The chairman of British Airways, Martin Broughton, recently used his last interviews as president of employers' organisation the CBI to say how concerned business was that it had no idea what the Tories planned to do if they got into office. At this stage in the election cycle, he said, one would have thought there would be some policies on display — not all of them, of course, but at least some.

But in spite of the fact business has fallen out of love with the Government, the Tories have yet to reveal how they would fill the void, encourage entrepreneurs and stimulate new jobs. What they have disclosed — such as resistance to a third runway at Heathrow — has raised more questions on the lines of how the Tories see London relative to other cities in the long term, and the capital's role as a financial centre.

Now it may be coincidence but in his speech to the annual conference of the Association of British Insurers yesterday, shadow chancellor George Osborne lifted the veil just a bit. Most of his speech was the usual motherhood-and-apple pie stuff about moving away from a debt-fuelled economy to one better balanced and less dependent on financial services, where there was more long-term thinking — all of which is fine except that he gave no clues at all about how he proposes to get us to this happy state, which has eluded every other government since the war. What Osborne did do though is drop these hints about policy changes which, at a micro level, could all make a real difference.

In the corporate space, potentially the most dramatic was his comment in the context of tackling the debt crisis when he said: “For companies, it means reducing the reliance on debt and leverage to increase returns — assisted by reducing the bias in our corporate tax system against equity and towards debt financing.”

Well, the only bias towards debt in the tax system is that debt interest is tax deductible whereas dividends on equities are not. So if he is going to reduce the bias, that means either cutting the tax relief on debt interest completely or certainly reducing it.

Now there are many arguments in favour of this — but its effect on companies would be dramatic, and none more so than all those currently financed on the private-equity model where the business is loaded up with as much debt as it can carry — and then some. There would need to be some form of transition or dramatic numbers would be tipped over the edge into bankruptcy. It makes rather a mess of the private-equity business model too — so no doubt that will soon be lobbying furiously.

Even in conventionally financed business, the switch would have profound implications for the way companies are financed, for the role of the bond markets and the banking system and for the role of pension funds and others as providers of finance for commerce, because it would dramatically alter the cost of capital and the relative pricing of debt versus equity. But equities have been too long in the shadow of the debt markets so long-term might be just what is needed to rebuild dividends and faith in the equity culture.

His second comment betrayed a healthy scepticism of the Government's plan for Personal Accounts — which is the official name for the new state second pension being launched in 2012.

Many — including this writer — think it is a misconceived scheme, which will fail miserably to help those who most need it while making almost everyone else worse off. The poorest sections of society in particular will suffer because the effect of their saving will most likely be only to reduce the means-tested benefits they would otherwise have been entitled to. Osborne is alive to this, saying he is very concerned at the possibility of this product being mis-sold.

He unfortunately stopped short of saying the Tories would scrap the entire plan, but clearly they are not supporters. There may be hope they will be the government that at long last will simplify the pension system rather than adding more and more layers of needless complexity.

His third comment will bring cheer to all those who have saved for their old age only to fall victim to the vagaries of the annuity market. The cost of annuities rises and falls with interest rates and this means accidents of timing can make a huge and lasting difference to the amount of pension that can be bought for a given lump sum.

Gordon Brown has consistently refused to lift the requirement to buy an annuity at the age of 75 but Osborne offered a glimmer of light. “We want to abolish compulsory unitisation at 75 conditional on [the pensioner's] having sufficient income in retirement to avoid means-tested benefits,” he said. Let us hope he means it.