Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps the Government is taking to support postmasters in rural areas.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
The Government recognises the critical role that post offices and postmasters play in rural communities and for small businesses across the UK. This is why in its 2017 manifesto the Government committed to safeguarding the post office network and protect existing rural services.
Around 6,100 of the 11,500 Post Office branches across the UK are located in rural areas and 3,200 are classified as community branches, meaning that they are the last shop in the village. Government recognises the unique challenges of running a community branch and supports the postmasters who run them with fixed remuneration in addition to the remuneration they receive for transactions. Post Office Limited recently announced they will increase fixed remuneration for all community branches and will also bring forward to August increases in remuneration for handling cash deposits. Finally, to explore what more can be done to support all postmasters, we have convened a quarterly working group meeting with Post Office Limited and the National Federation of Sub-Postmasters (NFSP). The focus of the working group is ensuring that running a Post Office becomes an even more attractive business proposition for current and prospective postmasters.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
What recent steps he has taken to support businesses in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk constituency.
Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We’ve committed to invest up to £560 million through both the Borderlands Growth Deal and the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal, demonstrating our commitment to supporting growth and prosperity in the Scottish Borders.
As of May 2019, the British Business Bank’s Start-Up Loans programme has made 45 loans totalling over £340,000 for businesses in his constituency.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to encourage investment in the space industry in (a) the UK and (b) rural areas.
Answered by Chris Skidmore
Britain has a vibrant commercial space sector and plays a leading role in international space science. Scotland has end-to-end capabilities from Satellite design and manufacture to the use of space data and services in day-to-day applications. Indeed:
We want to ensure that our space industry, one of the fastest-growing industries in the UK economy, covers the whole of the UK. In July 2018, we announced £31.5 million in grant funding to support development of a new vertical spaceport in Sutherland, providing a much-needed boost to rural Scotland.
We are equipping the UK with the Space facilities we will need in the future. The National Satellite Test Facility now being built in Harwell with £99m of investment from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund will provide crucial new test facilities for an expanding space manufacturing sector.
The UK Space Agency also co-invests with the Satellite Applications Catapult in a network of five regional Centres of Excellence in Satellite Applications across the UK, including the Scottish Centre of Excellence hosted by the University of Strathclyde. The Centres raise awareness of opportunities in the space sector, publicise funding calls and broker collaborative partnership, including with local universities.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how much financial support the British Business Bank start-up loans programme has provided to businesses in each constituency since it was launched in 2012.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
The information requested is currently being researched, and I will deposit a copy of it in the Libraries of the House by the end of April.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many workers will receive an increase in wages as a result of the rise in the national living wage on 1 April 2019 in each Scottish parliamentary constituency.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
On 1 April 2019, the Government is increasing the National Living Wage (NLW) to £8.21, keeping us on track to meet our target of the NLW reaching 60 percent of median earnings by 2020, subject to economic growth. This means that a full-time worker on the rate will be over £2750 better off over the year compared to the year the NLW was introduced.
In April 2018, we estimated that 3,100 workers in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk would benefit from the 2018 increases in the NLW and NMW, which accounted for 7 per cent of the workforce.
The Government has not published data on projected coverage of the NLW by constituency from 1 April 2019. However, we estimate that 159,000 workers in Scotland stand to benefit from increases in the NLW or National Minimum Wage (NMW).
We also expect workers earning above the NLW and NMW to benefit from indirect pay increases. Across the UK, we estimate that at least 20% of workers, which is over 5 million people, will directly or indirectly benefit from April’s uprating. This estimate was made from data published in the Government’s Impact Assessment for the 2019 uprating of the NMW and NLW, and the Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey statistics.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to encourage small businesses to invest in and utilise FinTech.
Answered by Chris Skidmore
The UK has been independently ranked by EY and Deloitte as the world’s leading hub for Fintech. The ambitious Fintech Sector Strategy, launched in March 2018 by the Chancellor, sets out how the Government intends to maintain that position.
This thriving Fintech community is an advantage for small UK businesses, who benefit from easy access to a range of services including foreign exchange, loans, equity investment and invoice finance. The British Business Bank’s annual Small Business Finance Markets report, published on 11 February, states that the value of peer-to-peer business lending rose a further 18% in 2018, having increased by 51% in 2017.
The same report notes that awareness among small businesses is also increasing, with 52% aware of peer-to-peer lending as an option (2017: 47%) and 70% aware of equity crowdfunding (2017: 60%). The British Business Bank’s portal for small businesses, the Finance Hub, has extensive information for small businesses on finance options including those available through Fintech providers and how to access them.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to tackle low pay in rural areas.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
The Government is committed to delivering an economy that works for all. Through the National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage, the Government is ensuring the lowest paid across the UK are fairly rewarded for their contribution to the economy. For example, 3,100 workers in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk are currently on the National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage.
The Government has committed to increase the National Living Wage to reach 60% of median earnings by 2020, subject to sustained economic growth. To meet this target, we will increase the National Living Wage rate by 4.9% to £8.21 in April 2019, benefiting 1.8 million workers directly. This increase will mean that a full-time worker on the National Living Wage will be over £2,750 better off over the course of the year, compared to when the policy was introduced. Furthermore, inflation-beating increases in the National Minimum Wage rates are expected to benefit 350,000 young workers from April 2019.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent assessment his Department has made of (a) how widespread social exclusion is in rural areas and (b) the effect of his Department’s policies on social exclusion in rural areas.
Answered by Kelly Tolhurst
In order to inform delivery of the Government’s Industrial Strategy, the Department regularly reviews data and assessments relating to our cities, towns and rural areas, to understand both the challenges they face and the competitive advantages they hold. Our Ageing Society Grand Challenge includes £98 million of Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund investment into a ‘healthy ageing programme’, which will drive the development of new products and services to help people live in their homes longer, tackle loneliness and increase independence and wellbeing.
BEIS is also supporting economic development and tackling regional disparities across the UK through the Strength in Places Fund, which received an additional £120 million of funding in Autumn Budget 2018. The programme supports businesses across the UK to adopt new technologies and to drive innovation-led growth, driving economic prosperity across all areas of the UK.
Asked by: John Lamont (Conservative - Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether an estimate has been made of the number of energy customers in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk constituency who are on (a) standard variable tariffs or (b) a default tariff.
Answered by Margot James
The Department collects data from energy companies by public electricity supplier (PES) regions; data is not available by parliamentary constituency. In South Scotland, 64% of gas and electricity customers are estimated to be on variable tariffs.
The Department’s methodology to produce estimates of customers on fixed tariffs is reliant on this being explicitly detailed in the tariff name so may not completely identify all tariffs. All tariffs not identified as fixed are assumed to be variable; however, standard variable tariffs cannot be distinguished within these.
Data are published in Quarterly Energy Prices tables 2.4.2 and 2.5.2.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/quarterly-domestic-energy-price-stastics