Chuka Umunna
Main Page: Chuka Umunna (Liberal Democrat - Streatham)(13 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Gyimah
I agree 100%. For many small business men or women, the only way in which they can get the banks to give them credit to grow their businesses is to put their own assets on the line, and that is unacceptable because those people often take on a lot of risk to keep their business going. In looking at the funding environment, we need to get banks not just to lend, but to consider everything else, including credit.
It is great to see new small businesses trying to step into the breach, however. I came across a business called Funding Circle, which encourages lending by private individuals to small businesses, but that is nowhere near enough compared with what the big banks can do.
Mr Gyimah
Sorry, I do not have much time.
Another thing that the Government can do, in particular, is look at cash flow. One of the biggest things that determines the fate of a small and growing business is the amount of cash flow, and national insurance and VAT are the key drivers of that. The Government have made the right decision by giving certain businesses national insurance holidays, but it would be great if we could extend that to more businesses.
Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
As a small business owner, dealing with employment law took more hours of my time than any other management responsibility. Since 1997, employment laws and regulations have been piled on to British business from both Labour and Brussels, but for the employer, particularly the many small businesses in my constituency, that has meant a major cost in time and money. The intense focus on employee rights has ended up with the employer spending a huge amount of time ensuring that he or she is abiding by the law, and wary of the consequences of even the most innocent error.
Under the previous Government, the cumulative effect of employment law fundamentally changed the playing field and left employers feeling defensive, rather than confidently hiring new staff. The other day I saw a friend of mine who is setting up a new business. She told me that she had been advised to take her staff on short-term contracts rather than hiring them as permanent staff to avoid all the pitfalls. Therefore, at the key moment when we need more jobs—in fact, hundreds of thousands of jobs—the advice to a budding entrepreneur is to avoid permanent staff if possible.
According to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” report, employing workers in the UK has become harder every year since 2007. We have slipped from No. 17 to No. 35.
Julian Smith
I am sorry, but I will not.
Statistics do not take into account the effect on small businesses of the sheer worry of all those burdens, nor the reality of a world where Britain will be under increasing pressure to attract internationally mobile jobs.
Mr Binley
That is absolutely incorrect. Construction has played its part, but not house building. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the size of growth in the manufacturing sector, he will see that it has been a major element of our growth.
I had intended to talk about manufacturing exports, but time forbids that now. I will say, however, that all of that is good, but the sector is not getting the money it needs, and we must pay attention to that. The banks say that lending to business is increasing, and that it rose by 0.9% this August, compared with the previous August. That sounds pretty good, but when we look beneath the surface, we find that most of that money was lent in foreign currency to foreign businesses outside this country. The truth is that lending to British businesses dropped by £400 million.
Mr Umunna
I recognise the hon. Gentleman’s comments about lending and about the struggles of small businesses and businesses in general. Was he disappointed, as I was, to see very little on lending in the comprehensive spending review Green Book? On page 30, we see mention of the £1.5 billion business growth fund, which was put in place by the British Bankers Association, but does he agree that that is woefully inadequate, given the difficulties that businesses are facing in getting access to finance?
Mr Binley
I want to see more, but we must also recognise that the mess that the last Government got the banks into is one of the reasons that they are not lending money now. That is why we need to encourage them to find more creative ways of lending.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are concerned about how the banks are dealing with them. Thousands are talking about the breakdown in relations with the banks. The number of complaints to the banking ombudsman is up by 119% this year alone, and 14% of all SMEs are now using credit cards to pay for their business expenses. That is an horrific figure. According to the Federation of Small Businesses survey, 31% of SMEs—that is 1.4 million small businesses in this country—say that bank lending is the most important way of improving growth prospects in the sector. When are we going to get the message? Those figures underline the great importance of this matter.
The reasons that growth is important, and that small businesses will not be able to play their part unless they get the money to finance their growth, are very simple. Most of the money they need to finance growth is short-term money for extra labour, extra materials and extra resources. Those are all short-term requirements, and businesses must have them in place before they can grow. The truth is that the payback time is relatively long term. Businesses often go bust more in an upturn than in a downturn because there is no other way of paying back that cash flow drag than through retained profit. They go bust because they try to over-trade but without having the finances to complete the process. Those businesses need our understanding. What are the Government going to do about this? They need to take action for the short term very soon. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister is sympathetic to that view, so this is not a criticism in every sense.
Basel III allows banks to lend money to the Government while still classifying that money as capital reserve. It is a complicated business and I am sure that it needs quite a lot of thought to decide how we use that opportunity to help to finance SME growth. The Minister is a very clever chap, as is the Chancellor, and they have some very clever people in the Treasury. I am sure that it is not beyond the wit of that group of people to give us answers today on how we might release that money to help the small businesses that are in such great need. I repeat that we need to provide money for small businesses in order to make the strategy work. That is the important factor in this debate.
We also need to look into providing businesses with a greater choice of banks in the high street. That is longer-term work, but it still needs to be done as soon as possible. We need an extension of the enterprise guarantee scheme, and we need to know how the Government are going to implement it. We also need the Government to get tough with the banks, and to point out that there is a real need for them to be more interactive with small and medium-sized businesses, because that is not happening. But fine words butter no parsnips, as my grandmother would have said. I want to hear what action the Minister is going to take to ensure that small businesses get the money they need.