Covid-19: Small Businesses Debate
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Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford
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Covid-19: Small Businesses
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Callanan (Con)
The noble Lord highlights an important issue. Of course we want to encourage as many people as possible to take advantage of our excellent local tourist industry—an important industry, including in Wales, to which the noble Lord referred. There have been a number of schemes to help small businesses: we have introduced business rate holidays, plus all the various grant schemes to try to keep those businesses afloat.
Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford (Con) [V]
My Lords, UK life sciences is not only one of our most innovative and productive sectors, it also benefits the whole country, with two-thirds of its jobs outside the south-east. Its thriving is crucial not only to our exit from Covid but to our economic recovery. However, life sciences SMEs say that they struggle to access data responsibly, that clinical research remains too slow, and that scale-up investment can be a challenge. In the upcoming CSR, will the Minister not only deliver on the £200 million life sciences investment programme but also invest in health data infrastructure and accelerating clinical research set-up?