UK Software Industry

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Dr John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I congratulate the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) on having started an important debate on an important theme. She will understand that I cannot comment on the situation in the north-east, so I shall concentrate my remarks on the contentious issue of video games—that has been the matter of some parliamentary discussion—and on Government procurement, which is an issue that interests me even more.

I am not especially interested in video games per se. I have not played them since the days when I had a Commodore 64 and played a game called “Pesky Painter”, which unfortunately I have not been able to obtain since. If anyone listening to this debate has a copy, I would be pleased if they wrote to me so that I could have access to the game again. Gaming is an addictive pursuit that takes up a lot of time, and someone who has other interests in IT—as I do—finds other things to do. There is, however, an argument in favour of Government support.

There are basically two extreme views on Government support. One is that the Government should always support successful and/or sometimes failing industries, and the other is that the Government should never interfere in the market. A friend of mine who is a software engineer alleges that any IT company that needs Government investment ought not to be backed in the first place, because there is enough venture capital out there and IT is a progressive and successful market.

I do not think that anyone seriously believes in either of those extreme positions. People who do not believe in state intervention at all are a bit like the people who do not believe in censorship at all. A case in which censorship was needed can always be cited, as can a case in which the state needed to intervene. The arguments usually centre on not the principle of state intervention, but the degree of it and the method used. I think everyone accepts, including the video games industry and all other branches of the software industry, that there is a role for the Government in incentivising economically useful behaviour. The video games industry supports the continuing policy of research and development credits, and of such credits that are specifically aimed at smaller businesses, presumably smaller software houses and the like. New starts are plentiful in the industry, and new starts can often become very big companies.

All the companies that we are talking about, including all those in the north-east, favour a sensible regime of business taxation. We can all talk about that, and about levels of corporation tax and the like. I guess that everyone nowadays accepts that tax incentives and breaks are better than direct subsidies, because they are a more effective way of encouraging winners and of getting the kind of behavioural impact that people want. I accept that a tax incentive is a form of sectoral subsidy, as essentially an amount that is due is not being paid, but the issue here seems to centre on whether a sectoral subsidy is, on the face of it, justifiable and necessary. It has to be necessary to be justifiable. On the face of it, there seems to be a pretty good case. I think we all accept that the industry has huge potential. The hon. Lady laid out very well what kind of potential it can offer, not only for the country as a whole but in areas of substantial deprivation. An area such as Sunderland is not necessarily associated, in the way that California is, with the IT industry, but the association is certainly helpful to Sunderland.

There is obviously a huge native skill-base in this country. I was surprised when, during the general election, individual constituents of mine e-mailed me to say that they were very much involved in a video games or software business, and they made representations on behalf of the industry. I was surprised at how many of them there were, and I was also surprised, in these days of the internet, that they did not know one another very well. I felt that after the election I could perform the useful function of putting them all in touch with each other. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger)—who has just arrived—is well aware that Liverpool has a burgeoning software industry involving a lot of small companies. We should support that industry emphatically, because it is very green, forward-looking and progressive.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should introduce some kind of domestic tax incentives and support not only to boost the industry, but so that we can compete on an equal playing field? Other countries across the world that produce software and video games have additional incentives for the industry, in both research and development and in the wages of people who come from abroad. Because we do not, we have dropped from sixth to fourth place in the world in video games production. We have so many people leaving the UK to go to other countries, such as Canada, the United States—

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind the hon. Lady that interventions should be brief.

[Dr Pugh]

I am not sure that the causal chain is as emphatic and clear-cut as the hon. Lady represents it, but later I shall come to the business of a level playing field.

It could be argued, could it not, that the indicators for what the industry offers and its potential are so good that the case for state investment is almost being undermined? If it is that good and there is that much potential, why would the Government be needed? Why should venture capital not be there; why would it not be there? I suppose there are some answers to those questions. It could be argued that this country’s financial sector is notoriously short term, which indeed it is. It is somewhat tax averse, and we have seen plenty evidence of companies preferring to go to places where the tax burden is less. The companies are certainly not patriotic and if they have scope elsewhere in places such as Canada, they might well decide that they want to place their funds there.

There are other strong arguments against the state getting too heavily involved in managing the industry. One is that the IT industry is notoriously volatile and unpredictable. One only has to look at the giants of the past that have crashed in the night—the IBMs, the Lotus Notes and the strange fall and rise of the Mac. One need only consider what would have happened had they put their money into floppy disc manufacture a few years ago, or into CD-ROM manufacture in the past five years. When someone puts money into the software industry or the IT industry more generally, they do so at an appreciable risk.

It cannot be in the long-term interest of the nation—of all nations—to base national taxation, for any sector, on the lowest common denominator of international taxation. Although the video games industry has said a lot about Canada, I would like to see what is happening in other areas where the software industry is also thriving and is competitive with Canada. I shall not rehearse the arguments that we could have about state aid and protectionism. I do not understand, however—the Minister can help me here—the argument presented by the Chancellor for not giving tax relief to the video games industry. He said that it could not be well targeted. I do not grasp that, and some evidence in the notes that have been provided makes it less than clear what is being said, meant or agreed by the Treasury.

[Jim McGovern (Dundee West) (Lab)]

I think the Chancellor actually said that the tax breaks were poorly targeted, rather than not well targeted. I have since had meetings with Ministers who have said that it is Government policy no longer to target any industry for tax breaks. Does the hon. Gentleman have a view on that?

[Dr Pugh]

The second answer that the hon. Gentleman was provided with seems to possess greater clarity than the first, because the first is, I guess, contestable. We can have a long discussion about how we can and cannot target breaks. A rational argument can quite decently be made that the software industry, given its potential for the capital venture market, is a lower priority than some other industries in a context of scarce resources; or it could be said that a break would be an unnecessary fiscal discount. The Minister can perhaps explain later exactly what is meant by the poverty of targeting in this case.

It is true that under our existing taxation policy some industries have failed, but even some of those mentioned in the notes we have been provided with have failed not because of the taxation policy, but because other things have gone wrong in the software development world and the product simply has not taken off. It is an intrinsically risky market, and the state ventures into it with some caution.

Just to extend the debate, there are other things that we should be talking about. I do not think the Government’s role in encouraging the software industry simply starts and finishes with tax breaks. They have a definite role in education. The hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South underplayed the continuity of British education between one Government and the next with regard to developing the software engineers of the future. In that context, I have a general worry about how the curriculum shapes up. In the initial phases of IT education, children were taught about programming and so on, but a great deal of recent IT education is simply about how to use applications. The people who are going to produce the applications of the future will not be the British: they will be Indian, Chinese and possibly American. There is a decline in IT education in this country—or, rather, it is not what it could be.

On the Government’s role, there is a further aspect to consider. The Government are probably the biggest customer for IT. Some 40% of all IT products, software included, are ordered by Departments. Government procurement is extraordinarily difficult for small software companies to work with, the process often being so prolonged that they cannot sustain their interest in applying for work, which the big companies ultimately get. The Cabinet Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport should consider how that process operates.

Labour Members must forgive me for going in this direction, but I have to say that huge software projects that were going to be embraced in the Building Schools for the Future programmes were, by and large, built by allowing the biggest players—the big American software firms—to engage with the process. Small British software firms found it difficult to get on the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency list. I have complained about BECTA in this Chamber in the past and I am glad that, as a result of my representations, it has been abolished.

There is a close and unattractive relationship between big government and big IT. We are blessed with the Connecting for Health project, with all its problems, ramifications and extra costs, largely because of close connections and conversations between the previous Prime Minister and Bill Gates. There has been a slow commitment to interoperability, open standards and open source in IT procurement in this country—particularly state and government IT procurement—all of which has effectively shut out the burgeoning British software engineering companies and favoured the large players, including Microsoft and Oracle.

I noted the Chancellor’s suggestion before the election—I am sure the Minister can comment on this—that by adopting a more favourable position towards open source and open standards, the country would save £500 million. I have not seen that in the comprehensive spending review so far. I can provide the press releases if any hon. Member doubts it, but I am sure we would all want to follow that up. That must surely be better than falling for the trick, as has happened in the past, where we receive memorandums of understanding and order shed-loads of products from big software houses abroad, simply because they give us the licenses at slightly less than the exorbitant prices they would charge a private customer.

The Government can do a huge amount in monitoring how taxation policy plays out. If there is a case, and serious empirical evidence is produced, showing that the video games industry is deserting the UK purely off the back of current taxation policy because the Government are reluctant to follow through on some suggestions made prior to the election, they will need to look at that. We cannot afford to stand by and let the industry go, because that would be a serious loss to the country.

We need to keep an open mind on fiscal measures and what will work, and to take a hard, prolonged look at both our education—

[Jim McGovern]

Before the general election, the Conservative and Lib Dem spokesmen on this subject both said unequivocally that they would support tax breaks for the video games industry. Why has that changed?

[Dr Pugh]

I am not party to the discussions that have led to that change. Clearly, there were opportunities for previous Governments to do precisely that.

The opportunities for the British software industry are huge. The Government just need to make the right move. Some of the right moves are plain and obvious, and I hope they will make them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once more, Mr Weir, and to have listened to the various hon. Members who have contributed to our debate about an extremely important industry for the United Kingdom. The ICT industry has developed hugely over recent years. I remember that when I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed candidate in 1997—I was one of the few Labour candidates to lose—we talked about giving computer internet access, as we then called it, to schools. Now, 13 years later, much of that optimism and much of the commitment made by the previous Government to putting schools online and introducing computers into schools has been realised. We easily forget the scale of the change that has taken place in our schools as a result of investment over the past 13 years.

There is no doubt that when the Labour party left office, the British software industry was strong on the national stage with 1.2 million people working in it to service the 22 million people throughout the UK who access IT and use computers every day in their work. We must try to ensure the continuation of our competitive advantage and knowledge base that has enabled the success of the international UK computer industry.

Today, thousands of students are marching in London in response to the Government’s proposals for university tuition fees. That is relevant to today’s debate, because over the past 13 years, there has been major investment in higher education and an increase in the number of students going to university. If one industry is knowledge-based, it is the IT and software industry. Those students who went to university and were attracted by all the games—of which hon. Members know much, and I know very little—have grown our IT industry. Many imaginative and successful small companies in the UK have come out of universities. My fear is that as we go forward, given that it is proposed that student tuition fees will rise to £9,000 a year, many people similar to those who went to university over the past 13 years will be discouraged from attending university and therefore from going into an educational, innovative atmosphere that could lead them into that innovative industry.

[Dr Pugh]

The hon. Gentleman will recall that he voted for tuition fees in the last Parliament and I did not. I say nothing about the current policy, but at the time I said that the introduction of tuition fees and top-up fees would reduce the number of people applying to university. As a matter of empirical detail, I turned out to be wrong. There is an outside chance that, regardless of the merits of this policy, the hon. Gentleman could also turn out to be wrong, as I was.

[Ian Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman is wrong to state that I voted in favour of tuition fees—I did not. I have always opposed tuition fees. There is a difference in kind between the tuition fees introduced through legislation in 2003-04 and the present position. The fees introduced in 2003-04 were supported by a generous bursary scheme that the Government put in place, which was the main reason why the proposals went through. We now have a situation in which fees of £9,000 a year are being proposed. Before the introduction of those fees, when Parliament will be asked to increase the cap to £9,000, we will not have any discussion about the bursaries that will be put in place. The White Paper on higher education—one of the most important subjects for our nation—will not be produced until after we have voted on the cap, and that is a matter of profound concern. I have always shown a great interest in this issue and, for the benefit of the hon. Member for Southport (Dr Pugh), I can say that it is one of two occasions when I voted against the Labour Government. The matter goes to the heart of whether the UK software industry succeeds in the future.

Of all the countries that compete with us, we are alone in cutting back on investment in higher education. Teaching grants for most of the subjects that will lead to people studying IT at university will be removed. That cannot make us more competitive as a nation, because it will make our students less knowledgeable. It is therefore necessary that we say that the removal of those teaching grants will have profound effects.

In its 2008 “Developing the Future” report, Microsoft stressed explicitly the importance of industry placements for students. When talking about the lower level of tuition fees, it stated:

“The introduction of tuition fees may have created a deterrent to students considering taking up a placement as they are likely to be more anxious to finish their studies as soon as possible in order to repay their loans and avoid further debt.”

How much greater will that deterrent be as tuition fees are set to triple?

That is not the only area of uncertainty created by the present Government. Labour made a clear commitment to universal broadband by 2012, but it has been scrapped by the Tory-Lib Dem Government. That will create a competitive disadvantage for many companies away from the south-east of England and centres of population in general. It will inhibit the development of innovative small businesses, which are so evident in the software industry. Even more serious is the uncertainty about the expansion of high-speed broadband services, which are key to the development of software companies. We all know that the £530 million docked from the licence fee will be insufficient to pay for universal high-speed broadband across the UK. Will the Minister please tell us where the Government believe the money for that will come from?

The Government have set their face against support for the video games industry by scrapping Labour’s games tax relief. We heard today that we need a clearer explanation of why the Government believe that that step—it contradicts the Conservatives’ pre-election stance, although we have come to expect that from the present Government—should be taken. My hon. Friend the Member for Dundee West (Jim McGovern) has been doggedly pursuing the matter for as long as I can remember, but he is still to receive straight answers to the straight questions that he has been putting. Why is an industry that we know is successful and that is in a very competitive environment not receiving the support from the Government that the Conservatives stated before the election that they would provide?

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Lucas]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. That sounds like a good deal to me, so perhaps such an approach that should be followed. We have a successful industry. We should be encouraging it to prosper, not taking away its advantages.

Last week, the Prime Minister made a speech about information technology. Interestingly, he chose to make it in east London. I note that this debate was secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson). We want innovative companies throughout the UK—in England, including the north-east of England, in Scotland, in Wales and in Northern Ireland.

My hon. Friend made the excellent point that the north-east had one of the best regional development agencies in the country in One North East. She talked about Sunderland, its Software City and its computer city-approach. We all know about the success of the investment levered into the UK from Nissan by One North East, working with Her Majesty’s Government. That £400 million of investment came at a cost of £20 million. That is the type of work that has been going on in the north-east to bring innovative new companies and investors from abroad to the UK. Unfortunately, One North East has gone and, as we speak, Sunderland does not have a local enterprise partnership.

We heard the Prime Minister talk last week about a fund of £200 million for new technology and innovation centres, so I would like some information from the Minister about the money. Is that sum separate from the regional growth fund? If so, who will administer it and how does one access it? If part of the country, such as Sunderland, does not have a local enterprise partnership, how will it access finance from the fund? Is the fund intended to be solely for the benefit of east London or is it a national fund? [Interruption.] The Minister chuckles, but it tells us something that the Prime Minister shuttles across to the east of London to make such an announcement instead of going, for example, to the north-east of England, which has many great industrial stories to tell.

I would also like to pick up the point that the hon. Member for Southport made about Microsoft having a close relationship with the previous Prime Minister—or was it the Prime Minister before? There was evidence in last week’s announcements of another close relationship between a Prime Minister and a major multinational software company—Google. Strangely, however, the hon. Gentleman did not refer to that. In particular, there was an announcement of a review of the intellectual property system, which the Prime Minister himself said frustrated Google in this country. It is interesting that on the very day the Prime Minister announced that there would be a review of intellectual property rights in the UK, Google announced that it would be taking part in the east London high-tech city project.

[Dr Pugh]

We all need to be cautious about such things, and I must add to that the fact that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister made some significant announcements the other day at the event involving Microsoft. We all need to be wary about these issues.

[Ian Lucas]

We do indeed, but the hon. Gentleman raised the issue initially—specifically in connection with the Labour party and Labour Prime Ministers. I thought it only fair to illuminate the debate by highlighting the announcements that were made only last week.

When examining issues such as intellectual property, which is extremely important and does need to be examined, we need to be conscious of not only freedom of expression and access to information, which are of course vital and needed to make our nation competitive, but the rights of those who create original material, who are often the small people in all this and do not have access to Prime Ministers, and sometimes have difficulty gaining access to MPs. Their rights concerning their intellectual property need to be retained. I shall therefore be watching the review with great interest. It is important that there is broad input into the review and I encourage anyone who has interest in this area to contribute. We are at a positive stage for the UK software industry. We have great talent, great innovation and great originality. My contention is that much of that arises from the positive intellectual atmosphere that has been fostered generally in the UK, and specifically in our universities. I am worried that that atmosphere might disappear because of the environment in which we operate.