(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberI thank my hon. Friend for his engagement in the region, in St Kitts, the Caribbean as a whole and Guyana, which remains in all our minds at the moment given the situation on its borders. He is right to highlight the CARIFORUM trade deal; it is a deal that the UK values, and I mentioned that we have had the inaugural meeting of the body designed to ensure that the deal has good effects on our trade with the Caribbean. I might suggest arranging a meeting between my hon. Friend and the trade commissioner Jonathan Knott, who I am sure would be delighted to meet him to discuss Caribbean trade possibilities still further.
I thank my hon. Friend for his question and for his work as one of our trade envoys to the Kingdom of Morocco—I know he is a true diplomat and the soul of discretion. We recently announced that we were raising the monetary thresholds that determine company size, reducing burdens on smaller businesses and removing low-value and overlapping reporting requirements. Around 13,000 medium-sized companies will be reclassified as small companies, and 100,000 small companies will be reclassified as micro-companies. This will save small and medium-sized companies around £145 million a year.
I visit many small businesses in my Aylesbury constituency, and I am always incredibly impressed by their spirit of entrepreneurship and the huge effort and hard work that they put in to succeed. They want to be able to devote as much of their skill and time as possible to finding new customers, selling more of their products and creating jobs, not to bureaucracy, admin and onerous regulation. As the true party of business, our Government have already made great progress supporting business, as the Minister has just outlined, but what more can his Department do to help the small and micro-firms that are the engine of our economy?
My hon. Friend is a real champion of small business, and we meet often talk about these matters. This Government’s policies have pushed the UK to third place in the OECD rankings for start-ups—third out of 39 countries—and we have a suite of programmes to help small businesses. Most importantly, we offer access to finance, with our Start-Up Loans Company, growth guarantee scheme and equity investment schemes, the seed enterprise investment scheme and the enterprise investment scheme. We offer supportive advice through our Help to Grow management suite, including our newly launched “Help to Grow: Management Essentials” course, which is two hours’ free online training for small businesses. We are also removing barriers through non-financial reporting. As well as the monetary size thresholds, we are consulting on increasing the employee size thresholds from 250 employees for a medium-sized company to 500, which will save medium-sized companies a further £150 million a year.
The hon. Gentleman and I both sit on the Tata transition board, which has a dedicated group to look at the welfare of contractors and supply chain partners. We will ensure that we support those people as much as the direct employees of Tata.
One of the many benefits of Brexit has been our ability to take back control of our trade negotiations. The comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership is one of the most exciting, so will the Minister provide an update on the status of our accession to CPTPP?
I am delighted to be able to do so, and delighted to have such an enthusiastic supporter of CPTPP, which is an enormous benefit to this country. The UK joining will take its share of global GDP from around 11% to just over 15%. The UK will be the first country ever to accede to CPTPP, which includes most of the fastest growing markets in the Asia-Pacific region: the UK joining shows that it goes beyond the region. On accession, we are delighted that Royal Assent has been given to our Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Act 2024, and we are looking forward to UK ratification in the coming weeks. Three of the 11 parties have ratified so far—Japan, Chile and Singapore—and we look forward to further parties ratifying it in the coming weeks, to make progress on this extraordinary opportunity for this country.
(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberWe have put in place a £4.5 billion advanced manufacturing plan for the manufacturing sector. Firms will need to ensure that they qualify for that funding. We are also doing what we can to bring in investment—especially foreign investment—which will help to drive productivity. It is good to see that business and investors globally want to invest all across the UK, not just in London, and not just in financial services but in manufacturing, certainly, and in our green industries of offshore and renewables. There is so much that we can do that will create industries and companies fit for the future.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on ensuring that these superb trade figures are brought to the attention of Parliament. Trade between the UK and Morocco has grown consistently since the entry into force of the UK-Morocco association agreement just last month. A UK consortium won the tender to design the Casablanca stadium for the 2030 World cup, which will be the second largest stadium in the world by seating capacity. Does she agree that it is thanks to Brexit that we can forge such one-to-one trade agreements that are of real benefit to British businesses, and does she share my view, as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to Morocco, that we should continue to prioritise work with Morocco, which is a dynamic and growing trade partner?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We should continue to prioritise trade with Morocco and countries like it. I remember that when we had a tomato shortage in western Europe, Morocco was one of the countries that had cheaper supplies, and we can drop tariffs on such products when shortages are affecting all of western Europe, not just the UK. So much flexibility comes of being able to have our own independent trade policy. I pay tribute to him for his work as trade envoy to Morocco, as I should have done to my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) for his work as trade envoy to the western Balkans. There are so many trade envoys in the Chamber today, and I am grateful for all their work to support our Department and deliver the good news stories that we are talking about today.
(1 year, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberI congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) on bringing her Bill to this stage of the parliamentary process. Having introduced a private Member’s Bill myself and, thankfully, succeeded in getting it on to the statute book last year, I know what a difficult job it is, and that it only works with the co-operation of many other people.
Like every other Member, I experienced flexible working myself during the pandemic. As many will attest, it was not without its challenges and required a degree of getting used to. It is fair to say some people enjoyed the experience rather more than others. Perhaps I am showing my age when I say that I struggled a little more than some of them! From a practical perspective, however, although many people thought it would be a difficult scramble to enable the majority of the nation to begin working from home for the first time, what we actually saw was a much smoother transition than had been expected. According to a report published following the pandemic by Buckinghamshire Business First and Chandler Garvey, a firm of commercial property consultants in my constituency, more than three-quarters of those surveyed in Buckinghamshire found the transition to remote working simple; so it can be done.
The fact is that working practices change over time. The incredibly late nights and unpaid overtime that I considered entirely normal when I started my career are today roundly rejected. Indeed, many people embarking on their careers, often fresh from university, see the work-life balance and the ability to work flexibly as a top priority, and in surveys it is frequently placed above salary expectations. The Bill will help in that regard. In particular, requiring employers to consult employees before refusing a flexible working arrangement will allow greater transparency in the working environment, and will hopefully result in an outcome that suits both parties. I emphasise the words “both parties”, because employers’ needs and businesses’ requirements must of course be properly recognised, and I think that the Bill achieves the balance that is necessary for that to happen.
As we know and as has been pointed out today, individual circumstances can change at any moment, and the Bill provides a framework to accommodate that. It will doubtless be helpful that staff will be able to make two flexible working requests in a 12-month period, as opposed to the one that is currently permitted. It would be rather odd if someone’s circumstances changed immediately after they had been refused permission and they were then not even entitled to ask for a reconsideration, so I think that this measure is entirely reasonable. Employees will also benefit from the reduction in the deadline for an employer to make the decision on requests from three months to two.
As the hon. Member for Bolton South East has said during earlier debates on the Bill, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to flexible working. On Second Reading, many Members spoke about the importance of flexible working arrangements in helping to remove some of the invisible barriers that can hold people back in the more traditional working environments. They could include living in high-cost accommodation close to the centre of cities—flexible working might well enable people to live further away from work if they come in less often—or suffering in increasingly crowded commuter trains, an experience that I know my constituents in Aylesbury would be grateful to avoid. However, I agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) when he emphasised that the impact of working from home can be broader than the impact on the individual employer’s business. Aylesbury town centre is undoubtedly seeing much less footfall and lower spending now that fewer people are required to go there to work. It is important for us to consider that in the round as the economy grows and develops in the years to come.
When flexible arrangements are agreed between employees and employers, the benefits can work both ways. From a business perspective it can be an opportunity to retain the skills and expertise of experienced workers. Hon. Members have already suggested that there are some people, perhaps in their 70s, who could perhaps spend a little less time on the golf course and more in the office, boardroom, or potentially on the production line. I am not expressing exactly where any particular arrangement should work in an organisation, and it is important that there is that flexibility. We know that at the moment there is a challenge with the over-50s having perhaps left the workforce, and we must do everything we can to get them back into the workplace. If I may stray a little from the narrow confines of the Bill, we may want to look at pension arrangements to encourage them to do so. Flexible working practices can also lead to a more diverse and senior leadership team, which again can be welcome. There are societal benefits in other circumstances, such as parents spending more time with their children, as my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) highlighted. Having met his three children I can well understand why he would want to spend as much time with them as he can.
One point that bears repeating is that made by my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell), which is that flexible working does not mean purely working from home. It can mean doing a week’s hours in four days rather than five, or starting and ending the working day at times that allow an employee to fulfil other commitments such as caring for an elderly relative. I welcome that type of flexibility and look forward to its being appropriately used, hopefully as a result of the Bill making its way to the statute book.
It is important to strike the right balance between the rights of employees and employers. There will always be some businesses and organisations where it is much more difficult to work flexibly. Much has been said about parents needing to pick up their children from school, but for teachers in that school flexible working will be much tougher, and it will require a good deal more imagination to enable that when they need to be in front of their class during the day. Both employers and employees need to approach this challenge with a flexible mindset so that there can be benefit to all—a win-win, if you like, Madam Deputy Speaker. In conclusion, I again congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton South East, and wish her well as the Bill continues its passage to the statute book.