Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Karl McCartney and Mark Prisk
Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
T3. Using his extensive business experience, as demonstrated by his confident and oft-repeated ability to foresee the economic downturn over many years, would the Secretary of State like to impart some of his wisdom and comment on how his Department, under his expert leadership, has helped small businesses to flourish, particularly management and IT consultants?
Mr Prisk
As you can see, Mr Speaker, we are able to work closely together as a team and assume all sorts of identities.
The key thing to bear in mind is that when we look at the number of small business start-ups this year and last, we see an increase of 51,000. According to leading independent surveys, there were 470,000. That is a good sign that we are making early progress, but there is much more to do.