulatory rules that investors believe may change again before the project produces a return.
The same confidence question is emerging elsewhere in the economy. EBM has previously examined British technology companies frustrated by procurement delays and the wider concern that thousands of entrepreneurs have moved capital and businesses away from Britain.
Hunting has already been shrinking Britain
This is not merely rhetoric from an executive threatening future action.
Hunting began a major restructuring of its European operations in 2025, closing facilities in Norway and the Netherlands and winding down its Fordoun site in Scotland. The company said the restructuring would reduce EMEA headcount substantially and generate roughly $11mn of annual savings. Its latest half-year update says the European restructuring is now close to completion.
At the same time, Hunting is winning significant work overseas. In April it secured $63.5mn of new subsea orders for ExxonMobil’s Guyana operations, while international sales in markets including Australia, Argentina, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have been growing.
The contrast is uncomfortable. Britain wants companies to invest in advanced manufacturing, energy security and high-value engineering, yet one of its own engineering groups sees stronger growth prospects almost everywhere else.
It echoes the tensions visible in chemicals, where Jim Ratcliffe has been deploying capital selectively across a battered European industry, and in the wider economy as Britain struggles with high energy costs and weak industrial competitiveness.
A warning Burnham cannot simply dismiss
Johnson is due to retire as Hunting’s chief executive by mid-2027 after more than three decades at the company, making this one of his final major interventions in the British policy debate.
His comparison with Venezuela is intentionally extreme, and Hunting’s retreat from Britain also reflects the mature North Sea’s declining production and a corporate strategy increasingly focused on higher-growth international markets. Not every lost investment can therefore be laid at the government’s door.
But that does not make the warning irrelevant.
Industrial strategy ultimately depends less on government announcements than on where companies actually put factories, engineers and capital. Hunting has already made that choice increasingly outside Britain.
The question for the government is whether it regards that as an unavoidable consequence of the energy transition — or evidence that Britain’s attempt to tax yesterday’s energy industry may also be driving away tomorrow’s investment.
