Debate Excerpts: Damian Collins vs Julian Smith

National Insurance Contributions Bill

Debate between Damian Collins and Julian Smith

Monday 4th November 2013

(10 years, 5 months ago)

Commons Chamber

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Damian Collins

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My hon. Friend makes an important point. The quality of the advice to businesses from all quarters is important. That echoes a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon, who said that we all need to advocate the Government’s policies to ensure that businesses benefit from them.

Julian Smith

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I pay tribute to the work that my hon. Friend has done within our party for a number of years to encourage entrepreneurs. It has been a most successful scheme. May I ask him for his reflections on that scheme? We have talked about the StartUp loans scheme and the new enterprise allowance, but he probably has the most experience of any Conservative Member of the competitive encouragement of small businesses.

Damian Collins

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It is very kind of my hon. Friend to make those remarks. The start-up hub competition at the Conservative party conference has given small businesses an opportunity. That has been a good way to ensure that those businesses are plugged into the decision makers and people with influence in their local communities, and to ensure that they are benefiting from the breadth of schemes that the Government have to offer. We have run the competition for three years.

At this year’s party conference, I was pleased to meet Neill Ricketts of Versarien, which employs groundbreaking technology to improve the cooling systems that are used in the mainframes of computers and data storage systems. That business, which started within the lifetime of this Parliament, is going from strength to strength. It was floated on the alternative investment market this year, employs a large number of people and is growing fast.

There is a business in my constituency that was started by a group of young men. The managing director is only just 30 years old. The business specialises in search engine optimisation and social marketing campaigns. It employs more than 20 people and is growing rapidly. It has developed a way of specialising its techniques for small local businesses so that it can design social media and search engine optimisation campaigns to help businesses on the high street to grow.

People are using their knowledge and expertise to develop innovative businesses and to demonstrate that there is a market for them that has not been realised. People are developing cutting-edge technologies and products that will be exportable and that will help businesses to develop and grow.

One business that succeeded through the start-up hub competition was started by Julian Hakes, who redesigned the high-heeled shoe. He is an architect and he applied the principles of architecture to a fashion item. This year, his product was given the accessory of the year award by Vogue. It went viral on the internet and he has export orders from around the world. That was all based on a good idea that he was able to take to market. Credit is also due to two good trade bodies, the British Fashion Council and the UK Fashion and Textile Association, which supported him in the development of his business.

There are some brilliant people who are doing great things. We need to get behind them and support them. We have good schemes that can do that. My hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon made a good point about our advocating those schemes and ensuring that people are aware of them. At Tech City in east London, one hears people talking enthusiastically about the enterprise investment schemes that are available. When we meet politicians from Germany, as my hon. Friend has done, we find that they are interested in the way that we use enterprise investment schemes to encourage private investors to invest in start-up businesses. However, I wonder whether our own chambers of commerce and people around the country know enough about the schemes that are available and that they could benefit from. We all have an important role to play in advocating the Government schemes that are there to help people get their businesses to the next stage.

That support sits alongside a strong regional growth policy that is being delivered through the regional growth fund. In east Kent in my constituency, the regional growth fund has granted a third of the money that has been awarded. Tens of millions of pounds are being spent and invested by businesses. People are being employed on the back of that investment.

H. V. Wooding in Hythe, which was visited by the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon), is investing in a new plant and machinery to expand its production capabilities. It is a precision engineering company that makes parts for the Hadron Collider at CERN, and it makes busbars that are used across a wide range of industry and machine parts for Formula 1 engines. It is bidding for contracts that have gone overseas in the past decade, to bring them back to this country because it can compete in that sector. It is benefiting from regional growth fund money, which is helping it take its business to the next level, and it is employing people now.

One reason why unemployment is falling much faster than predicted is that the schemes to benefit smaller businesses are helping them grow and employ more people, and we are seeing the knock-on effect. It is not only bigger businesses that are doing well and competing, but smaller ones too. The challenge we should set ourselves is: “Do we have a strong and robust investment culture? Is this a country that people around the world want to invest in?” Increasingly, we are seeing that it is. People are investing in this country because of low levels of corporation tax compared with our competitors in Europe and America. That is why people are bringing investment from all over the world to this country.

Not only are smaller businesses investing in themselves, but the investment community is investing in them through crowdsource funding and companies like Funding Circle. People can match fund some of the Government schemes to help businesses get the finance they need, and that is an important part of the growth of our economy. In the ’80s, thanks to privatisation we were seen as a nation of shareholders. In the next decade, could we be a nation of shareholder and start-up businesses where people take advantage of available schemes to invest in start-up and smaller businesses in their areas? We should set ourselves that challenge.

Finally, we should not lose sight of the big projects that the Government must back, including those that will not benefit us directly in this Parliament but are important for the next 10 to 20 years—major infrastructure projects like high-speed rail or investment in electricity power generation. Such projects are vital for our future competitiveness. We have sometimes looked at other countries and seen how their infrastructure has helped them to compete. We have the tax and investment policies, ideas and people to compete, but we must ensure that we invest now in the big infrastructure projects we need to help those people grow in future. I commend those projects that I have touched on in my remarks, as well as the Bill which, as my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary said, is an important part of the range of measures that the Government have put in place to support entrepreneurship in this country.

All 2 Debates between Damian Collins and Julian Smith

National Insurance Contributions Bill

Oral Answers to Questions