Industrial Strategy

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The evidence base we were able to assemble was an awful lot stronger because of her connections with small businesses in her constituency and the insights she was able to bring from the world of labour. The point she makes is absolutely right. Past industrial strategies have sometimes conjured up images of corporate Britain calling the shots, but this country’s real potential is actually in abundance in smaller firms. Unless we can make sure that on our islands it is easier to start a business, easier to scale up a business, easier to hire people and easier to give people a pay rise, we are not going to unlock our full potential, and that is what this report sets out to do. We have clearly in our minds the richness and potential of our smaller firms, and we want our economy to be a bigger and better place for them.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his statement and his Committee’s report, which is welcome. The summary clearly says:

“Britain’s economic institutions and markets—especially in public procurement, energy, skills”

and, critically,

“the diffusion of innovation and finance—must be modernised for new times.”

In the spirit of the partnership he spoke of between the public sector and private sector, he will no doubt have been glued to the debate on the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill yesterday, when I pointed out that most of the Government’s advanced fuels funding is going on foreign-owned technologies. How does he think, and did his Committee consider, the way that the approach to Government grant schemes for innovation needs to change to ensure that we keep talent and innovation here at home?

[Liam Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point. We have heard time and again—we heard it in relation to life sciences, defence and clean energy—that we have some of the best thinkers in the world, but they often struggle to get the start-up finance or the scale-up finance they need to turn those ambitions into new businesses. As someone who spent four years building a business before I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got elected to this House, I know that what small businesses need to grow are sales. That is why we need to be doing a much smarter job of marrying public contracts with access to scale-up finance, but that will take the institutions we have today working very differently in the future.

Perhaps our most shocking evidence session was on the subject of public procurement, when the chief commercial officer of His Majesty’s Government was just not clear how many jobs, how much economic growth and what levels of wages were driven by £1 of GDP. That is simply not good enough. I hope that there is cross-party consensus about these reforms because, ultimately, this is a once in 50 years moment. Our recommendations should command cross-party support, because that is how we ensure that they are sustainable for the long term.