Asked by: Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Labour (Co-op) - Brighton, Kemptown)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, how many chapters of a prospective free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council have been concluded.
Answered by Greg Hands - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
Six rounds of negotiations have been successfully concluded as part of negotiations on a free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The Department for Business and Trade regularly engages with the GCC at both Chief Negotiator and ministerial level and is making good progress on agreeing chapters including in areas such as Customs, Technical Barriers to Trade and Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). The department cannot comment any further as negotiations are ongoing.
Asked by: Andrew Bridgen (Independent - North West Leicestershire)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of the EU Critical Raw Materials Act on levels of trade between Northern Ireland and the (a) rest of the UK and (b) EU.
Answered by Greg Hands - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
The Government is carefully considering this Regulation and will be publishing an explanatory memorandum shortly, with detail on its potential impact on Northern Ireland.
Any applicability in Northern Ireland will of course be subject to the important democratic scrutiny mechanisms in the Windsor Framework.
Asked by: Lord Naseby (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask His Majesty's Government, following changes in the leadership of the Confederation of British Industry, whether they plan to renew their relationship to help business and Government work in partnership.
Answered by Lord Johnson of Lainston - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
The Government is focused on driving long-term, sustainable economic growth and an ambition to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business. Following the changes that CBI have put in place over the past year, and the vote of confidence that their members gave them at their EGM last summer, Government is rebuilding a working relationship with the business organisation.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what estimate she has made of the number of small businesses in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry and (c) England that have closed in each of the last three years.
Answered by Kevin Hollinrake - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
Numbers of enterprise (business) ‘deaths’ (closures) are not available at the parliamentary constituency level. Neither are they available, yet, for unitary authorities in 2023.
Numbers of enterprise ‘deaths’ are not available broken down by business size and are only available for PAYE and/or VAT registered businesses.
Data in the 2 tables below show total numbers of registered enterprise ‘deaths’ in England in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and in Coventry in 2021 and 2022.
Table 1: Counts of all enterprise ‘deaths’ in 2021 and 2022 in England and Coventry
| 2021 | 2022 |
England | 291,370 | 308,900 |
of which… |
|
|
Coventry | 1,570 | 1,750 |
Source: ONS business demography
Table 2: Provisional counts of all enterprise ‘deaths’ in 2023, in England
| 2023 |
England | 293,170 |
Source: ONS business demography, quarterly experimental statistics
Asked by: Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Labour (Co-op) - Brighton, Kemptown)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of the Competition and Market Authority investigation into the proposed merger between Vodafone and Three Mobile.
Answered by Kevin Hollinrake - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
The Competition and Markets Authority is the UK’s independent competition regulator and its merger investigations are independent of Government.
Asked by: Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Labour (Co-op) - Brighton, Kemptown)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, with reference to her Department's press release entitled Millions to take home more cash as new guidance on Tipping is published, published on 22 April 2024, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of delaying the implementation of the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 to 1 October 2024.
Answered by Kevin Hollinrake - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act will require employers to pass all tips on to workers, without deductions. The implementation date for the Act, and the accompanying statutory Code of Practice, was revised from 1st July to 1st October to ensure sufficient time for those affected by the changes to prepare.
The impacts of the new requirements were considered in the impact assessment for the Act: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3197/publications.
Asked by: Lord Mann (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of whether criminals in China are setting up companies by fraudulently registering addresses in the UK through Companies House in order to bypass Chinese restrictions on cryptocurrency trading.
Answered by Lord Johnson of Lainston - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
Companies House is working increasingly closely with law enforcement to understand filing patterns. While I cannot comment on the detail of that, I am confident it will, over time, significantly improve the ability to identify and combat attempts systematically to abuse the company register.
Where Chinese nationals, or others, have registered companies using addresses which they have no authority to use, the Registrar has a suite of powers - recently strengthened by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 - which allow the misappropriated address to be replaced with a default address. Where companies persistently fail to provide an appropriate address, the Registrar has the power to strike them off the register altogether.
Asked by: Geoffrey Cox (Conservative - Torridge and West Devon)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what discussions the Minister of State for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business has had with Post Office Ltd on the decision to reduce the remuneration period for subpostmasters with Hard to Place post offices; and what steps he is taking to ensure sufficient compensation and support for affected subpostmasters during the transition period.
Answered by Kevin Hollinrake - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade)
I and my officials meet regularly with Post Office Ltd to discuss a range of issues of mutual interest, including Hard to Place Postmasters. I also chair a regular working group between the National Federation of SubPostmasters and Post Office to discuss a range of issues affecting postmasters.
Whilst the level of compensation offered to Hard to Place postmasters represents a commercial matter for Post Office to determine, the Government supports Post Office Limited's attempts to resolve the situation. The previous situation was more detrimental to all parties involved as individuals were holding on, as they had for a number of years already, in the hope that they would get compensation that might not have materialised.
Asked by: Richard Thomson (Scottish National Party - Gordon)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, whether (a) Jet-A and (b) JP-8 fuel for Hermes 450 drones has been exported to Israel in the last 12 months.
Answered by Alan Mak - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade) (jointly with the Cabinet Office)
Data on UK exports is published by HMRC. For the latest 12-month period where data is available (until March 2024) there were no exports of any kerosene-type jet fuel to Israel.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Business and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what data her Department holds on the number of people in (a) the West Midlands, (b) Coventry and (c) Coventry North East constituency who have been employed in the automotive industry in each of the last three years.
Answered by Alan Mak - Minister of State (Department for Business and Trade) (jointly with the Cabinet Office)
According to the ONS Business Registers and Employment Survey (BRES) the estimated numbers employed in automotive manufacturing in the West Midlands, Coventry and Coventry North-East were as follows (latest published year 2022):
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
West Midlands | 54,000 | 57,000 | 46,000 |
Coventry | 7,000 | 7,000 | 6,000 |
Coventry North-East | 1,750 | 2,000 | 1,500 |