Business Community

Lord Suri Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Suri (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for securing this debate. This is a very pertinent question for us to consider today. As a businessman, I have often thought of business as the original big society: a way of solving issues and problems that Governments alone cannot fix. What could be a bigger issue than climate change? In many ways, it affects us all. The Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs suggested this week that it was to blame for the recent terrible floods in Cumbria and Lancashire that have caused £0.5 billion of damage and the loss of many homes. Heavier rain and hotter weather will also come over the next few decades, and will affect our children and our children’s children. The Health Protection Agency projects that higher temperatures will mean a rise in heat-related mortality of 70% by 2020 compared with 2000, which will put further strain on our National Health Service.

I hope that the UN Climate Change Summit talks in Paris will be fruitful, but more and more onerous regulation on climate action can often be a poor means of achieving lasting change. I believe that any solution has to come from the Government, yes, but also from business. I was gladdened to read last week that an increasing number of large corporations have realised their corporate social responsibility to their consumers and will commit to sourcing all their energy from renewables, through the RE100 initiative. Some businesses, such as Unilever, are going even further and trying to become carbon positive, on which I congratulate them. Whether they succeed depends largely on the quality of the research and product output that is conducted by businesses in the private sector, which are already making great strides with renewables and carbon capture technology. At every step when tackling this generational issue, business will have to be deeply involved if there are to be successful results.

Another challenge that the UK faces relates to employment. The current figures are relatively good, but more can be done to make this country into the high wage, high productivity and low welfare state that our Prime Minister wants us to transition to. The best way to decrease unit labour costs and boost productivity is through investment by the Government and business. The Government must do their bit on education and infrastructure, but the huge role that business plays in training, developing and nurturing talent is often overlooked. Business investment here reached 11% of GDP in the second quarter of 2015, the highest level since 2000. Businesses are increasingly ploughing their retained profits back into the workforce, because they can see the gains that will secure their future. In my business, I have been able to do that because of the business-friendly environment that the Government have created.

From the data, we see that productivity has broken free of its time lag and is again on the rise. This is a real example of business fixing social problems. If we are to fix social problems we must move away from a top-down, heavy-fisted government approach, regulating the problem away. We must work with business, because the interests of socially-responsible businesses are the interests of their consumers.