Alok Sharma
Main Page: Alok Sharma (Conservative - Reading West)
Mr Umunna
What I cited was the World Bank’s assessment of the state in which we left the environment for businesses to carry out their work. If the hon. Gentleman reads the guidance that has been issued by his Government, he will see that we have been praised for doing things such as introducing the primary authority scheme, which was supposed to, and did, reduce the regulatory burden on businesses.
Perhaps the Secretary of State’s most damning criticism of his and his Government’s actions is that they are “frankly, rather piecemeal”. At first sight, that is precisely what the Bill is. It is a hotch-potch of measures that provides no discernible overall vision or confident message. There is no evidence of a connected approach across Government to drive growth.
Business was straight off the blocks with its criticisms of the Queen’s Speech, the centrepiece of which was this legislation. The director general of the British Chambers of Commerce said what many people have been saying for many months:
“There is a big black hole when it comes to aiding business to create enterprise, generate wealth and grow.”
He is right. Our amendment makes it clear that the Bill, viewed as a whole, does not change that assessment.
I will quickly go through the parts of the Bill and set out our position on each.
Mr Umunna
I will make a bit of progress, because I want to ensure that there is time for others to get in.
Part 1 will set up the green investment bank. I have stated on many occasions, as has the Leader of the Opposition, that it is crucial to long-term economic growth to have an active Government working in partnership with the private sector. In our view, the Government should work with business to identify the sectors from which future demand will come and to ensure that companies are set up to meet that demand. There is and will continue to be a growing demand for green technologies, so we need an active industrial strategy to support the low-carbon economy, as I and my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) have argued.
A critical component of that is the green investment bank. That is why we set up the green investment bank commission in 2009 with a view to establishing such a bank, and why we committed ourselves to establishing such a bank in our 2010 manifesto. We will therefore not oppose the bank—our amendment makes it clear that we support it in principle. Also, I do not want to add further long-term policy uncertainty in this area, after the huge uncertainty that the Government have heaped on the low-carbon sector since coming to office. I note that the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has left his place, conveniently ignored the decision on feed-in tariffs, which is perhaps the most glaring example of the uncertainty that has been created.
As the Secretary of State said, Lord Smith of Kelvin and Sir Adrian Montague were appointed as the chair and deputy chair of UK Green Investment Bank plc during the Whitsun recess. We welcome their appointment. Having heard what the Secretary of State has said, I suggest that until this entity is given the power to borrow and to lend, allowing it to leverage its initial equity to make more capital available, it will not be a body that most people would recognise as a bank. It is a fund, whereas it is an operational bank that the country needs. The Secretary of State made has made it clear that it will not be allowed to borrow—he repeated this today—unless public sector net debt is falling as a percentage of GDP in 2015. The earliest it is likely to be able to borrow is therefore 2016. That is a delay of four years from now. Ed Matthew, the director of Transform UK, the business alliance campaigning for the bank to be set up, put it well:
“Allowing the bank to borrow is the key to generating growth and rebooting the UK economy. Delaying this power until the economy has recovered is like a doctor waiting for a seriously ill patient to recover before giving him life-saving medicine”.