Business Support (Lancaster and Fleetwood)

David Morris Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

My hon. Friend makes a significant point. High Speed 2 is critical to the north-west and to Yorkshire. We should talk about it as a line that will go from London to Manchester and from London to Leeds, and eventually from London to Glasgow and from London to Edinburgh. As hon. Members may know, I have said in other places that I do not see why we do not start building south from Glasgow and Edinburgh now, while the areas around London argue about where their terminus will be. The point is clear: High Speed 2 is vital in the long term for business in my area, and in my constituency in particular.

The other helpful development is the proposed northern hub, which will allow faster and more frequent services between the cities of the north and bring an estimated £4 billion of benefits to the region. That will be good for business and for job creation. In particular, the electrification of the line from Preston to Blackpool will be a major help to the growth of business in my area.

I am also pleased that the Department for Transport has finally agreed that the M6 to Heysham link road should go ahead. It has been on the drawing board for 50-odd years. When it is finally built, it should lead to better communication to the port of Heysham, which will help businesses and attract new businesses on both the Morecambe and Lancaster sides of the River Lune, and along the M6 corridor.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the new link road will create pockets of investment in my constituency and in his constituency next door?

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

Absolutely. I thank my hon. Friend for his support in working with the chamber of commerce, the county council and Ministers to help them see the importance of that scheme, which promises much for business.

The transport links to Fleetwood remain poor. I have raised with Ministers the fact that although there is about four and a half or five miles of railway line in Fleetwood, unfortunately there are no trains on it. There is a plan, with the support of the council, to get that development, which needs capital of about £6 million. I will come back to those figures in a minute.

My last general point is that I fully support the plans to reduce the amount of red tape that businesses have to fight through. We need economic growth, and it is only right that we should make it as easy as possible for businesses and entrepreneurs to start up companies and create the jobs that are so badly needed. That is the greatest area in which businesses have asked me for support and talked about their hopes from the coalition.

The Government’s war on red tape—the red tape challenge, I think it has been branded—is welcomed by all businesses. I know that many previous Governments have talked the talk, but I hope this Administration will finally walk the walk. I am particularly hopeful of that because I know that the Minister has that type of background and has personal experience. I am sure that he will put his full weight behind the deregulation drive.

Those are the general issues, but I also wish to mention one or two specific local examples to demonstrate the problems. The first is that of a company called Nitratec, which is based in Fleetwood and supplies trucks and trailers both new and used for the UK and export markets. It asked me to visit last year. It was having a particular problem in getting help to access export markets, particularly in some less usual export destinations. For instance, it was keen to grow into Africa and Kurdistan. As it happened, I was able to put it on to the British embassy in Iraq via a couple of contacts, and I understand that that side of things is now going well. The lesson is that perhaps we could still be doing more to help companies understand where they can go to get assistance if they want to export goods or services. In that instance, it was just a fluke that I had contacts in the particular area where the company wanted to develop, but why should a business that has such potential have to rely on the chance nature of its MP’s contacts?

Increasing exports is, of course, a major policy plank for the UK. I note that only yesterday, the Foreign Secretary told the House that if we could increase the number of small and medium-sized enterprise exporters in this country from one in five to the EU average of one in four, the extra exports from Britain would more than cancel out the trade deficits that we have experienced in recent years. I hope that more can be done to help companies get on the right track.

I shall give another example. Paul Banks is a constituent of mine who has a start-up business in Lancaster called Image Alchemy. It is highly innovative, as I saw when I visited him a couple of months ago. His potential for further growth is extremely high, and Lancaster university’s environment centre has recently “adopted” him, marking his business out as worthy of support. His new prototype system was an immediate hit at a recent German trade fair and a fair at the national exhibition centre in Birmingham, and order inquiries came pouring in. To get the system to production he needs to get finance, which could mean the immediate creation of five new jobs in the community.

Mr Banks has funded the new product with his own money, but he has struggled to access local and EU funding designed to help expand small start-ups such as his. The bureaucracy that he has encountered in seeking a small five-figure sum has bogged him down with repetitive form-filling, but the rewards if his expansion can be aided are potentially huge. The key point that I wish to underline is the small sum needed to get the company launched. We need to make it easier for such businesses to find funding, especially when the sums needed are so small.

Another example is a scheme called the fish park in Fleetwood. One of the plans for the regeneration of Fleetwood was to develop a sea and shellfish processing park, providing a new unit for the already resident company AM Seafoods and various other units for some 20 SMEs. The industry is already worth some £135 million and 660 jobs to the local economy, but the enhancement and modern premises could mean the addition of 150 new jobs in a town that needs private sector growth.

A partnership between Wyre borough council, Lancashire county council and AM Seafoods is in place, and the plan is to split the costs 50:50 between the private and public sector. The public sector amount required is £6 million. The point that I am trying to make is that the sums needed in areas outside the major areas of deprivation are quite small, but the resulting employment would be quite large. In my postbag and my surgeries, virtually every fortnight I hear of a new business, whether small or large—although the businesses in my area are not huge—that has the same problem. Through innovation or expanding on existing orders, they could provide the extra jobs that the economy needs, but at the moment there seems no way for them to get assistance with that growth, and certainly not from the banks.

I need to give the Minister time to reply. I should like him to reconsider regional stock exchanges, and I should like him to consider enterprise zones being part and parcel of every university campus, to enable universities to develop innovation. Most of all, I look for some assistance from the Government, or for them to put pressure on banks to provide that much-needed assistance, so that we get the growth we need.