Autumn Statement 2022

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, it was only seven weeks ago that I and many other noble Lords here today spoke out against the so-called mini-Budget during the debate on the economy in this place. Well, much has changed since then, but it has left the new Government with little room for manoeuvre and an understandable fear of markets taking fright at any further signs of fiscal lunacy. Therefore, I will give credit where due to the Chancellor for crafting a relatively sensible and balanced Autumn Statement. The reaction from both debt and currency markets has been reassuring. That said, there is very little here for business, enterprise or innovation.

Most of us, if not all, are pro-growth and pro the causes of growth. Yet here we have a Conservative Government that have dropped the baton—scarred, no doubt, by Liz Truss’s “Growth, growth, growth” strategy. I apologise for adopting a cheap football analogy at this time in the evening, but a new manager has got rid of our dodgy keeper, stiffened the defence and central midfield but left us with a toothless attack and very little creativity. My focus will be on the attack—what businesses, and especially SMEs, need to help the UK become both productive and competitive. I refer your Lordships to my interests set out in the register, and I speak from my experience of both start-ups and scale-ups.

A quick word on the SME landscape: we keep hearing about the 5.5 million SMEs in the UK, but over 4 million of these employ no staff. We should focus on the 1.3 million businesses that employ between one and 50 staff, and generate £1.3 trillion in annual turnover, and on the equally important 35,000 businesses that employ between 50 and 250 staff, and generate a further £700 billion in revenues. These two groups alone now account for almost 50% of all private sector turnover in this country. They are the businesses that grow at the fastest rate and, crucially, show potential for further growth. We need a bottom-up strategy to support and galvanise these emerging businesses, rather than a top-down macro approach—the very opposite of trickle-down economics.

As we know, economic growth is, in essence, a function of the size of the economically active workforce and the productivity of that workforce. For the last three years, our workforce has been shrinking and demographic data suggests this trend will not be reversed. That leaves us with boosting productivity—the only way we will see a return to real growth.

Since 2010, the UK’s productivity as measured by GDP output per hour has grown by a miserly 4%, according to the OECD. To put this in context, France saw an 8% gain, Germany almost 10% and the US more than 10%, and even those are not great numbers. Why we are lagging behind is a complicated question, but the continued very weak levels of business investment are undoubtedly a major factor.

As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blackwood, pointed out, it was especially disappointing to see the Chancellor cut the R&D tax credits for SMEs, which will inevitably hit innovation and productivity, especially in loss-making start-ups. The Treasury is apparently concerned about growing taxpayer losses to fraud and spurious claims, but that reflects on poor oversight and execution of the programme rather than the actual impact of R&D on economic growth. I ask the Minister whether the Government have conducted any assessment of the impact on productivity from these R&D tax cuts. I thought the Government were pursuing an ambition to turn Britain into the “world’s next Silicon Valley” or “the Singapore of Europe”.

There was also very little for exporters in the Autumn Statement. Given weakening domestic demand, an export-led recovery may be the most realistic way of engineering our way out of recession. We still have a very competitive exchange rate: against the US dollar, sterling is close to $1.20, compared to $1.70 in 2015. That is a depreciation of some 30%. Remember what happened back in 1992 when we crashed out of the ERM: sterling lost 20% of its value, and our economy grew by an average 3% per annum over the rest of the decade, driven by booming exports. This spells an opportunity for boosting British exports across the Americas, Middle East and Asia, because we are price competitive once again.

What are the new Government’s plans to seize this opportunity? It is all the more urgent, as our exports to Europe have fallen by 15%, with thousands of SMEs, consumed by red tape, simply giving up selling to the EU—do not mention to them Boris Johnson’s oven-ready deal. I ask this question because, although Brexit will not be reversed, there is a clear need for closer trading relations with the EU. It makes commercial sense for both sides, whether we look at a new version of the Swiss, Norwegian or any other model. I understand that factions of the Tory party—notably the European Research Group—are resistant. But at a time of recession, can we really afford to play politics with our economy?