Family Businesses

John Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

Britain’s got talent! Right across this great land we have many clever people innovating and working hard. As a member of the Business and Trade Committee, I have been in places as far apart as Exeter and Glasgow, talking with people who make everything from satellites to sausage rolls. The mood, however, is not good. The strivers are still striving, straining every sinew to deliver success, but confidence is not so much on the floor as deep in the cellars below.

In my constituency I spoke to a family firm of bakers who had modest expansion plans—two or three extra staff drawn from the ranks of youngsters who might struggle to find that all-important first job. Those plans are parked; those youngsters, for all I know, are on the dole. Similarly, The Usual Place, a charity in Dumfries that provides wonderful opportunities for youngsters in catering, is making cutbacks. Six people will lose their jobs as the reality of the anti-business agenda—designed in No. 11 Downing Street—bites.

When we, in government, proposed raising national insurance to fund the NHS, one Labour Back Bencher denounced it as the “worst possible tax rise”. Now that same politician is Chancellor, and the tune has changed. And spare us the claim that Labour’s manifesto pledge on national insurance covered only that paid directly by employees, which is sophistry—sheer sophistry.

We lack not for start-ups in Britain, but we struggle for scale-ups—the firms that expand and grow. Family businesses are often among the front rank of successful scale-ups, as their multi-generational nature and the investment, literal and metaphorical, of senior figures imbues stability. The Prime Minister talks a good game, but talk is cheap, and his actions have expensive consequences. He said that he and his Chancellor had made it clear to Cabinet colleagues that in each of their briefs

“growth is the number one mission”.

Well, the Deputy Prime Minister did not hear—perhaps her rave music was too loud—for how is growth compatible with her Employment Rights Bill, which the Government’s own analysis says will cost businesses up to £5 billion a year. That is £5 billion, when grandparents are in tears as family farms face being split up; £5 billion, when families who have been in business for decades look at their bottom line and despair?

The worst aspect of that Bill is the premise that all trade union organisers are saints and all business owners are robber barons intent on exploiting the workers. [Interruption.] The unions are restive. The Secretary of State for Scotland would not attend a reception in his own magnificent Dover House because of a picket line—and how ironic that the meeting was with the Scottish CBI. Now those same strikers have forced the cancellation of a Scotland Office event with National Air Traffic Services. I have said it before, and I make no apology for saying it again: “Unions gonna party like it’s 1979.”

Labour Members see business as a dripping roast to be devoured, taxed to a standstill, and not much mischief if it fails. They perceive a nobility in the public sector when they see only avarice in the private sector, but they are as wrong about that as they are about profit being a dirty word. The drivers of growth are in the private sector. They deserve our admiration and, more important, our support. What can the Government do for them? How about getting out of the way? How about less legislation, not more? How about less petty regulation, and more can-do attitude? How about lightening the tax load, not adding to it? Labour needs to step away from its anti-business policies so that firms in every part of the country can step up with wealth creation, with the private sector leading the charge.