Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Power Station: Wylfa

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Michael Shanks]

My hon. Friend is right: we should all be—I know we are, and the consensus has been welcome—hugely proud of this British innovation. We have a huge opportunity to be at the forefront of a technology that I have no doubt will change the energy system of a great many countries around the world, and Britain can be at the leading edge of that. This is a hugely important moment, and we should recognise that. As well as 3,000 jobs in Wylfa for the construction of the site, as my hon. Friend says there is a significant number of opportunities, including thousands of jobs across the supply chain. Great British Energy Nuclear aims to ensure that 70% of supply chain products are British built across the SMR fleet, ensuring that those SMRs are not just a product of British innovation, but that they are clearly stamped with “Made in Britain.”

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

No one likes to consider the prospect of international conflict, but we have seen from that between Ukraine and Russia how dangerous a situation can be when fuel supply installations are targeted. What thought have the Government given to affording the same level of protection against either sabotage or external attack for these new smaller reactors as those that are already built into the construction of the larger plants?

[Michael Shanks]

The right hon. Gentleman asks a typically important question. We take the security of our nuclear fleet in all its forms extremely seriously, and SMRs are a new part of that. The security arrangements will take into account the existing nuclear constabulary, which will look at security as soon as construction starts to ramp up on site. Across Government, we have been looking at the broader question of how we ensure our critical national infrastructure is protected in an increasingly hostile world, not just from physical attack and sabotage, as the right hon. Gentleman points out, but from cyber-attack, which is becoming more of a priority. My Department and the Cabinet Office are working together to come up with a more detailed plan to ensure that we do that, but the security of all our energy infrastructure is a top priority.

Rogue Builders

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

This is an issue that is crying out for a solution. In my opinion, there are two principal remedies that need to be applied to the plague of rogue builders: criminalisation of those builders who are shown to have fraudulently fleeced their innocent victims; and a requirement for all builders to be registered with and licensed by a professional body, together with an insurance scheme to remedy failure or harm, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) has already explained in his admirable opening speech.

I have decided, on balance, not to identify the specific rogue builders and their victims to whom I shall refer today; however, I do not rule out doing so in the future. My first case study concerns Graeme, a constituent of mine who paid more than £1,800 to a builder in 2023. Although the same builder had done satisfactory work in the past, on this occasion he gave a succession of excuses for not turning up before ceasing to respond at all. A solicitor advised Graeme that it would cost more than any sum likely to be recovered for lawyers to be involved, and suggested contacting the police.

Graeme writes:

“I was born at the very end of the 1960s and, to me, if someone deprives me of my money, it is theft or even fraud.”

As someone born at the beginning of the 1950s, I heartily endorse that view, but the police responded that stealing £1,800 from Graeme in that way did not meet

“the threshold for theft or fraud”.

Similarly, his bank was not keen to help once it knew that the builder had previously completed satisfactory work for Graeme.

Next, he found that trading standards could be contacted by an aggrieved individual only via a charity such as Citizens Advice, which also came as news to me. His CA recommended the money claims court; Graeme followed its advice and eventually obtained a county court judgment for £1,800 plus costs and interest. Even then, it took action at a higher court level for bailiffs to be appointed. They extracted a few weekly payments of a fraction of the sum stolen before giving up the ghost.

One might say that it could have been particular circumstances or misfortune that led the builder to let down his client—although that is no excuse for keeping his money. However, Graeme managed to establish directly that he had treated another victim in precisely the same way. Indirectly, Graeme heard of several others who had suffered in similar fashion. He was forced to conclude that, irrespective of a pattern of dishonesty towards multiple victims, the police still regard such behaviour as “a civil matter” and a “breach of contract”. Thus, with criminal prosecution closed off, all that remains is the costly, risky and often ineffective civil route. To date, Graeme has received a paltry £260, with more than £2,040 awarded by the court outstanding.

While Graeme rightly feels aggrieved by the injustice of his situation, my second constituent, Malcolm, has had his own and his family’s life totally upended by a truly nightmarish experience—one of the worst cases I have had to deal with in 28 years as a Member of Parliament. After a career of admirable public service in the Royal Navy and as a fireman, he has lost huge sums of money from his life savings and pension schemes at a time when a close relative with stage 4 breast cancer was meant to be benefiting from his support. It was for that purpose, I believe, that he commissioned the alterations—primarily converting a garage into extra ground-floor rooms—to his home in the first place.

Malcolm selected a building firm that he chose from a respectable trade recommendation website, where 5-star ratings for it were recorded. He agreed to pay about £25,000 for, supposedly, three weeks’ work to be undertaken while the family was on holiday in 2022. Despite an extra week’s delay, they returned to a scene of incomplete and utterly shoddy work and, in some respects, dangerous disorder. Indeed, Malcolm injured himself quite badly in a fall at the property that he attributes to this.

In addition to the very large payment made irrecoverably to the rogue builder, it cost Malcolm a horrifying £45,000 more for remedial works, which he had to undertake to make his home safe and inhabitable again. The trade recommendation website, which he thought had validated the rogue builder, offered its maximum level of compensation —a modest £1,000. Later, he discovered that the builder had no gas safety qualification, as he had falsely claimed.

Malcolm succeeded in communicating with trading standards, which indicated that it would be helpful if a pattern of similar construction disasters could be established. Malcolm therefore turned investigator, and discovered several other families in my constituency and in nearby Southampton. He calculated total losses caused by the same rogue builder to be at least £200,000. One victim, a lady living with multiple sclerosis, was left without a functioning toilet.

The police, nevertheless, still insist that the threshold for criminality had not been reached. If so, that threshold needs to be changed, and changed substantially. Despite correspondence from me to Hampshire county council pointing out the multiple victims, the apparent evidence of companies being repeatedly set up and dissolved by the rogue builder—as we have heard from another hon. Member—and his not infrequent changes to his own name, nothing effective has been done to punish or constrain him in any way.

As stated at the outset, there are two fairly obvious remedies. First, if the police are right that the current state of the law prevents such devastating and ruthless misbehaviour reaching the threshold of criminality, that threshold must be repositioned by legislation to include it. Secondly, like other skilled professions, builders must be licensed before being allowed to operate. The good news is that, as we have heard, the Federation of Master Builders is ready and able to undertake this vital role. That must be coupled with an insurance scheme to which builders will contribute to enable redress where appropriate and where standards are breached. Rogue builders can ruin lives; now is the time to banish that evil.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Kate Dearden)]

I will do my best, Ms Furniss. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) on securing this debate on an issue that I know he has campaigned on for a long time, beginning when his party were in government.

I really welcome the debate. I am grateful to the many Members who contributed to it for raising their constituents’ concerns and the horrifying cases that they have been dealing with in their constituencies. They set out the serious impacts that incompetent and rogue tradesmen have had on the homes and the physical and mental health of their constituents, who are sometimes elderly or vulnerable in other ways. I know from my own constituents the misery that can be caused and the toll it can take on people, as well as the time and money it takes to remedy problems. I thank Members again for their hard work, through casework and surgeries, to defend their constituents’ consumer rights.

Consumers have a have a right to expect that work undertaken in their homes will be performed competently and that there will be redress if the work does not meet acceptable standards of quality and safety, and I want to take the opportunity to assure the House that the Government are committed to strengthening the system to ensure that that happens. I will try to align my winding-up speech with the winding-up speech in the main Chamber and move quickly to responses to points that Members raised.

The Government’s aim is to improve the market and to support honest and competent tradespeople and firms, working with the industry and with local authority trading standards. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 sets out the standards that consumers can expect in relation to the supply of goods and services, including building work, and the remedies available to them. Under the Act, traders are required to carry out a service with reasonable care and skill, and within a reasonable time. If those requirements are not met, the consumer can ask for the service to be performed again or for a price reduction. If that is not agreed, consumers can seek redress through the courts. The small claims procedure provides the means to pursue a claim of up to £10,000 at an affordable cost and without a solicitor, and consumers have six years to bring a claim against a trader.

Government bodies are also working with the super-sector working groups under the industry competence steering group, collaborating to improve trade and installer competence and to reduce the incidence of poor work. That process brings together over 1,000 individuals across trade bodies, professional organisations and employers to produce and implement competence frameworks across more than 130 occupations.

The Government are committed to strengthening competent person schemes that cover higher-risk occupations such as electricians and gas engineers. Competent person schemes must ensure that consumers are provided with the appropriate protection for a minimum of six years to remediate work that is non-compliant with the building regulations.

Other protections include the TrustMark scheme, which hon. Members have mentioned. That is the only Government-endorsed quality scheme for domestic construction. It covers trades such as fenestration, roofing, and kitchen and bathroom installation, as well as general building work, and it requires participating firms and tradespeople to demonstrate competence and provide for consumer redress. Government-funded schemes for energy and heat efficiency also require installers to hold relevant certifications and to provide consumers with access to redress.

I know that the hon. Member for Wyre Forest has campaigned for a long time on licensing schemes. Licensing or registration schemes exist in the US, Australia and New Zealand and aim to improve quality, protect consumers from incompetent contractors, and provide consumers with redress for poor-quality work. The hon. Member spoke about that in quite a lot of detail. However, few evaluations have been undertaken of the effectiveness of those schemes. The available evidence suggests that they can deliver some benefits, such as increased quality, but that they can also have detrimental effects, including increasing prices for consumers. There is also no clear evidence that the existence of licensing schemes reduces the incidence of poor-quality work. The schemes are reliant on audits and inspections of work to identify incompetent builders, which is similar to the approach of the TrustMark and competent person schemes in the UK.

There are also questions of how licensing schemes would be funded and administered, the implications for existing schemes in the UK, and the resourcing of the organisations responsible for the schemes. Any proposal to introduce a licensing scheme in the UK would have to be based on an assessment of costs and benefits and would have to address those issues.

Hon. Members also mentioned the issue of phoenixing. We are aware of the problem and work is ongoing. In the 2024 autumn Budget, we announced a greater focus between His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Companies House and the Insolvency Service on tackling rogue directors and phoenixing. Key actions include closing loopholes in company registration and dissolution, targeted enforcement to boost compliance, and stronger referrals.

I thank the hon. Member for Wyre Forest for welcoming our New Homes Quality Board and ombudsman. From a consumer protection perspective, the Government are supportive of alternative routes to recourse outside the courts, such as alternative dispute resolution and the ombudsman. Many similar schemes already exist, and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 strengthened ADR provision. That is also relevant to his comments and reflections on compensation, for which I thank him.

I am very conscious of the time, Ms Furniss, so I will move to my concluding remarks and just thank hon. Members for raising lots of other issues that I do not have time to go through. I will be working closely with other relevant Departments on the wider infrastructure issues that Members have raised on house building.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

What about the fact that these people, in some cases, are criminals and their actions ought to be subject to the criminal law?

[Kate Dearden]

I thank the right hon. Member for raising that point. Lots of Members have mentioned the complexity of determining whether something is a criminal offence or a civil matter under the Consumer Rights Act, whether we are looking at a trading standards matter or a criminal act, and demonstrating intent. It is a very complex area and I would be happy to meet individual Members if they want to talk it through with me.

I am sure that the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Grantham and Bourne (Gareth Davies), does not expect me to speculate or comment on the Budget so close to its announcement. I am sure that his party, during its time in government, had lots of opportunities to address this issue. On his remarks on the licensing scheme, I think he can reflect on similar reflections that his Government worked through.

No one should doubt the human impact that rogue and incompetent tradespeople can have. This issue obviously needs to be addressed, and the best way to achieve that is by improving standards of consumer redress. Although there is no clear evidence on how a licensing scheme would do that, we will keep that under review. In the meantime, we will continue to improve standards of competence and consumer redress in the construction sector. I thank hon. Members again for raising cases on behalf of their constituents. I have run through a lot of them in my concluding remarks, but if Members want to talk to me directly about these issues or ask me to raise them with other Departments, I will be more than happy to do so.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of protecting consumers from rogue builders.

North Sea Oil and Gas Industry

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Michael Shanks]

My hon. Friend is always a great champion for the industry. Although we often talk, quite rightly, about Aberdeen and north-east Scotland, she is right to champion her own community, where there are a significant number of oil and gas workers. I always welcome her straightforward challenge to me on many points. I will not get into the detail of the response to the consultation, which we will publish in due course, but we have been clear that we want a credible, long-term plan for the future of the North sea. That is why we consulted on a range of factors, not just the future licensing position, and we will come to a pragmatic position on what the future of the North sea looks like.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

For how many years, in the Government’s estimation, will we have to keep importing foreign oil and gas, as a result of not being allowed fully to exploit our own supplies?

[Michael Shanks]

Perhaps I should switch the question back: for how many years have we already been importing oil and gas? That gets us to the fundamental point. The Conservatives want to pretend that in July last year, we switched to being a net importer of oil and gas. That is not what happened. The right hon. Gentleman’s party oversaw that transition over many, many years. I recognise that, to some degree, given the geology of the basin, there would not have been different decisions taken if we had been in government, but what we could have done differently was ensure that the transition was happening, and delivered the economic opportunities that come along with what comes next, and that is what we will do.

Employment Rights Bill

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 15th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Peter Kyle]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on being a champion for investment in our country, unlike the Conservative party, which did down the country while it was in government, and is doing it down while in opposition, too.

The task this Government have set themself is formidable: to update employment law and make it fit for the age in which we live; and to reward good employers, and ensure that the employment protections given by the best are extended to millions more workers.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I have a letter from the Hampshire chamber of commerce, which, the Secretary of State will be pleased to hear, says that businesses are not opposed to all the changes that will be made to employment legislation, but it does focus on several areas of concern, such as the involvement of a tribunal in deciding whether an employee has been legitimately dismissed during their probation period, removing statutory sick pay waiting days, and changes to trade union recognition and industrial action thresholds. Will the Secretary of State do more to engage with chambers of commerce about these concerns?

[Peter Kyle]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his thoughtful contribution, and for reflecting the voice of chambers, who do an incredible job right around our country—and around the world. I say to the chambers, and to him, that the Bill reflects the best standards that are already in use right around the country by the very best employers—indeed, by most employers. Those employers have nothing to fear and a lot to gain from this legislation.

On consultation, this is a Government who listen constantly, and we will continue to listen. On those measures for which an implementation phase is really important, there are, unusually, formal consultations in which businesses can engage. This is a listening Government and an acting Government, and we will deliver on our manifesto commitments.

Jaguar Land Rover Cyber-attack

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister to the world of “neither confirm nor deny”, though I fear it may cramp his inimitable style somewhat. Does he accept that there are broadly three categories of hacker? There are the show-offs, who are aiming to boost their egos in the online world; the wreckers, who are usually working on behalf of hostile countries or political ideologies; and the extortionists to whom he referred earlier, who are out to blackmail people and relieve them of large amounts of money. In every case, though, there is always the anxiety that people’s personal data is going to be compromised and publicised. To that end, is the Minister really satisfied that so many Government services that deal with personal data—the latest being His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs—insist that people go online to supply that data to Government?

[Chris Bryant]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very good point about personal data. When I was the data Minister, that was one of the things I was trying to push very strongly—there is no point in trying to get people to give data if it is not then secure. That is the single most important part of what we have to do, not least because if people do not trust that their data is going to be secure, it is perfectly understandable that they are not going to surrender it. That does not just apply to Government, although it is very important in Government; it applies across all sorts of different companies.

I slightly take issue with the right hon. Gentleman’s delineation of those three groups; I think there is just one, which is a bunch of criminals. Their intent sometimes mixes a desire for cash with a desire for some kind of spurious infamy, but I just think of all of them as criminals. As for my inimitable style, I can neither confirm nor deny it.

Speciality Steel UK: Insolvency

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

Of course. I share that gratitude for those amazing colleagues who stand up for what they know to be right and sensible. We are protecting not something that is not worth protecting, but something that has a vibrant and viable future; that is what we are working towards. We are working closely with the South Yorkshire mayoral combined authority and the Mayor. In broader advanced manufacturing in the region, including the innovation district and research centre, there is a huge wealth of expertise and talent that we can build on.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for the frankness of her statement. She says that the director of the company is under investigation for suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering. Can she reassure the House that that will not in any way hold up the Government in taking any remedial steps that they need to take in support of the industry and its workforce? For background knowledge, will she tell the House precisely what sort of specialisms this plant offers, given that it names itself a Speciality Steel enterprise?

[Sarah Jones]

The right hon. Gentleman should perhaps go for a tour and see what the speciality is, but it is defence, aerospace and industrial engineering on the Stocksbridge site. The Rotherham site has two electric arc furnaces, which feed the Stocksbridge site, and there is huge expertise there. There are a number of other sites that feed various sectors, such as the automotive industry, hydraulics and a whole range of others. There are a range of specialisms.

On the investigation, the official receiver will look at what is true and what is not, because there have not been any accounts published for many years. They will establish what has happened. The Secretary of State has written to the Insolvency Service today to ask it to take special account of the Serious Fraud Office investigation, and to pass over any information it uncovers to the Serious Fraud Office, so that it can do its work.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry: Volume 1

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 8th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Thomas]

I have absolutely no doubt that we need to see, in full, who was responsible for this disaster and why. Sir Wyn Williams’s work on that is critical. We await his final report, which will look at what happened, why, and who was responsible. That transparency will be hugely important to help the Post Office, and the country as a whole, to learn lessons from this appalling scandal. If we need to introduce measures to ensure that the Post Office is never in such a position again, we will certainly look to bring them forward.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The Post Office Horizon scandal has often been compared with the contaminated blood disaster. By coincidence, this very afternoon the relevant all-party parliamentary group, led by the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford), has been having a meeting with the Infected Blood Compensation Authority. Even if the Minister does not go all the way with Sir Wyn Williams’ suggestion that there might be a standing body responsible for delivering compensation, will the Government look at the experience of the compensation body for that scandal rather than allowing separate disasters to be compensated for in separate stovepipe arrangements?

[Gareth Thomas]

To be clear, Sir Wyn Williams’ recommendation of a standing body to deliver compensation is very much to ensure that if there is ever a future disaster on this scale—and we all hope that there is not—the Government are better set up to respond to it. He has not specifically suggested that we transfer into such a body the responsibility for the delivery of compensation schemes at this stage, because doing so would undoubtedly slow down the process. I think that there are parallels with the infected blood inquiry, but there are also differences. We need to learn lessons on the delivery of compensation from the infected blood scandal, the Post Office scandal and other scandals that came before. In that regard, the National Audit Office published important work last summer, which will certainly help to inform our judgment about the case for such a standing body.

Hair and Beauty Sector: Government Policy

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Julia Lopez]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right: this is about a series of things hitting these businesses. It is about new legislation, new taxes and the withdrawal of reliefs that had been supporting businesses. I am glad my right hon. Friend intervened, because I was in Hornchurch yesterday speaking to staff at Wyndham Hair. Johnpaul, who runs that business, is one of my right hon. Friend’s constituents, and he told me how supportive my right hon. Friend has been of his local high street, so I appreciate the support he is giving me in the debate.

As my right hon. Friend said, this is about a whole range of people sectors. It is not just about salons being hit with these staggering tax bills; it is also about the early years sector. That sector supports many other businesses that require good workers. When I talk to nurseries in my constituency, some of the bills they talk about are just unbelievable. In fact, they are so unbelievable that when I tell people about them, they do not believe it—they think the nurseries must have got their sums wrong, but that is absolutely not true.

One after-school and holiday club provider has seen her annual NICs bill go from £10,851 to £26,040. That is a small business, and it is being absolutely hammered. One nursery provider told me that the combined impact of NICs and the minimum wage is adding £30,000 to her payroll costs every month. Those are unbelievable numbers, which risk driving many nurseries to closure. That will dismantle the support network that allows many other women to go into the workplace.

The minimum wage is right in principle, but when we force a small salon with razor-thin margins to meet that extra cost on top of everything else, it becomes untenable. When we add to that the looming Employment Rights Bill, many salons are telling staff to go self-employed just to survive. That is not giving people more protections but ripping up the ones they already have.

That brings me to apprentices. Salons are letting them go very fast. For decades, this industry has opened doors for young people to learn skills and earn a living, and that ladder is being kicked away. At Coal House Cuts, the owners once proudly trained apprentices; now they cannot afford to. Wyndham Hair used to employ four apprentices; now they have one. The Vanilla Room is getting daily calls from laid-off apprentices, but it too has had to cut learner hours. Its owner, Kerry, told me:

“For the first time in 30 years, we just can’t afford to run apprenticeships. Our costs are up £28,000 on apprenticeships a year. How much does the government think salons make?”

After I put in for this debate, more stories poured in from across the country. This crisis goes beyond hair and beauty, because I am hearing the same from construction firms—another traditional route for working-class youth. Two vital pathways into work for working-class girls and boys are collapsing. Is this the future that Labour promised—a generation of young people priced out of skilled trades because Westminster could not design a Budget with small businesses in mind? That is surely the very opposite of what this Government say they want, and it is utterly incompatible with their drive to get people off welfare. Because beauty salons are facing so many different costs, they are also cutting back on training, in a sector where customers demand that they are up on the latest technologies.

So what will happen? First, there will be job losses and price hikes. One of the challenges for many salons is that their customers face the same economic headwinds, so they are spending less and visiting less often. Then there is the ultimate risk of closures. Every time a salon closes, it leaves more than just an empty unit; it leaves a void in the community—a place of connection, conversation and confidence gone. Speaking to Wyndham Hair yesterday, I heard not only about the services it offers but the support it gave its long-standing clients through covid. Those are the kinds of businesses that these people run. Utopia has clients aged 10 to 97; the 97-year-old goes to the beauty salon because it is her place of sanctuary. When legitimate businesses vanish, they are replaced by shady operations that are often fronts for illegal or exploitative practices. The rest of the high street struggles, apprenticeship routes collapse and tax receipts fall—they will not rise.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I know it is not the main thrust of my hon. Friend’s argument, but does she share my concern at the detailed exposés at the end of March in the Evening Standard and The Sunday Times about the huge proliferation of barber shops, which could not possibly all be conducting legitimate trade? For example, the Evening Standard talked about 17 barbers in and around a two-mile stretch of Streatham High Road, and about 25 on a similarly sized section of Kingsland Road between Stoke Newington and Haggerston. That is clearly criminal activity on a major scale.

[Julia Lopez]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that important intervention. As I was preparing for the debate, I read about some of the police operations in Manchester, where they have been cracking down on this kind of activity. The frequency with which they found that these were fronts for illegal businesses—often with links to international crime gangs—is deeply worrying. That is one reason why I want to raise the profile of this issue. We cannot lose legitimate businesses from our high streets, because what fills the void is something that none of us wants in our communities.

What can be done? I know how this works: the Minister sits in the Department for Business and Trade, not His Majesty’s Treasury, so he cannot give any substantive answers on the fundamental mistakes being made on tax policy. However, like any Business Minister worth his salt, he will probably share my concerns and wonder how best to get the Treasury to change course. He might even find this debate quite helpful to his own lobbying, just as the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), and his officials did when I gave him evidence about the crisis now engulfing the early years.

Here are some practical asks that my salons would like the Minister to make of the Chancellor: VAT reform, with a reduced rate for labour-intensive services; the restoration of business rates relief and the overhaul of the outdated business rates system, particularly for high street premises; the revival of apprenticeship incentives; and revisiting the measures in the October Budget. Look, the Government should use global market turmoil as an excuse to mask Labour’s mistakes if that is what it takes, but let us get a U-turn on these economy-shrinking tax takes. They are not working. Confidence and employment are down. Growth projections have been halved. The tax take is going to shrink, and that will translate into a smaller pot for public services. Members do not need to take my word for it; the International Monetary Fund said so just yesterday, confirming its view that the UK’s growth prospects have been cut because of domestic factors.

To conclude, this debate must serve as a reminder that Government do not create growth—businesses and people do. Those businesses are now often paying increased rent, utility bills, professional fees, VAT and covid debt interest and, since April, giant hikes in business rates and the cost of employing people. It is just too much. People work to incentives, and right now the incentive to start a business such as a hair and beauty salon, grow it, take on staff with full employment rights and train apprentices is simply not there.

The Government say they care about growth, communities and employee rights, but their actions—I hope by accident rather than design—are crippling the very people who grow things, give heart to communities and employ people. I say to the Minister: use this debate and take these real stories, these stark warnings and the sector’s clear-eyed solutions straight to the Treasury—before it is too late.

British Steel

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

My hon. Friend is right to say that we produce only about 30% of the steel we use in this country, and we must be much more ambitious about increasing that figure. He is also right to raise questions about carbon leakage and safeguards. The CBAM is being introduced in 2027. We are working through what happens in the interim period, how it works and how it interacts with the European CBAM—some changes are being made to what will be implemented. This work is obviously being led by the Treasury, but we are working really closely with the Treasury to ensure that the CBAM works in a way that protects the steel industry.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

On the day that Parliament was recalled, I gather that the workers themselves had to confront Chinese executives who were intent on coming on to the site. They believe that those executives intended to take unilateral action to shut down the blast furnace irrecoverably. Is that correct? What does that tell us about the motivation and behaviour of China when it gets its hands on our strategic industries?

[Sarah Jones]

I need to be clear on this point, because I know that there has been lots of speculation. We are not aware of any deliberate acts of sabotage. There was an issue with people coming on site who did not gain access. No Jingye officials are on site at the moment. We are talking to Jingye in a respectful way about what happens next. That said, it was the case that we had been negotiating in good faith, and we felt that that good faith had ended in the way in which Jingye was not securing the raw materials that we were really clear it needed to secure, so there was a breakdown there. The position on Jingye is a position about it as a company; it is not a position about our wider view of China. Because we have hundreds of thousands of jobs that are dependent on trade with China and because it is our fourth-largest trading partner, our position remains that we need to be mindful of that, but we also need to be mindful of security, and we always will be. There will always be a very specific and deliberate account of the security implications of any investors in the UK.

Scunthorpe Steelworks

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Jones]

I agree with the hon. Member’s premise that we need to ensure that we have steel production in the UK, although there is some nuance around some of this. High-quality steel is being made, as we speak, for defence purposes by electric arc furnaces. That is perfectly possible; we melt scrap and add about 20% of primary steel. For some things, depending on what we are making—I know too much about the steel industry now—we do not need any primary steel. We are conducting a review of primary steel, which will be finished shortly. Again, neither Tata nor British Steel is a critical supplier to defence programmes at the moment, but we need that steel production, as I said before, so that we can build whatever we might need in the future. Of course, we will work cross-party; if that is his offer, it is very gladly taken.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The Minister should not waste the opportunity of a lifetime in the parties of the right urging a party of the left to nationalise a British industry. One organisation that has been utterly consistent in all this is the GMB union: it wrote to the previous Government’s Defence Secretary saying that a business Minister had failed to answer clearly whether virgin steel was essential for defence. Today’s Minister seems to suggest that it might not be, but we must have a quantity of virgin steel, even if we add other things to it, to embark on the process of making essential defence products. Seize the opportunity: keep the blast furnaces, and if necessary, nationalise them for good.

[Sarah Jones]

If we get into conversations about different types of steel, it is like the Facebook update “It’s complicated”, right? It is complicated. For some things, we absolutely need primary steel; and for some things, we do not. That is why we are carrying out a fundamental review of steelmaking and the need for it here in the UK. Those results will come out soon. The right hon. Member is right that the GMB has been an advocate for this, as have Community and Unite. We talk to them regularly about British Steel. I have not failed to notice the slightly odd position that we find ourselves in today. I repeat that we are looking at all options. The House will understand that we are talking about large amounts of taxpayers’ money, which we have to spend in the right way, in a sensible way, and in a way that will get us what we need. That is what we are looking at, and it is what we will do.