Small Businesses
Debate between Chris Heaton-Harris and William Bain(11 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Bain
Indeed; it is a great pleasure to follow the tremendous speech by the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris). I thank her and the Backbench Business Committee for scheduling the debate.
I represent a constituency that has one of the largest problems of family poverty and long-term unemployment in this country, but it also has some rapidly expanding SMEs. I have been in contact this week with Gaia-Wind, which is the fastest growing private company in Scotland and the eighth fastest growing SME anywhere in the UK, to hear its exciting plans for expansion. It also, however, shows us some of the particular needs of participants in the green economy and the problems that they face.
There is a lack of investment in our economy. We discovered yesterday that investment by businesses has been largely flat over the past year. In fact, business investment contributed only 0.1 percentage points to the 0.8% of GDP growth in the third quarter. We also know that access to finance is a huge problem for the SME sector. Although the small regional banks in Germany, the Sparkassen, were able to keep lending to support SMEs during the recession, lending by institutions in this country, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland, shamefully fell to spectacularly low levels, which had a huge and disproportionate impact on the SME sector.
In the coming weeks, we will celebrate the contribution that small business makes to our local economies and the national economy. We will celebrate the fact that there are 4.9 million businesses in this country employing 24.3 million people. However, we must be aware of the need to take firm action on business rates, the need to expand the range of financial institutions that are able to lend to SMEs, and the need to do much more on skills, and research and development.