Oral Answers to Questions

Craig Williams Excerpts

Monday 4th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

My hon. Friend raises an incredibly important point. We are absolutely committed to working with international partners in tackling the pandemic, ensuring the UK is contributing to, and indeed benefiting from, efforts around the globe. At the global coronavirus response summit, which the UK is co-hosting, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has today confirmed the £388 million from the UK towards the global £8 billion target for research and development into covid-19.

[Craig Williams (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

What support his Department is providing to businesses designing new ways of working to help safely mitigate the effects of the covid-19 outbreak.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. We are engaging with businesses, business representative organisations and unions to get a shared view on how workplaces are made as safe as possible for when people return to work. We will work with industry and other key Administrations to help develop an understanding of how business can adapt to a world where restrictions may last for some time.

[Craig Williams [V]]

I welcome my hon. Friend to her place. I want to ask particularly about tourism and hospitality, as Montgomeryshire is a rural, countryside constituency. It is built for socially distanced tourism, but the industry, including our pubs, our hotels and our countryside pursuits, will need some support in putting together the new normal and the new way of working. What work are the Government doing to get the sector deal on its feet?

[Amanda Solloway]

As the Prime Minister said, we want to get the economy moving as fast as we can, but we refuse to throw away all the effort and sacrifice of the British people and risk another major outbreak. We will be relying on science to inform us, as we have from the beginning. We will also be reaching out to build the biggest possible consensus across business, industry and all parts of the United Kingdom.