Business and the Economy

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Commons Chamber

[John Cooper (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

As a member of the Business and Trade Committee, it has been a privilege to traverse this land from Exeter to Belfast and from Glasgow to Cardiff to speak with people on the frontline of business. They are a doughty, resilient lot, doing amazing things; Britain’s got talent, but heads are going down. The barrage of red tape is taking a toll. Costs are up, and I must reference the speech from the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher), which probably owed more to the boards of the Globe theatre further along the Thames than to this place. In his highly colourful speech, I was not quite sure whether he was blaming Mrs Thatcher or gas prices for high energy bills, but he should really look towards his own Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, because much of the increase in energy prices, which hammer businesses right across this country, comes from carbon taxes applied by this Government.

Critically, all this leads to expansion plans being shelved, as confidence slides. That means fewer jobs, especially for young people and those chasing that all-important first job. This Government’s boast is that they are putting money into working people’s pockets. Setting aside the questionable veracity of that claim, there is no doubt that if someone loses their job, or if they do not have a job in the first place, there is no extra money in their pocket.

What this Government are creating is a hostile environment for some sectors. Yes, there are millions of pounds—maybe billions—for steel, plenty for unionised train drivers and no-strings pay boosts for NHS staff, but what about agriculture, which is the key driver of the economy in rural Dumfries and Galloway, my constituency? Farmers and many associated businesses might just about survive Labour’s urban-centric indifference, but the active harm it is doing by taking steps such as the upping of inheritance tax and the driving down of agricultural property relief is a disaster.

The consequences of Labour’s avaricious increase in employer national insurance contributions are all too real. The Usual Place is a Dumfries charity that does amazing work helping young people with a host of mental and physical issues move into real jobs in catering. It is cutting back on those jobs because extra national insurance contributions put a bounty on each employee’s head, meaning jobs gone and life chances maimed. I hope the charity will celebrate its 10th anniversary next month, but Labour is doing nothing to help it get there.

At the other end of the spectrum, I spoke this week with a major firm whose payroll supports a five-figure number of employees. It has a strong social conscience and tries to tap into the huge cohort of economically inactive Britons and get them into the world of work, with all that that means for their pay packets but also for the intangibles such as the self-esteem and dignity that work affords. It calls itself a gateway employer, proud to be the first rung on the jobs ladder for thousands, but it is aghast at Labour’s anti-business approach. Its increased bill for extra national insurance contributions is eye-watering, and now it faces the thicket of rules and regulations that is the Employment Rights Bill—the Deputy Prime Minister’s love letter to the unions. The imposition of day one rights means that a taking a chance on employees with poor qualifications and a poor employment history, or perhaps ex-offenders, is much more risky for the firm. It knows—as do myriad other businesses, large and small—that it is less likely to recruit, while elements of the legislation are designed instead to swell the ranks of the increasingly restive trade unions.

We are through the looking-glass with this Government’s unbalanced approach to business. Black is now white.

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Has the hon. Member just arrived in the Chamber?

[Rosie Wrighting]

indicated dissent.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

You cannot waft into the Chamber and make an intervention; you have to listen to the contributions. What time did you arrive in the Chamber?

--- Later in debate ---

[Rosie Wrighting]

About twenty-five minutes ago.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Marvellous—we will check the record. You may continue.

[Rosie Wrighting]

The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper) is talking about the feedback that we heard on the Business and Trade Committee. Does he recognise that businesses also fed back about the political uncertainty under the previous Government and how that made it very difficult to create an environment in which they could expand?

[John Cooper]

The hon. Lady is a doughty campaigner on the Business and Trade Committee. Unquestionably, mistakes were made. We know that and we have been through it before, but this Government have been in charge for 10 months now, and we see inflation rising and jobs slipping away.

As I said, we are through the looking glass: trade deals are bad, except when they are good. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs last week criticised the Conservatives’ Australia and New Zealand deals for hitting farmers, while saying that his Government’s US deal protects farmers. The US deal put the welly boot into beef farmers, who face cheap imports here and US quotas over there that they just cannot fulfil.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)]

What a great speech to follow. I have an ambition to reach 25 minutes, so here we go. I should start by making reference to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I was challenged by a Labour Member—I am not quite sure which one—and I should declare my background in entrepreneurialism. I ran an SME and then created something called an employee ownership trust, having employed well over 1,000 people. I am also a director of a farming company, which will perhaps have some relevance to my later comments.

This has been a very lively, interesting and well-informed debate—I have certainly enjoyed it so far—and it has been interesting in what it has revealed about Labour Members and Opposition Members. We have had no fewer than three academic economists speaking from the Labour Benches and we have had businesspeople with real-life experience of the economy speaking from the Opposition Benches. One might think, “Well, surely economists know lots about the economy.” You would have thought so, Madam Deputy Speaker, but if we look at how the Government have responded since 4 July, with their obvious surprise at business confidence going through the floor, we begin to see how out of touch academic economists can be when faced with the facts of the real economy.

It is undoubtedly the case that business confidence has collapsed. The BDO optimism index has now sunk—this is the latest figure—to 91.36%. What does that mean? What it really means is that it is the lowest since the entire world economy was shut down by covid. Looking at any one of a number of indices, both business confidence and consumer confidence have gone down massively as a result of Labour’s election. That prompts the question why there has been such surprise on the Government Benches that their actions have been so ill received by the people who drive the economy. One of the reasons is that the country as a whole—and businesses in particular—was actively misled by Labour in the run-up to the general election. We were all told that Labour had no plans for tax rises beyond those that had already been announced. We were all told that Labour’s plans were fully funded and fully costed and that they did not require tax rises above those set out in the manifesto.

[Rosie Wrighting]

As someone with a business background and who worked in a large international business before coming to Parliament, I think the previous Conservative Government misled businesses when they promised them a Brexit that was going to remove red tape, but which actually created barriers. Does the hon. Gentleman agree?

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful for that intervention. I joined this House in 2019, but the original Brexit debate had hyperbole on both sides. We had Project Fear saying we would need an immediate fiscal event as soon as we had the referendum, but that did not take place. Growth has actually continued since the referendum back in 2016. In fact, growth in the United Kingdom has outpaced that of Germany, France and Italy, and, for that matter, Japan. There were a lot of arguments, both one way and the other, over the likely consequences of Brexit. My takeaway is that, overwhelmingly, it has not made that much difference to the world economy or to Britain’s relationship with the world. There have, undoubtedly, been some trade frictions, and those have been particularly acute for SME import/export—I recognise that. But overall, trade has continued, and we have actually outperformed our European big economy neighbours.

US-UK Trade Deal: Northern Ireland

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I am grateful to the hon. and learned Member for bringing this urgent question and for putting his community’s concerns on the record; I understand how strongly he will feel about them. There is much that I could say and criticise about the previous Conservative Government’s approach to a lot of things, but the approach that they took with the Windsor agreement to balance the obvious, practical problems and realities of Brexit—of leaving the single market when Ireland is in the EU and the customs union—alongside our commitments under the Good Friday agreement to observe what we have all signed up to and want to support is fundamentally better than when they threatened to break all kinds of international laws and agreements with key partners. It was the better way to find a way through them.

I absolutely accept and understand that this issue is difficult and complicated, but I can tell the hon. and learned Member that that is not just the perspective of the UK Government, in terms of working with our colleagues and ensuring that these issues are reflected in the agreements, but what we hear from the other side in these agreements. When we explain what we need to see happen around agreements such as this, we see that the US is absolutely committed to peace, to the Good Friday agreement and to the sound working of the Windsor agreement.

The hon. and learned Member has raised a number of specific questions, and I will ensure that we deal with them. We will meet with him and a delegation of MPs and ensure that we are in correspondence with him, as we have promised to be with the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. This approach is complicated, but it is far better than the one we briefly glimpsed in that difficult period when the Conservative Government did not have the Windsor agreement in place. Fundamentally, there is a difference between goods entering Northern Ireland and therefore entering the UK and goods entering Northern Ireland if there is a risk of them entering the single market more widely. This is a sound system to deal with that, and I accept that we must make it work.

This is not our system, but we recognise what the previous Government were trying to do. Whether the hon. and learned Member wants it or not, I offer him an absolute, unequivocal agreement that we will work with him on any concerns he or his community have to ensure that we get this right to the maximum degree possible.

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

Can the Minister update the House on the Government’s engagement with the chemicals industry?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

Absolutely. Whenever any trade agreement of any sort is agreed, there will obviously be domestic impacts if our trading partners have requested further access to the UK market. That is particularly the case for the agreement on bioethanol. Senior officials from my Department have been meeting representatives of the domestic industry, and I have a personal meeting set up—on Wednesday of this week, I believe. A lot of the issues we need to address are wider than what has been agreed through this trade agreement, but our commitment to working with the domestic industry to help manage any trade-based transitions is absolute.

Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

2nd reading
Saturday 12th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

We are here in the House to answer a very basic question: if we cannot trust a company, can we entrust to it a capability that we need, when that capability is so vital to our strength? That is one reason why the Select Committee has set up a new Sub-Committee on Economic Security, Arms and Export Controls. We will be reporting back to the House on the state of economic security in our country before the summer recess, and I look forward to the hon. Lady’s comments on that report.

The general point I want to land is this: what we value most cannot be entrusted to those we distrust most. The timing of the Bill is critical; we live in an age of intensifying insecurity. President Putin’s violence is unabated, China’s military build-up is unabated and now President Trump threatens to upend the free trading system. In such a world, to surrender our ability to make primary steel would not be a misfortune—it would be negligence.

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend will know that the Select Committee has spoken to defence companies about how necessary it is not to rely on imports at a time such as this. Does he agree that national resilience and defence rely on industrial security?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In this debate, we need to remember that 95% of our rail infrastructure is made by British Steel. British Steel also supplies three quarters of every major construction project in this country. Thanks to the Chancellor, we are about to invest £10 billion in the rearmament of this country; much of what we need to put in place will be made by British Steel. How can we afford to let British Steel go out of business today? How can we vote against the Bill? British Steel is not simply a pillar of British industry: it is a cornerstone of our economic security.

Terms and Conditions of Employment

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

This Government have made a solid commitment to make work pay and put more money into working people’s pockets. In my constituency, we have a large number of distribution jobs, and as a result of this Government’s actions, people in Kettering on the minimum wage will have more money in their pockets to last them through to the end of the month.

Having spent my career in business, I know how important it is for businesses to have a productive, motivated workforce with minimal turnover. That benefits not only businesses but workers. In Kettering, it means that people earning a decent wage will spend their money supporting our local economy. It is shameful that the Conservative party let this country get to a place where people who work full time are queuing at food banks to feed their family. The uplift in the national minimum wage is a huge part of the national renewal that Labour has promised this country, and will mean a pay increase for 3 million people in Kettering and across the UK.

Young people in my constituency deserve a minimum wage that reflects the work they do. I speak to many 18 to 20-year-olds in Kettering who face the same financial pressures as adults older than them. One of the best things about my job is visiting many schools and colleges across my constituency, where young people talk to me about their plans for their future. This uplift will mean a wage boost of 18% for apprenticeships in Kettering, so that we can incentivise young people to see apprenticeships as a financially viable option and start to fill the skills gaps that businesses across the UK face after 14 difficult years under the Conservatives.

The last Labour Government brought in the national minimum wage, and it is this Labour Government who will secure Britain’s future and make work pay.

“Chapter 4A

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Lee Barron (Corby and East Northamptonshire) (Lab)]

I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I have said it before, and I will say it again: due to the virtue of my last name, I am the only legitimate union Barron in this place, and I am absolutely proud of it.

It is an honour to speak on this Bill again, and I commend this Government for bringing it forward. We made a commitment to working people before the election, and we are following that through. I welcome the Government’s new clause on agency workers. In Corby we have more employment agencies than any other town in Northamptonshire. We now see that those who work in agency jobs will receive fair treatment in pay, working hours and job security, which is to be welcomed as we aim to create a better local economy for the people of Corby and East Northants.

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. He and I are constituency neighbours. As he will know, there has been a lot of growth in Northamptonshire and increased distribution in the area, so the Government new clause will make a massive difference to our constituents.

[Lee Barron]

It will indeed. I thank my hon. Friend for making that point so well.

This Bill has been a huge move in terms of sick pay, as far as the Government are concerned. It will bring 1.3 million people into getting sick pay for the first time, and we need to welcome that. We might need to have a look at some point in the future to see if there has been a drag downwards in terms of the people around the lower earnings limit, but we should certainly welcome this as a step in the right direction.

This is not just about legislation: we must change the jobs market and the perception of work that some people have in modern Britain. There are still some people who do not recognise the value that working people bring. I had a meeting last week with the parcel delivery company Evri, which operates in all our constituencies. It described the employer-employee relationship as a “master-servant” relationship. I turn around and say that that kind of view of working people is absolutely dated. Evri said that if it changed the status of its workers, it would want its “pound of flesh”—its words, not mine.

While we have those who treat and describe working people in such a way, we must bring in legislation to ensure that they cannot treat people like that. Working people are not servants, and they should be treated with the dignity and respect that they deserve. That is a fundamentally wrong, crass and outdated way to view employment in modern Britain, and as long as there are still those who think like that, we need to ensure that we change things for the better, and this Bill goes a long way towards doing that.

The question I often ask myself is this: why do those who want economic growth think that we make growth happen through insecure work, minimal wage rates and zero-hours contracts, under which people do not know what they will earn in order to support their family from one week to the next? Work should not mean a lifetime trapped in poverty; it should be the route out of poverty, and this Bill is a step in the right direction to ensure that is what it becomes once again.

I chair the all-party parliamentary group on modernising employment, and at our last meeting we heard from Zelda Perkins, of the Can’t Buy My Silence campaign, about non-disclosure agreements. Her testimony makes it absolutely clear that more needs to be done in that space, and if there is room to do so through this Bill, I urge the Government to accept the amendments that were described earlier. The APPG looks to the future of work and what good employment looks like. At the end of the month, the APPG is going to look at good work, the new deal and this Bill. We will look at the full effects of this Bill to see how we can take forward its benefits and transfer them into the modern world of work. In the 21st century, modern employment should look like security of work, well-paid and with progression opportunities, in order to keep families out of poverty. This Bill goes some way towards doing that.

In conclusion, I urge all Members to support this Bill, which bans exploitative zero-hours contracts. Saying that this will somehow stop flexible working is for the birds—it is not the case. We had flexible working long before we had zero-hours contracts. We survived then, we can survive now, and we will survive into the future.

Department for Business and Trade

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is an extraordinary champion for the city he represents, and for the industry that has made that city great over the centuries. He is absolutely right: when the industrial strategy is published, we must understand whether it is driving growth and better wages, and whether it is transforming people’s ability to earn a good life in every corner of the country. We cannot again have the situation that we had over the past 10 to 15 years, where 70% of the growth and wealth in our country has been concentrated in London and the south-east. We must genuinely level-up this country and pull together a cross-party consensus, to the extent that we can, on the changes that are needed. Why? Because if we can get that cross-party consensus, we can redesign the economic institutions in our country in a way that is sustainable for the long term.

I wish to flag three issues that pose questions to the Minister who is asking us to agree the estimates today. First, there is a real worry in the small business community about whether it will be adequately supported by some of the changes that the Minister is helping to drive through. We all know that what has bedevilled our economy for a long time is a long tail of underproductive, often smaller, firms. If we are to raise wages, raise the rate of economic growth, and become the fastest growing economy in the G7, we must transform the productivity rate of a lot of our small firms. How will new technology be diffused through supply chains? How can we ensure that small and medium-sized businesses have support in deploying new technology that could change their business?

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his chairmanship of the Committee. Given the Prime Minister’s recent announcements, and our increased defence spending, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is important to support small and medium-sized defence enterprises?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is a brilliant member of the Committee, and she makes a brilliant point. We know that we must come to a strategic culture and defence mindset in this country, so that our industry can innovate as fast as the battlefield changes. We all know that there are defence manufacturers—drone manufacturers in particular—that struggle to get the working capital that they need to fund and grow their businesses, month by month. We will have to change the way that we support smaller businesses, and that means transforming access to finance.

Time and again, the Committee has heard about business leaders being brought in once a firm gets to a particular size, and it being snapped up and shipped out, in particular to the United States, because we do not seem able to supply equity finance or debt finance of between £50 million and £500 million. We have to think anew about how we ensure that the British Business Bank, the National Wealth Fund, the private sector and the proposed changes to pension funds work together to completely revolutionise access to finance for businesses in this market. In the estimates, there looks to be a welcome £414 million increase in funding for the British Business Bank. Although it is hard to decode the accounts, it looks like about £127 million of that is provision for bad debt. Will the Minister clarify that? The Committee will continue to press for us to completely transform access to finance, including through an inquiry that we will launch later in the year.

The final fear that I wanted to flag, which is coming through loud and clear to Committee members, is that the Government just do not work for business in the way that they need to. We have heard over and over again about one Department doing something that completely undermines the work of another, or one regulator doing something that completely undermines what a different Department or regulator is trying to do. We do not yet see anything about how we can knit Government together in a wholly new way in either the Green Paper on industrial strategy, or any of the commentary about the estimates. In the good old days, when I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, what we were beginning to test—

Budget Resolutions

Rosie Wrighting Excerpts

Wednesday 6th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Rosie Wrighting (Kettering) (Lab)]

Like many of my hon. Friends, I have spent my career in business—specifically, in retail head offices—so I am proud to be a part of a Government that is pro-business and pro-worker. The last time a Labour Government delivered a Budget in this House, I was 12 years old. That Labour Government looked after our public services, focused on cutting crime, were ambitious about our education and invested in our NHS. It is because of those decisions that I had the opportunities that I did and that I am standing in this House today. Since then, those priorities have been forgotten and our constituents have had to bear the brunt.

People in my constituency of Kettering know all too well the price they have paid for the last 14 years of Tory failure: crumbling hospitals and schools, rising crime and a crisis in SEND. Working people in this country have not had a Government who have worked for them for 14 years. It is shameful that the previous Conservative Government promised funding that simply did not exist. They let our communities think that they were going to receive money, knowing that it was not there and that it would be someone else’s problem after the election.

We now finally have a Labour Government and a truly Labour Budget that prioritises working people. It is incredible to be the youngest woman in the House today, but it is even more incredible to have watched the first female Chancellor deliver the first Labour Budget in 14 years. It shows me and many young women that there is no limit to our ambitions. Regardless of what the Leader of the Opposition thinks, this was a glass ceiling shattered.

There are some hugely important measures in this Budget for the people of Kettering. Our public services deserve better than the treatment they have had for the last 14 years, and I am proud to be part of a Labour Government who are fixing the foundations and rebuilding Britain. People all over the country are waiting to see what this Government will deliver and, thanks to this Budget, we can give them hope that they will have an NHS fit for the future and a country that invites investment, without barriers to opportunity, and in which working people are at the heart of everything we do.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call Charlie Maynard. Not present.