Britain’s Industrial Future

Debate between Paul Bristow and Peter Grant

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Paul Bristow (Peterborough) (Con)]

It gives me great pleasure to speak in this debate on Britain’s industrial future. It gives me great pride once again to talk about my city of Peterborough, a city whose tradition of manufacturing, engineering and all sorts of other industries makes it crucial to Britain’s industrial future. I also want to pay tribute to the Minister, who is not in his place on the Front Bench at the moment—the Minister of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman). The Minister did, quite rightly, refer to how Britain is the ninth biggest manufacturing economy in the world, something that is all too often forgotten about in this country. We constantly hear messages that we do not manufacture and do not make anything any more as a country. Well, that is evidently not true if we are the ninth biggest manufacturing economy in the world.

I would like to return to a theme I have raised in this House before, because the truth is that in Britain we have too many jobs that are low-skilled, have too low productivity and are too low-paid, and we need to replace those jobs with highly productive jobs, highly skilled jobs and, of course, highly paid jobs. The truth is that this country for too long has been addicted to what I would call cheap migrant labour, and so many people in cities such as Peterborough—

[Peter Grant]

Oh, come on!

[Paul Bristow]

It is absolutely true. If productivity and wages were somehow linked to migration, Britain would have been one of the richest countries in the world over the last 25 years. It simply does not work. We have been addicted to cheap migrant labour, and far too many people in cities such as Peterborough—far too many young people when they leave education—are referred to as a failure if they do not go to university or do not excel in academic subjects. What we need to be doing is valuing those children who excel in manufacturing and in practical and technical skills. That is exactly why we are building a university in Peterborough—a university that focuses on engineering, on manufacturing and on technical qualifications. That is really important, because that will attract other companies to come to our city, invest in the skills that we have in Peterborough, invest in those new people and ensure that we create those highly paid, highly productive jobs in the future.

There are just a couple of things I want to say about how, other than in Peterborough, we can transfer to that high-skill, high-productivity and high-wage economy. The first is that we have to invest seriously in R&D in this country. We have to continue to commit to that, and encourage private sector organisations to invest in research and development, backed by Government incentives on tax and regulation. That is absolutely crucial. No longer can we rely, as I said earlier, on cheap labour to drive economic growth, because it simply does not work.

The second thing we need to be doing is investing in skills, and I am really delighted to see our committing ourselves to lifelong learning. For places such as Peterborough, lifelong learning is absolutely crucial, and I hope we can do more and that we can invest in the talented people we have in cities such as Peterborough and across the country.

Thirdly—and I say this knowing that it will not always make me as popular with Members on the Conservative Benches as it will with those on the Opposition Benches—I went to Lancaster week to speak to my old university Conservative association, and what fun I had too. I was led to believe that all young people were socialists; well, that certainly was not the case at Lancaster. What they told me was that the one thing they felt could unlock their potential and their future is a relaxation on planning. We really have to focus on and invest in building the houses and the industrial units of the future. We need to create an environment where we can free up, not logjam, our planning system when it comes to industrial units, business and other areas, as well as homes for the future. No longer can we have a situation where new homes and new industrial developments are blocked for nimbyish reasons. That is not the way to long-term economic growth, and it certainly will not give a step up to young people in my constituency and elsewhere. Frankly, I do not think Labour Members get or understand this; they are still locked in a mentality of continuing with a low growth, cheap labour type economy and— [Interruption.] Their party believes in open borders and wants to import people into this country to do low productivity, low skill jobs. If we had continued with a system like that, Britain’s economy would have grown faster than that of any other country in the last 10 years. If we follow that advice, we will continue down the same route.