Department for Business and Trade

Chris Vince Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North) (Lab)]

I put on the record my profound thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this debate, and to the Liaison Committee for some of the arrangements that have made today possible.

The Prime Minister has underlined time and again that growth is the No. 1 priority, so I am grateful that the House has agreed to put the Department for growth, together with its accounts, under the microscope today. In readiness for today’s debate, my Business and Trade Committee has taken the precaution of talking to hundreds and hundreds of businesses up and down the country, to trade unionists and to consumer groups, and has laid in the House a report on what we heard from literally thousands of voices. In a way, that is what these accounts and estimates, and the Minister, should be judged against when we consider this matter today.

Let me make three points quickly to get the debate started. I start with the point that struck me hardest when we were listening to business voices up and down the country: for all that divides us in this House, there is a terrific unity of purpose in the business community in this country—unity not only about the possibility of becoming the fastest-growing economy in the G7, but on what we need to do to hit that target. The overwhelming majority of businesses want Ministers do more to grow the markets into which they sell. They want to see an ambitious reset with the European Union, fast-tracking of the free trade deals with Switzerland, the Gulf Co-operation Council and India, and for us to do absolutely everything possible to avoid the peril of tariffs from the United States. However, they also want to see a complete transformation in the way in which we use public procurement to support businesses in this country. Minister after Minister has said from the Dispatch Box, “We will do more to buy British.” Well, it is time to actually deliver on that promise.

Secondly, businesses want the right workers for the roles that are available. Pretty much everywhere we went, the challenges of getting the right workforce were the No. 1 priority of the people we heard from. It is true that we heard a lot of concern about the rising costs of business. People are worried about the impact of the Employment Rights Bill, the national minimum wage changes and the national insurance increases all coming at the same time. However, I heard businesses say that they could live with that if they saw the rapid development and publication of a growth plan, along with the comprehensive spending review. I regret the fact that that has kind of moved sideways, because given what this extremely hard-working Minister is doing with the Employment Rights Bill, it would have been in his political interests for his colleagues to table that industrial strategy and growth plan sooner rather than later.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I appreciate a fellow Harlowian giving way to me. Does my right hon. Friend agree that part of employment is about skills, and one way the Government can support businesses is by ensuring that young people have the skills to succeed in business and in all workplaces?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is 100% right. We heard businesses say to us loud and clear that they wanted radical and bold changes in the way that the skills levy was organised. The Government have moved to introduce flexibilities, and business want them to go further, faster.

We also heard business say that there is a good environment when it comes to start-up finance, but a terrible environment in this country for scale-up finance—I will return to that in a moment. People want much stronger relationships between universities and businesses, and we in this country still do not have something like the Fraunhofer institutes in Germany, which have as their slogan that they are the research and development departments for the Mittelstand. Where those knowledge transfer partnerships work, they are good, but they need to be far more prevalent. Finally, we heard businesses say loud and clear that the planning system needs a complete overhaul. The infrastructure in this country is terrible, and we must drive down energy prices; right now, many businesses are being priced out of doing business because our energy prices are sky high.

For all our differences, there are important points on which we can agree. We on the Business and Trade Committee will continue to judge Ministers against many of the things that we heard from the business community as we travelled up and down the country, and I will flag up two or three points that we want to zero in on.