(7 years, 1 month ago)
Grand CommitteeMy Lords, I thank the Minister for his pithy introduction. The regulations surely have to be welcomed. It must be good news to many thousands of SMEs. I refer to the register of interests: I am president of Flintshire Business Week and Deeside Business Forum, which sits across the England/Wales border and has some 9,000 jobs. It is based at Deeside Industrial Park, which has 260 companies at least, most of which are SMEs. There is considerable interest from companies such as these in the regulations. Do we yet have a commissioner’s name in mind? Who shall choose? Shall it be salaried? What salary might it be?
I refer to my entry in the register of interests, including my chairmanship of Red Tractor, which helps British branding, including some small businesses, to have their food assured and to sell it into the market.
There was a flurry in the Printed Paper Office this afternoon as some of us sought papers on the Small Business Commissioner. Eventually, we discovered papers entitled “Enterprise”. Of course, small business and enterprise go hand-in-hand. I share a passion for both, as noble Lords may know. It was fantastic to be involved in the passing of the parent legislation for these regulations. I welcome Mr Paul Uppal to his job—I believe he is the new Small Business Commissioner. Perhaps the Minister could kindly tell us a bit about him and why the Secretary of State has appointed him to this vital job for small business. I commend the role of the Federation of Small Businesses in ensuring that the Small Business Commissioner not only is now on the statute book but will be up and running once these regulations have been passed.
While regretting the length of the regulations—although obviously I support them strongly, brevity and simplicity are the most important features of law-making—I am sure that the Minister will keep the regulations and the rules and operation of this important new office under review so that we can ensure that it delivers better payment terms for small businesses in the way we all hope it will.
I have some sympathy with the points made by my noble friend but we are where we are. Of course, the majority of the measures were taken when the party opposite was in power. The steel industry has found it very difficult, which is why we have made the substantial compensation payments to which my noble friend referred, including £50 million to Tata since 2013, £9 million of it in the past three months, with tens of millions more in the pipeline. More importantly, however, the Chancellor announced in the Autumn Statement that we will exempt energy-intensive industries from renewable policy costs, saving them an estimated £400 million up to 2020. This is a difficult area and we have sought to find a way through.
As I said in repeating the Statement, we are ready to look at pretty much all the options. I think that the Secretary of State has made clear that he sees nationalisation as problematic, not least because all the most successful, leading steel operations across Europe are not nationalised. But we are keen to find a way through this so co-investment with an element of government support for a period, and indeed the sort of arrangement that we had in Scotland, where there has been some sort of interim cover, can be advantageous.
My Lords, will the Minister acknowledge the huge contribution made in north-east Wales by Shotton steelworks, which is still highly profitable, very high-tech and a centre of excellence in steel making? Perhaps I may remind her that in 1980 Shotton steelworks was an integrated plant employing 13,000 people. It lost overnight, in Europe’s biggest single redundancy exercise in living memory, some 8,000 steelworkers’ jobs. It is fair to say that the Shotton steelworks has made its sacrifices already. Further, does the Minister understand the impact of mass unemployment? It affects many families, schools and satellite steel townships? Communities remain scarred and now, when they are in a profitable state, do not wish to suffer further redundancies or closures.
My last point is this. If our nation is to have any idea of national greatness for the future, how can we survive without the seedcorn industry that is steel? It is a folly to consider sending atomic-powered submarines armed with nuclear-tipped missiles abroad if we do not have the industry that enables any nation to make war—which is steel. We must retain our steel industry.
I applaud the work of the noble Lord both as a Member of Parliament in that area and indeed as shadow Secretary of State, and of course I acknowledge the sacrifices that have been made by steelworkers and their families in Wales and more generally across the UK. These things are very difficult. Indeed, that is one of the reasons we are taking the measures that we have set out today. We have said that we are willing to provide a much broader degree of support for Port Talbot and that in the future, procurement rules will allow a greater degree of buying British than has been possible in the past. The noble Lord is right to say that steel is a core industry for any country.