UK Entrepreneurs
Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Leong (Lab)
Well, the noble Lord asked a pretty long question so I am trying to respond to him. The Government’s new modern industrial strategy— Invest 2035—for high-growth areas such as advanced manufacturing, AI, creative industries, life sciences and others, will drive our growth mission. The Government will publish a small business strategy next year, which will include further measures to encourage greater entrepreneurship and provide a strong business environment.
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
Does the Minister agree that the best way to attract investment to this country is for the Government to demonstrate some economic competence and fiscal discipline? Will he therefore agree that the Government should stop promising that in no circumstances will they ever raise the basic taxes of this country, which provide most of our revenue, and will stop piling on additional debt, which it is their duty to begin to get under control? If we continue to simply freeze our tax revenues and pile on more debt, very few people will find this a very attractive country to come to.
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, most of the 95% of UK businesses, which employ something like 16 million people, will not be affected by any of the tax rises. I do not wish to remind noble Lords of the black hole we inherited, but we had to make difficult decisions to restore economic stability and fund our public services. We are doing the hard job early and fixing the foundations in one. After all the chopping, changing and chaos of the last few years, we now have a stable, pro-business, pro-worker Labour Government, offering certainty, consistency and confidence. That is what investors, businesses and entrepreneurs want.
Ministerial Code: Policy Announcements
Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Twycross (Lab)
We do. To anybody who watched that Budget and who had not been involved in its development and thought that they knew every single detail that was announced in the Chancellor’s speech, I would question whether they were watching the same speech as I was.
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
My Lords, I will not repeat what I said yesterday, but I was outraged by the complete circus of trailing in advance and trying things out that has gone on for three months while this Budget was prepared. There were no surprises to anybody in today’s Budget, and they got away with it as far as the markets were concerned—but I said I would not repeat that. I now do not understand what the policy is. The Minister sounds as though she still asserts that it is a serious matter to trail in advance the contents of the Budget before they have been announced to Parliament. She says it with a completely straight face. My learned noble friend Lord Macpherson, who was with me in the Treasury in the 1990s, when we did not have leaks of any kind—
Noble Lords
Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con)
We did not—even the Cabinet did not know what was going to be in the Budget until the day before, because someone in the Cabinet would have leaked it.
Will the Minister not acknowledge that this Government are now approaching Budgets on the basis that things have to be tried out with the public and various Labour lobbies, and nastier things leaked in advance to lower their impact? It is all deliberate media management nowadays and the old obligations to Parliament are, in practice, being completely, deliberately and openly abandoned.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
I find the outrage from Opposition Members to be in the category of faux outrage. As I said earlier, the Speaker’s comments were heard by Ministers across the Government, and Treasury Ministers have been hardly out of the other place this week, with Statements and Question Time. I cannot see how anybody could assert that all the decisions in the Budget—which makes difficult choices to fix the foundations of the economy and public services in this country—were trailed in advance.