Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Robin Walker

Wednesday 16th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris), I hope that this debate sets a precedent for more discussions and legislation on supporting small businesses, but like my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller), I hope that we will free entrepreneurs from the shackles of intervention, rather than encourage more of it.

The Bill’s aim is to make the UK the best place in the world to start, finance and grow a small business. The Government are already helping to achieve that admirable aim by backing small businesses through scrapping the jobs tax, extending small business rate relief, introducing the employment allowance, cutting fuel duty and reducing the rate of corporation tax for small businesses, which, under the previous Government, was higher than the rate paid by some large corporations.

That is why employment has risen by 250,000 in a single quarter, with new business creations at record levels. In Worcester, I have seen how start-up loans and the new enterprise allowance have helped new entrepreneurs to come into the market, and how youth unemployment has been halved since the general election, while apprenticeships have more than doubled. Like the FSB, the CBI and the British Chambers of Commerce, I support a Bill that will extend that progress.

The Secretary of State said that the Bill is complex, and it certainly is. There is far too much to address in a four-minute speech, but I want to speak about a few of the things it gets right and about one big omission. The Bill is right to address access to finance, which is clearly a concern for all small businesses in our constituencies. Data sharing is a very important way of doing that—for example, organisations such as Impetus, which helps many businesses in my neck of the woods, should get access to a list of businesses that have been refused finance by banks and get more of the data that the banks at the moment keep to themselves.

Supporting small businesses and exporting is great. We are all in favour of that, and I agree with the many hon. Members who have praised UKTI’s work and the extension of UK Export Finance to more small businesses. However, I want to sound one note of caution. A business in my constituency that exports to more than 20 countries has contacted me to say that it has lost access to passport to export funding, because that has been refocused on larger employers. I hope that we can support small businesses to get bigger as well as support bigger and more established businesses.

The Bill is right to extend the red tape challenge, which has already saved more than £1 billion, and to replace one in, one out with one in, two out. It is also right to help small and medium-sized enterprises to access more Government procurement. In my view, it is much better to do so by removing barriers and simplifying the application process than by some kind of central business administration, as the FSB has suggested. We need to learn from the US model. The Government have increased small business procurement from 6.5% to 10.5%, but there is still a long way to go to reach the target of 25%. I hope that the Bill will help us to reach it.

It is right to address the pubs code and to create an adjudicator, but I share some of the concerns of my colleagues on the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills in that the Bill could go further and that more could be done to protect some of the smaller family brewers.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) said, the Bill will do important work on the skills agenda, including by improving access to destination and training data. It was great that the Minister for Business and Enterprise recently visited Worcestershire Business Central in my constituency, which is linking employers and schools in Worcestershire. However, I agree with the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk), who said that a fundamental reform of business rates is missing from the Bill. When the Select Committee looked at the future of the high street and the retail sector, it recognised that there is a need to reform the business rates system to make it deliver for small businesses that are growing, to remove some of the shelves in the system and to update it for the 21st century. That will be a challenge for all the parties in their manifestos for the next general election.

I commend the Bill. It is great to see the Government really striving to help small business.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Today’s prize for patience goes to Anne Marie Morris.