Autumn Statement

Lord Leigh of Hurley Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Rose of Monewden, to the House and congratulate him on an exemplary maiden speech. This is the second time this year that I have followed the noble Lord, as he left the board of Blue Inc earlier this year for me to join. He brings to this House a wealth of experience at some of the country’s leading businesses, such as Argos, Arcadia, Ocado, Booker, Woolworths, Fat Face and the Burton Group. As he said, he started as a management trainee at Marks & Spencer to rise to CEO and then executive chairman. In 2006, the World Leadership Forum gave him its Business Leader of the Year Award, but he survived that accolade. I am delighted to say that, since then, on leaving M&S, he has become involved in a significant number of start-ups and SMEs. So he brings to your Lordships’ House invaluable international business expertise, and we look forward to many future contributions.

I would like to lend my support to the package of measures announced by the Chancellor in the other place yesterday as further evidence that this Government continue to strike the right balance between fiscal responsibility, on the one hand, and measures to encourage growth and investment, on the other. Indeed, with the deficit down by a half, and projected growth of 3% this year—the envy of our peers in the developed world —on both measures we are succeeding. The Opposition have long said that we are cutting too far and too fast. Indeed, in 2012, the Leader of the Opposition said somewhat opportunistically that we should be more like France. He hailed the election of President Hollande, and gave a description of their first conversation:

“We talked about growth and austerity in Europe and how we can tilt the direction of where Europe is going”.

Well, that tilt has been tried in France and, as we now know, it has led to recession, higher unemployment and, this week, protests in Paris by business men and women frustrated at the unfriendly policies to business adopted by the French President, whose current low rating in popularity is matched only in the UK by his admirer the Leader of the Opposition.

Because we ignored our critics and stuck to our long-term economic plan, Britain is now growing seven times faster than France and we have created record numbers of private sector jobs in the UK. Unlike in other parts of the world, where finance and business continue to be vilified, this Government are encouraging investment, particularly in smaller companies. For example, I welcome the one-year extension of the Funding for Lending scheme to January 2016 and the additional help for the enterprise finance guarantee scheme of some £2.9 billion to small businesses, extended by a further £500 million.

When the banks simply will not lend, we need alternative sources of finance. It is a welcome development that, within the ambit of the British Business Bank, there will be an extra £400 million to support the enterprise capital funds programme. Support for SMEs does not end there; business rates, as the noble Lord, Lord Rose, said, remain a significant impediment to all businesses, but particularly small ones. So I am very pleased to see that small business rate relief will be doubled to 2016, meaning that 385,000 small businesses will continue to have 100% relief, and a further 190,000 will benefit from taper relief, which will be a great help to them.

However, we must also make sure that, as the economy grows, large multinational corporations pay their fair share in helping to get the deficit down. There can be little doubt that globalisation has completely outpaced and outgrown our system of national taxation and, as a result, global corporations are paying less and less tax while acting within the law. So we must change the law. As my noble friend Lord Lawson has said, it is pleasing to see that the Chancellor has taken such dramatic, innovative and radical steps in many areas, but particularly in taxing multinationals. I suspect he must have been listening to the debate in this House on the excellent House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report, entitled Tackling Corporate Tax Avoidance in a Global Economy, led by my noble friend Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market. The noble Lord, Lord Rose, might be interested to know that by a happy coincidence, it was on that subject and in that debate that I gave my maiden speech.

The Prime Minister, through his leadership of the G8, has put tax evasion on the political map, and this Autumn Statement keeps it there. At a time when we have asked public sector workers to accept difficult pay freezes, it is only right that corporations and high net-worth individuals pay their fair share as well. The OECD is doing vital work in this area in trying to secure international agreement, but at some point one country has to show leadership, and I am proud to see that this is the UK.