Kemi Badenoch pledged to slash red tape and “rewire our economy” as she sought to woo business chiefs to back the Tories.

The Conservative leader said the system was “broken” and was not suitable when faced by “aggressive competitor economies like China”.

The former business secretary told the Confederation of British Industry the role of the Government must change if the UK is to return to sustained economic growth.

She said: ”Politics needs to accept boundaries.

“Every day in the legislature, someone has a great new idea that sounds nice in principle but in practice creates more red tape, more bureaucracy, more burden. The incentive for us as politicians is for us to keep announcing new nice things.

“The way to fix things is not just about creating new laws.”

The Tory leader was reluctant to set out new policies, telling business leaders: ”I’m not standing here telling you that we have all the answers.

“I am letting you know that I have seen the system from the inside and it is broken.

“We are trying to fix problems with the wrong tools. We are using a mindset and a paradigm that worked well in the late 20th century, but does not work well when we have aggressive competitor economies like China and when there is rapid technological innovation.

“When our society is getting older and the birth rate is still too low – more quangos, more interference, more regulation, more laws will not fix that.”

She said: “We can no longer tolerate a situation where building roads takes decades, where Treasury decision-making means railways don’t get built.”

She added that businesses have had to transform as a result of “massive societal and technological change” and “it’s time that Government does the same because what we have now isn’t working”.

She also suggested the whole of the economy has to adapt.

“I believe that we need to rewire our economy into one where the vast majority of jobs are productive and those that are not change,” she said.

Mrs Badenoch said people must feel the benefits of economic growth: “The bottom line is that economic growth is not the end in itself.

“It is a means to an end. The end is to make people’s lives better.”

But she acknowledged that message needed to be set out more clearly: “Capitalism is not a dirty word, wealth is not a dirty word, profit is not a dirty word.

“But we need to start explaining how these things deliver for the people out there, people who often think that you are in it for yourselves and we the politicians are in cahoots.”

The Conservative leader acknowledged attention from business had shifted from her party to Labour in the run-up to the general election.

“I was not surprised at how many people attended Labour’s prawn cocktail or smoked salmon offensive last year, I know it is because you thought that we didn’t understand what your needs and concerns were and you knew we were going to lose.”

Mrs Badenoch would not commit to reversing the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions but said it would be looked at as part of the Tory policy review.

She told business chiefs: “The fact that so many organisations, especially those that have people who are on the lowest wages, are saying that this is becoming unaffordable means that we should look again and that’s one of the first things that we’re going to be doing when we start our policy platform.”