Subsidy Control Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Stephen Flynn and Simon Baynes

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Simon Baynes (Clwyd South) (Con)]

Q Thank you for your time this afternoon, Dr Barker; it is much appreciated. I wanted to look at the part of the Bill to empower local authorities, public bodies and central and devolved Governments, particularly the public bodies aspect. Do you see this as a welcome broadening-out of the routes by which subsidies can be brought to business, not only through central devolved Governments but through local authorities and public bodies?

Dr Barker: That is potentially welcome, but now we are extending subsidy-granting powers to a large number of bodies—about 500 in total. That will create a requirement that each of those bodies understands the principles for granting the subsidy and the processes that need to be gone through. They need to have some degree of expertise to guide business through the process in a confident way. In practice, that will probably mean that the subsidy advice unit in the CMA will be called on a good deal from a lot of those bodies for advice, information and to try to get an indication of whether the process being followed is the right one.

I am slightly concerned that consulting the subsidy advice unit may become a kind of quasi-obligatory stage in the subsidy approval process. The question is, will that delay things? Will it take away the nimbleness of the system? Does the subsidy advice unit have the necessary resources to deal with the hundreds of public bodies that will be consulting it? That is an uncertainty and a concern.

[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

Q Thank you for your helpful answers and input so far, Dr Barker. I think earlier you alluded to—those who gave evidence this morning certainly alluded to it—the lack of detail behind the Bill, the lack of guidance and the powers that sit with the Secretary of State. That prevailing situation is unlikely to change before the Bill comes into law. Do you think that is a help or a hindrance to businesses as it stands?

Secondly, we know that historically the UK’s spend when it comes to state aid, as it is more commonly known, has fallen well below that of European partners. Do you think the Bill will change that in any way, shape or form? Is there any indication in the Bill as it stands that it will change, certainly from a business perspective?

Dr Barker: I do think that more clarity is needed around a number of the concepts in the Bill. The need for more detail increases with the number of public bodies that are being empowered to grant subsidies. To give some examples, there is uncertainty around what would constitute a subsidy of particular interest, which is a subsidy that requires much more detailed pre-assessment by the CMA. Will that apply to a significant proportion of potential subsidies, or will that be done just on an exceptional basis? The answer will affect the nature of the entire system. At the other end of the spectrum, I think we still lack detail about the streamlined subsidies that can benefit from fast-track approval.

Another area that is important, particularly for IoD members, is the extent to which this regime can facilitate the support of start-ups, particularly those companies that do not have a long-standing financial track record and are still some way from generating profit or even revenue. I think that the proposed regime in this respect is preferable to the previous European Union regime, which had a prohibition over supporting undertakings in difficulties, which really ruled out start-ups. Within this measure, the only thing that is ruled out is the support of ailing or insolvent companies, which increases the scope of what can be supported. However, we still need clarity about what kind of going-concern assessments will be conducted to ensure that a potential recipient is eligible.

To answer your first question, there is still some way to go to provide all the interested parties with more clarity about how the system will operate. With your regard to your second question—do I think that this framework indicates that we will have more state support of business?—in itself, the answer is no. As I said before, it provides a framework in which that kind of policy could be pursued, but there is nothing about it that necessarily implies that it will be pursued. As I have said previously, in certain sectors there is a need for a changed approach to match those of our key competitors. That is really how the IoD is viewing it—is it going to be useful for that purpose? The answer is that it could be.

Subsidy Control Bill

Debate between Stephen Flynn and Simon Baynes

2nd reading
Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Flynn]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. It does not put a stain on all of politics; it puts a stain on the Conservative party, where it firmly belongs, because Conservative party donors and friends have gained the most from this pandemic when it has come to contracts. [Interruption.] Conservative Members can argue all they want, but the facts are as clear as that.

Now, to the Bill before us; we got a little side-tracked there. It is important to look at the wider context of the Bill: the present situation, the past regime, and what is to come, which of course is what the Bill sets out. Let us look first at what is in place at this moment in time. As I see it, and as I think all of us in the Chamber will see it, we left the European Union, but we left to a system of nothing. We do not actually have an effective system at the moment. Indeed, I think it was the Institute for Government that deemed the current system to be completely ineffective.

That is understandable. Of course, a public body looking at what it is going to be doing does not want to break any rules, so if it does not have a full understanding of what the rules are, it will obviously err on the side of caution. In many ways, that might be an argument for the Bill. I can certainly understand why that may be the case, and that was what the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra), intimated in terms of meeting international obligations and the like. I do not think anyone would necessarily disagree with that.

Let us reflect slightly on where we have come from in relation to state aid. Some of this has been touched on already by Members on both sides of the House, but there is one specific aspect of it that I think needs to be aired properly. It was mentioned by the former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), at the Dispatch Box during Prime Minister’s questions earlier, and again by the Secretary of State—perhaps not directly, but he certainly inferred it—that state aid was a problem of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Yet if we look at the facts before us, 95% of all state aid measures did not even go near the European Commission’s desk, so we are almost fixing a problem that did not exist in the terms that the Government think it did, irrespective of how much they want to make Brussels seem like the bad guys.

I appreciate, though I disagree with, the stance of some Conservative Members—the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare made this point, as I think did the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) when she was in her place—that we did not, when we were in the European Union, make the most of what we could do under state aid regulations. However, the facts are that, under those terrible state aid regulations, we invested but a third of what the Germans invested, and a fraction of what others invested, so the big bad guys in Brussels were not so bad after all. Yet we left that arrangement for a system that, at this moment in time, is completely ineffective.

That brings us to the next stage, as represented by this Bill. As I see it, the Bill’s objectives are to enable strategic interventions to support economic recovery, levelling up and net zero. That is not wholly different from the EU state aid rules, which were, of course, to support the environment and innovation. The one slight difference, however, is that the EU state aid rules had a specific remit for the EU regional aid system, whereby people advocated money to be directed to less developed regions.

I have to say that I am a little surprised that there are not a few more red wall Tories present, whose regions could be described as—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) is waving at me; I am sure he will seek to intervene on me in due course. If I were a Conservative Back Bencher representing a constituency in the north of England, I would be deeply concerned about this aspect of the Bill. Although the Government say that the objective of the Bill is to level up, it contains no detail at all. It says that the Secretary of State will come back, subsequent to the Bill, to provide the detail on how levelling up will work. More importantly, we have walked away from a system that put money directly into less developed regions.

[Simon Baynes]

I am a Conservative Back Bencher representing a red wall seat in north Wales. The previous EU system was very biased against regional and localised issues of deprivation. It went for large areas, but there are plenty of areas in north-east Wales that require the same amount of help as was gifted under the European system. I would argue that the new system is much more direct, much more localised and much more effective.

[Stephen Flynn]

I admire the hon. Member’s optimism, but I am not quite sure where he has read that, because, of course, the Bill does not have that detail. He is hoping that the Secretary of State will subsequently provide that detail, but the Bill does not make that clear.

Another extremely important point that the Bill does not make clear is in relation to relocation subsidies. Essentially, the Government are saying that they will not relocate subsidies to areas with a more significant problem. They might want to level up—to use their term—but that is not going to happen under the terms of the Bill.