Economy: Growth

Lord Mitchell Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mitchell]

My Lords, 11 years in your Lordships’ House and for the first time, I have lost my speech. Actually, it was left on the Northern line, so while somebody was having a lot of fun reading it, I was having a quiet panic in the Bishops’ Bar, trying to reconstruct it. Anyhow, here goes.

First, I thank my noble friend Lord Hollick for securing this debate. He started as an entrepreneur, he ran a major media group and now he is with one of the premier private equity companies in the world. He is the quintessential businessman. I, too, am an entrepreneur. I have started three companies from scratch, built them up and eventually sold them. It is great. I have loved being an entrepreneur and I would recommend it to anybody. Seeing companies grow and develop and seeing your staff grow is fantastic. However, there is a dark side to being an entrepreneur as well. It is terrifying not being sure that you can meet the payroll, there are problems with the banks, all sorts of things wake you up in a cold sweat at two in the morning and the stress is enormous. So when I hear the Government say that 300,000 public sector employees will, as a result of all the cuts, somehow find another job because of private sector growth and the entrepreneurial society that we are going to form, I simply do not believe it. I cannot conceive that somebody who has been working in the public sector for 10 or 20 years is somehow suddenly going to come out and become an entrepreneur. It absolutely does not make sense to me.

The tone of today’s debate has been, “What is wrong with the UK economy?”. I want to devote the two minutes and 15 seconds that I have left to what is right. It is a very exciting story. The noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, in his excellent speech, talked about Silicon Valley. We now have a Silicon Valley in this country. It is not in Cambridge; it is three miles from here and it is a revolution. It has the most wonderful title of “Silicon Roundabout”. It is to be seen around Old Street and Brick Lane—indeed, that whole area. It is the east London cluster development and it is better than anything else in Europe. It is fabulously exciting and it needs an awful lot more publicity.

I suppose that one of the things that people always said about Silicon Valley was that it was clusters of people with similar ideas in life getting together after work. I recommend to any noble Lord taking a drive around Silicon Roundabout to see the bars, the restaurants and the unbelievable enthusiasm around there. It is full of young people all working in small businesses in creative industries such as applications for iPhones, music, advertising, fashion and movies, in all of which London is to the forefront. As I said, young people are doing all this. There is something about that area that Cambridge would never have and the City and the West End never have. It is edgy and cool and it attracts these sorts of people.

How did this area come about? It did not come about under this Government or the previous one either. It was spontaneous. It just happened. It has just grown like Topsy. Why? First, low rents were available. Secondly, it was close to the centres of finance, fashion, theatre and advertising companies. It has produced these raw entrepreneurs, to the extent that today American companies such as Cisco and Google have decided to invest in these areas and in these companies. It is very exciting.

These companies are now running out of space. Where will they go to? After the Olympics in 2012, many of them will work in the Olympic park and, for the first time anywhere in the world, an Olympic Games will have a true legacy made up of high-tech and creative industries.