Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Pound Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Swire]

Indeed. My hon. Friend makes an ingenious connection between York and Northern Ireland—the only connection that attracted investment before was probably with the Vikings, who took an early interest in both areas.

There are clearly tremendous advantages in Northern Ireland: it is not in the euro; it is extremely good in terms of education; it is a great place to live; and it has low costs, good IT, good connections and good transport connections. Yes, we can do more, but let us just look very carefully at how well Northern Ireland has done to date in attracting inward investment.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

If we can move on from the battle of Clontarf, I must say that the Secretary of State is getting the reputation of being something of a one-club golfer when it comes to the Northern Ireland economy. When even yesterday’s Belfast Telegraph referred to a putative corporation tax as “an economic disaster”, one has to ask: does the Secretary of State have another driver in his bag, and will he or his caddy whip it out and show it to us?

[Mr Swire]

We have many clubs, and we shall use them in the same way as they were used at the Open last week—with tremendous professionalism. The whole issue of corporation tax is a key thing that the joint group has been—

[Stephen Pound]

It is a disaster.

[Mr Swire]

It is not a disaster; it is what we have been looking at very carefully.

There are other things that we need to do to rebalance the Northern Ireland economy, which both Governments over a successive number of years allowed to become far too dependent, for obvious reasons, and we will use any club available in our or anyone else’s bag to bring that about.