Business and the Economy

Lord Soames of Fletching Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

I say to the hon. Gentleman that I am proud to be a shadow Minister for a party that saw 1.1 million new businesses created during its time in government. I am proud to be the shadow Business Secretary for a party under whose Government Britain was rated the best place for doing business in Europe and fourth best in the world. I must also remind him that the UK has fallen from fourth to seventh place on his watch.

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

Would the hon. Gentleman accept that the Foreign Secretary was saying that we have to do better with our exports? We have done much better this year, as the Secretary of State pointed out, through our commercial diplomacy, and the hon. Gentleman is wrong to sneer at that. It is a fact that we do not export nearly enough from this country, or nearly as much as we could.

[Mr Umunna]

If only the Foreign Secretary’s comments had been limited to those that I have just cited. There was more, however. Asked whether they amounted to a modern-day call to our people to get on their bikes, echoing the call from the noble Lord Tebbit back in the 1980s, the Foreign Secretary said:

“Well no, it’s more than that. It’s ‘get on a plane, go and sell things overseas’…It’s much more than getting on the bike. The bike didn’t go that far. ‘Get on the jet.’”

I know that senior members of this Government have a penchant for hanging out with people who own yachts and jets, but most business people in this country do not have those things or mix in such company. Chris Romer-Lee, the director and co-founder of an award-winning architecture practice here in London, said to me yesterday that his firm is working flat out and has been doing so through these bad economic times. He said that

“to suggest we could work harder is insulting.”

That is what a business person said to me yesterday.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

I start by wholly agreeing with the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) about House of Lords reform.

It is a great privilege to speak in this debate on the Queen’s Speech in the year of Her Majesty’s diamond jubilee, when all of us across this wonderful country will have an opportunity to celebrate the Queen’s exemplary attention to her duties over the past 60 years, when the Olympics will come to London, and when there will be vast opportunities for Britain to place itself at the centre of world interest.

I am sorry that the principal spokesman for the Opposition, the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), has left the Chamber. What he said was really foolish and profoundly ignorant. Anyone who has had anything to do with UK Trade & Investment in the past year will know that it is functioning probably better than it has ever done. Let me tell the House a story. The other day, I went to speak at a dinner in Scotland. It was an international gathering of the whisky industry, and the chairman of probably the biggest company in that industry said to me, “I think you should know that the Government’s export efforts have never been better run, and that the attention from the diplomatic service and our embassies abroad is quite outstanding.” The Government deserve credit for that.

I pay tribute to the work of Lord Green, Lord Marland, and Lord Sassoon, who have led tremendously successful trade missions all over the world—missions that have secured contracts and goods for this country that we have never secured before. Our exports are up £50 billion on previous years. The hon. Gentleman will find that he has done himself no good by speaking as he did of UKTI.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Nicholas Soames]

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, but I have only six minutes, and I have a few points to make.

I support and endorse the Queen’s Speech. Much in it deserves and commands support at this very difficult time. The Government are right in their determination to drive the economy forward, to bring the UK’s productivity and growth up to world standard—they are not at that standard at the moment—and to focus on getting the big things right and resolving the stubborn, difficult and often politically very unappealing challenges that have long kept the UK’s economy from fulfilling its true potential. Our national problems are serious. Many of the causes of Britain’s plight cannot justly be blamed on Greece, Brussels, or even the banks. There is the dire state of too many of our schools and thus, through no fault of their own, the poor skills of too many young people; there is the decline in size of our manufacturing industry—an industry that the Germans sustain so well—and there is the plight of small businesses, which are still groaning under oppressive bureaucracy and employment law. We really need to get on and fix those problems. This country remains, on its good days, a wonderfully civilised place, but there is no contradiction in recognising that our traditional national values will not suffice to support us through this century unless they are allied to harder work, vastly improved skills, and a drastic reality check about the standard of living that we have for so long taken for granted.

I wholly endorse the views that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary expressed yesterday in a really interesting, punchy interview in The Sunday Telegraph. He set out clearly the great opportunities for British trade and the great efforts being made to secure them through our outstanding commercial diplomacy. The success of our economy locally, nationally and globally will depend on how we build our economic growth around a tapestry of skills, with science, finance and sound regulation working together. In many ways, the Queen’s Speech sets out a way forward on that. It is worth remembering that growth, as a public policy, can achieve a great deal. It can create jobs and it reduces welfare dependency, but it is not an end in itself.

I am trying to develop an idea that takes advantage of the south of England’s local geography and opportunities. Starting with the south of my constituency, I want to develop an international technology hub between Burgess Hill and Brighton, and between Brighton and Southampton. The work required to deliver improvements to the A27 must happen, and I do not see why that should not be carried out by a public-private partnership of some sort. We need to get on and develop the sort of creative clusters that are essential for economic growth, making the most of the university of Sussex and the brilliant Brighton university, through to Portsmouth and Southampton—an area with ample office space and housing. The advantage of such a scheme is that it contains all the conceptual ideas that begin with the creation of jobs and extend to kick-start a knowledge-based economy. One of the points that the Gracious Speech makes—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Time is up.