Backing Business to Create Economic Growth

Justin Madders Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Bromborough) (Lab)]

In the face of the local election results last week, it is undeniable that what we have done so far is not enough. The long tail of austerity means that we have so much more to do. People see a world moving at a rate of knots and are frustrated at this Government’s slow pace of change. We live in a world where we can order almost anything we want in the morning and have it delivered later that same day. For consumers, satisfaction is now almost instantaneous. That is in complete contrast to Government, where improvements are seen as slow. The expectations and the challenge that we face are there for all to see.

What does the King’s Speech do to address what I consider to be the holy trinity of what good Labour Governments do: jobs, homes and health? First, there are two pieces of legislation on homes. The social housing renewal Bill will alter the right to buy by increasing the eligibility requirement by 10 years, amending percentage discounts to better align with new maximum discounts and exempting newly built social housing from the right to buy for 35 years.

This area is like so many other Thatcher legacies. The sugar rush felt in the short term by those able to buy their home at a substantial discount has long been replaced by a broken social housing market in which people living in identical properties next to each other can pay massively differently rents. It is a market in which the taxpayer often subsidises inflated rents through housing benefit and millions of young people who might once have seen a council home as their natural route into adulthood have the option forever denied to them. We can see where the logic of right to buy takes us. Between April 2012 and March 2025, 133,000 social homes were sold, but only 51,000 were replaced. With 1.3 million people on council house waiting lists, the problem is obvious for all to see.

Secondly on housing, the long-awaited draft commonhold and leasehold reform Bill will bring us closer to ending the feudal leasehold system. It will finally ban the use of leasehold for new build flats, it will place a cap on ground rents, and it will create a new legal framework for commonhold. There is huge demand for this to be done as soon as possible, and I know the Minister is going as fast as he safely can, but he also needs to tackle rip-off estate management fees—he has to stop that model in its tracks. If we are determined to tackle the cost of living crisis, that is one obvious and indefensible practice that we can end.

Alongside addressing the problems that people face now, the Government must take steps to address the problems that are coming down the track. I believe that the unwritten social contract that if a person works hard and plays by the rules, they can expect a good standard of living in return, is disintegrating and under real threat. Across this country, economic growth no longer translates to better outcomes in life, something that is only set to continue with the increase in AI in the workplace and developments in automation. Graduate roles have already been hit—graduate vacancies have fallen by more than one third this year—and that trend will only continue and diffuse across other areas of the labour market. Young people are therefore growing up and entering a world of work that is detached from previous norms, and we are nowhere near ready for the resulting changes that we will see in the next decade. The state needs to be ready to respond to those shifts, to ensure that not only those entering the workforce, but those who are already in it and those who are displaced, are properly skilled for the needs of the future labour market.

That future labour market has to include significantly more manufacturing roles, as the Secretary of State acknowledged in his speech. The more we can make ourselves, the more insulated we will be from the inevitable disruption that AI is going to cause to jobs, particularly in the service sector, but it will also better protect us from the global supply chain shocks that we are far too exposed to at the moment. The moves to protect UK steel are the right first step in recognising that we need to do much more to protect our manufacturing base. I am not proposing that we nationalise everything—I will leave that for other people to do—but my visit to the local Vauxhall car plant last week was a clear lesson in how we need to sharpen up across the whole of Government to protect manufacturing, and the UK automotive sector in particular. The decision on employee car ownership schemes in the last Budget was welcome, as is support for energy costs next year, but of course, the industry would like that support to be much sooner and much stronger than what is proposed.

There are a number of factors challenging the automotive sector, but the biggest one and the one over which the Government have the most control is the ZEV mandate. There has been huge investment in the Ellesmere Port plant so that it can manufacture electric vehicles, and I believe that most of the UK automotive sector is supportive of an electric future. However, the reality is that the current level of sales is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to hit the ZEV mandate, and that gap is only going to get bigger each year. We need to be clear that this is not just a case of “Oh, well, we aren’t going to hit the target.” Every sale short of that target has direct financial consequences for UK manufacturers.

Looking around the world, we see that most countries that have put in place sales targets for electric vehicles have had to row back from them in light of the evidence that uptake just is not where it was predicted to be. We need to bring the review forward and make the decision now that the escalation of targets under the ZEV mandate needs to be turned off. This is not something to be looked at in the abstract, on a graph in the corridors of Whitehall; it needs to be looked at in the context of the cold reality of consumer choice and the importance of protecting UK manufacturing. Let us not lose good manufacturing jobs in pursuit of the unattainable—all that will do is supercharge the Chinese automotive sector. That is not going to help the planet as much as we would like, and it certainly is not going to help this country. We have a great tradition of building vehicles in this country, and we want to be at the vanguard of taking the industry into the future, but let us do it in a sustainable way that protects and builds on what we have.

We need to do more to support UK manufacturing through procurement. I was delighted recently to take a Royal Mail delivery van made in Ellesmere Port for a spin, with permission from the owner. That electric van, made down the road, is delivering mail to my constituents. We need to see much more of that, and we need to encourage UK companies to buy from the UK. Every part of the public sector should be required to buy British. Every council, every hospital and every school should seek to maximise that, because every taxpayer pound spent on UK goods goes back into our economy. We can do a lot without legislation, but we need to pursue it with great zeal.

This is all about levelling the playing field, because more needs to be done. When people see barber shops and vape shops proliferate on their high streets, they know that something is not right, as there simply is not the market to sustain them all. When they see some shut down, perhaps for selling illicit goods or for illegal working, it confirms their suspicions that they are not competing with legitimate businesses. When we see them reopen a few months later, perhaps under a different name, people see a system struggling to cope with the scale of organised crime infecting our high streets.

The time for which a shop can be closed for breaching the law will be doubled, but let us also go after the landlords for, at best, failing to do due diligence, and at worst for being complicit in illegal activity. We can do more to support our small businesses on the high street and get the level playing field that we desperately need.

We also need a level playing field in how we treat people at work. We have to accept that bogus self-employment is a business model based on denying workers basic protections at work, and it is absolutely the wrong direction for this country. We promised in our manifesto that we would tackle this, so we should get on with it.

On a related note, the proposed strengthening of the growth duty, which will apparently reduce unnecessary risk aversion, is misguided. Good businesses want their staff to work in safe environments, and they want them to be treated well. This so-called unnecessary risk aversion, referred to in documents that the Government have produced, is an illusion—a straw man—and it has been used to put up with other shortcomings.

We face many challenges. I think we are on the right track, but we need to go much further and much faster. The public are telling us that they need to see results. We are now two years into this Government, and as much as the news cycle is hyper-focused on personality, the King’s Speech is all about policy. It is about how we shape a better future and show voters that they were right to put their trust in the Labour party to deliver for them.

Everyone here knows the perils that lie ahead if we are not bold enough, if we are not determined enough and if we do not use the time that we have to deliver real change. We are nearing the halfway point of this Parliament and, while progress has been made, it is abundantly clear that we need to go much further if we are to show that we have the power to transform the lives of ordinary people in this country.

The clock is ticking. Incrementalism will not cut it. We now need a response that rises to the urgent challenges that our country faces, so let us go out there and do it.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call Sir Desmond Swayne.