Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Mann Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Prisk]

There are two steps. One is to ensure that the practice that we follow deals with the gold-plating, which has quite rightly been raised by Members on both sides of the House. That is our first step, but as my hon. Friend has pointed out—and as my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey) pointed out in his answer earlier—we are ensuring that we deal with domestic legislation first. We will then ensure that we look to include EU legislation. [Interruption.] I love this coming from the Opposition, who allowed 14 new working regulations every working day. We are tackling regulation; they funked it.

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

T10. If the Business Secretary had been able to accept my invitation to open the world’s most advanced plastics recycling factory in my constituency two weeks ago, he would have learnt that the decision to invest in this country was based on a £1 million grant from the regional development agency. How much will be available through such grants to attract other overseas businesses to invest in my constituency in the next three years?

[Vince Cable]

I am sorry that I did not have the opportunity to visit the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. I will try to make up for that in future. We want to attract inward investment, but it was not at all clear that the best way of doing so was through the RDAs, which were duplicating each other’s work. In key overseas countries, for example, there have often been several RDAs competing with each other, using public money in a completely unstructured and unhelpful way. We are going to resolve that.