Reducing Costs for Businesses

Debate between Lord Grayling and Jonathan Reynolds

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register.

I have great respect for the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds). He deserves to sit in the front rank of his party, but I have to differ from him when he says that this Government have provided inadequate support to the business sector. I take him back to 2010. Both parties have faced a crisis; Labour had the financial crisis, we have had the pandemic. Both parties have had to spend hundreds of billions of pounds to prop up the economy. But back in 2010, when I became Employment Minister, unemployment was 2.7 million and the pressures were all upwards. Today, in the wake of the pandemic, having just before the pandemic managed to get unemployment back to the levels of the 1970s, and having feared that the pandemic would take us back to where we had begun, actually we have ended up, as we are, I hope, coming to the end of the pandemic, with unemployment heading down towards 4% and hopefully below, and significant numbers of vacancies in our economy. That has happened because Ministers took the right decisions at the right time and targeted their support in the best possible way. It is not possible to do everything for everyone—

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I share the mutual respect that the right hon. Gentleman kindly outlined at the beginning, but he will accept, because this is his background, that there are 1 million fewer people in the labour market than pre the pandemic. Yes, unemployment has gone down, but of course the participation rate has gone down; it is not because those people have simply transferred across. The huge worry right now, and what is leading those shortages, is that participation has fallen. That is the true picture, surely, is it not?