Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Mark Field Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is one of the problems of trying to make policy on the hoof. Small businesses in this industry up and down the country will be looking aghast at the actions of the Secretary of State. Serious business people run these breweries. They have to make long-term investment decisions that affect themselves, their employees and their customers. To have a Secretary of State who makes his position clear on a Friday, but changes it by Tuesday and again when it goes to the upper House sends an incredibly poor set of signals to an industry that has to make those long-terms decision. To be quite honest, a Secretary of State for business should understand that and should have the decency to be here—[Interruption.] I am sorry, I should not say that. It would have been preferable if he had been here today so that he could explain his rather unforced flip-flop at the last minute, because these are unprecedented changes that he is putting forward.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful and impassioned speech. Does he not recognise that Ministers have tried at least to find some element of compromise? For those of us who had some concerns about this—I share the concerns, as they have been put to me by Fullers brewery in Chiswick—the change to 350 provides a reasonable compromise, and it will now go to the other place to be determined.

[Richard Fuller]

My hon. Friend, with his emollient and soothing words, makes a fair point. The Minister has done a fantastic job in presenting these compromises. However, they raise severe questions both in terms of the specificity of the number of companies that will be affected by this additional change and the fact that they were presented to this House at the last minute on a “trust us, we will change it” basis. Yes, it is a step in the right direction, but would it not have been so much better to have this sorted out before and to have included the proposals in the Bill or in the amendments so that we could debate them here today in this House?

This issue shows some of the problems with Government intervention on industry. Essentially, anyone who runs a business knows that they cannot trust the politicians. They cannot trust the politicians to keep the guidelines for the industry safe and secure if we have an interventionist as Business Secretary, and we certainly have that. They cannot trust the Government if they know that they will change the rules one week so that the next week they will affect the industry.