Business and the Economy

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith]

Of course, I agree with my hon. Friend, but it does not actually matter what I or others think, because the reality is that the data does not lie. As of now, we have 100,000 fewer people on payroll than we did 12 months ago, so the data is already telling us about the cumulative chilling effect of those measures.

That is perhaps unintended. We learn today that the Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister are at odds, and perhaps the Business Secretary is the third leg on that stool, with each of them bringing forward measures that are enormously damaging to business. They are perhaps not adding up the sums and seeing eye to eye to understand the lived experience of what it is like to be a business on the receiving end of all of those changes, cumulatively and all at the same time.

Many businesses will, from the start of April this year, not only face a payroll increase of around 10%—in an economy without such a level of topline growth, so that hits margins directly—but, because of the failure of the Government to maintain business rates relief at anything like the same level for our retail, hospitality and leisure, have seen their business rates double. Imagine that all hitting a business on 1 April this year.

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

I was a little startled to be described as sitting on the “other Government Bench”, but perhaps that is the shape of things to come—who knows? I do not have my crystal ball with me.

There has been a predictably negative barrage from the Opposition, which does not surprise me because that is how we work in this place, but thinking of businesses, there are businesses that from this year will get better in my constituency and, indeed, in that of the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens (Dave Doogan). I am talking about the seed potato industry. We have been crying out to get the best Scottish seed potatoes into European markets, and I therefore do thank the Government. It means a lot to farmers, and I have had very positive comments about it. I am being absolutely fair-minded about that.

[Andrew Griffith]

I am enormously glad, and we should be balanced, that we have found something that goes the other way. I am not sure if one can subsist entirely on a seed potato—it may have been tried historically, and not with enormous success—but I congratulate the hon. Member on the success of his seed potato industry.

To be charitable, we have found a rare example of the Government actually having the back of a business and supporting it, but would it not be wonderful if they could extend that to much larger sectors of the economy, such as financial and professional services, retail and hospitality industries and even our manufacturing industries, as they wrestle under the cosh of uncompetitive energy costs, so that a business in Birmingham, west midlands, will face an industrial energy cost four times higher than that of a competitor in Birmingham, Alabama?