Amendment of the Law

Debate between George Freeman and Mike Weatherley

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman]

If my constituents were given the choice between a part-time job in a sustainable private sector business or a full-time job in the public sector that was not sustainable, I know which they would choose.

More than 600,000 new jobs have been created in the private sector since the election.

[Mike Weatherley (Hove) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend welcome with me the measures for the video games industry, which are so important to Brighton and Hove, protect jobs in this country and stop them going abroad?

[George Freeman]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point with which I entirely agree.

If I had only one small complaint about the Budget it was that, for reasons I well understand, the Government were unable to do anything to relieve the pain of rural fuel prices in areas such as my constituency, where the cost of living is an acute problem. I urge the Government to look at what might be done to relieve the effect of fuel prices on the rural economy.

I said that I would touch on why I believe that this country can begin to be optimistic about our future. The Government have begun to set out a credible and coherent plan for long-term economic recovery based on a model of trading again around the world. There is a high rate of growth in the emerging nations—the so-called BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China—and with the pace of globalisation and the explosion in those markets, if this country can set out a model of producing and selling the things that those countries need, we will be on the road to a secure recovery.

Last year saw the publication of the foresight report, which set out how the world population is rising to 9 billion, which will drive huge demand for life sciences such as food science, biomedicine and energy and environmental science. The Government have set out over the past 18 months a long-term strategy to unlock that science and research base and tackle the problems of sustainable development around the world. That is a sustainable model for us as well as for other countries.

There is a huge opportunity for the UK to trade on our great strengths and to unlock the power of the City and financial services sector to back and build the companies and businesses of tomorrow in the sectors of tomorrow. So I support—it is worth repeating—the measures that the Government have taken, especially in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, including the Green investment bank, new sources of finance for infrastructure, the enterprise zones, the competitive tax regime and the £20 billion of credit easing, allied with the reforms to welfare, schools, universities and science and research. The Government are setting out a modern industrial policy for a modern innovation economy. Will it work, I hear you ask, Madam Deputy Speaker? Well, it is already working. The programme has been welcomed by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Even the BBC’s business editor last night said that the Budget had had the most positive response of any Budget he could recall. If any more proof were needed, today one of the world’s great businesses, GlaxoSmithKline, announced a major £500 million investment in the UK, directly citing yesterday’s Budget as a reason. It is an historic Budget that will put us on track for a long-term recovery.