Business and the Economy

David Mowat Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sheerman]

Everyone knows that we could have had legislation that strengthened the Government’s power to force banks to lend to small businesses.

It was me, in an intervention, and not the shadow Secretary of State, who drew attention to what had been said by Lord Jones this morning. He said that the trade and industry outreach of the Foreign Office had been decimated in recent months. We need to expand our manufacturing exports, and the small and medium-sized enterprises will do that as well.

If we are to rebalance the economy, we must recognise what the Queen’s Speech does not recognise: London and the south have become totally out of proportion in terms of infrastructure investment, resources and everything else that we can think of. To those who come down here from Yorkshire, the north-west or even the midlands, this part of the world is a foreign country. There is no recession here, but there has been a recession for three years in the regions of our country. The fact that the Queen’s Speech makes no reference to that is a disgrace.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

No. I will not be given extra time if I give way again.

Finally, let me say something about skills and management. I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on management, which recently received a report from the Chartered Management Institute showing that 43% of managers in this country are not very good and 23% are awful. Whether it involves running a hospital, running Parliament, running a school or running a business such as an SME, good, skilled management is underrated in this country.

What we needed in the Queen’s Speech was a proposal to abolish unemployment among young people for good. We should have a system like the Dutch system, under which no one under 25 is unemployed. Everyone below that age is in a job, in education or training. No one is allowed to stay at home receiving an income and doing nothing. That is the way in which to repay, for years and years, the great debt that is owed to individuals and to heal the scars that they bear, and to deal with the cost of it all to our country.

We must do something at a time when—I do not know whether anyone has seen the figures—there are 6.9 million unemployed graduates in Europe today. That means 6.9 million wasted talents, but what did the Queen’s Speech do about that? Nothing.