Fuel Costs

Debate between Stewart Hosie and Brian Binley

Monday 7th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie]

I shall move on a little. I have been generous, and I will give way again in a little while.

I was talking about the impact on business and the information provided by the FSB. As I said, 78% of its members who were surveyed in January said that the increase in duty would have an impact on them and put business profitability in jeopardy, which is the wrong thing to do when we are trying to grow our way out of recession. I would have thought that this Government would want to listen to the views of the FSB, not least because small businesses in the UK provide 90% of all our enterprises, and in Scotland they provide 50% of all jobs. They will be engines of recovery in this country.

John Walker, the UK chairman of the FSB, and Andy Willox, the FSB’s Scottish policy convenor, said:

“Scottish small businesses want to grow, innovate and create employment but the cost of fuel puts the brakes on their ability to drive the recovery…Every extra penny spent at the pumps is a penny not being spent elsewhere in the economy and our members are finding it hard to plan for the future, as well as survive the present, due to the spiralling cost of fuel.”

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to interject a little on the question of small and medium-sized business. I agree with his thrust that they are vital and that they will provide the jobs growth that the growth agenda requires. However, will he join me in expressing concern that the four increases in fuel duty are not as necessary as we were told they were by the then Government? Does he agree with that?

[Stewart Hosie]

I believe that the SNP opposed a number of the fuel duty increases. The hon. Gentleman may have been an honourable exception—I hope he was—but my memory tells me that Tory FrontBenchers abstained on some of those increases over the past few years when they were in opposition. He is generally right, but as I said, the debate is not about the cancellation or postponement of a single increase, however welcome that is, but about the implementation of a permanent stabilisation mechanism. Mr Willox said of that debate that:

“The FSB is right behind all moves to introduce a fuel duty stabiliser.”