Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what steps the Government is taking to improve productivity.

Government policy focuses on delivering growth; this in turn partly depends on longer term improvements to productivity. As such, much of the Government’s economic policy is about raising productivity, including but not limited to:

Tax cuts: Government is actively working to reduce the tax burden where possible to help give businesses the confidence to invest and grow. Initiatives announced at this year’s Autumn Statement include a doubling of the Small Business Rate Relief for a further year, and a continued cap on the annual increase in business rates at 2% from April 2015 to March 2016. More widely the UK now has the lowest headline corporate tax rate in the G7 and 4th lowest in the G20. Budget 2013 announced further measures to reduce the main corporate tax rate to 20% by 2015.

Deregulation: Government departments are working together to simplify and reduce the regulatory burden for UK businesses through the Red Tape Challenge, One In, One Out , and One In, Two Out policies. This will create a regulatory environment in which businesses have the confidence to invest and grow. This work is already showing significant signs of success; excluding EU regulation, the estimated annual net cost of regulation to UK business has fallen by £1.5bn since 2011.

Skills: Ensuring employers have access to workers with the right skills plays a crucial role in enhancing the UK’s productivity. This Government has driven up participation in education, employment or training for 16-24 year olds since 2011. Apprenticeship participation has risen by 77% from 2009/10 to 2012/13, and there have been over 2 million Apprentices started since 2010.

The Government is giving employers more direct control over the design and delivery of training solutions to address skills shortages and improve business performance through the Employer Ownership Pilot (EOP) and its successor Employer Ownership Fund (EOF). The Government is completing round 2 of EOP which will be worth £238m and has announced targeted activity for the auto supply chain and engineering under EOF.

Infrastructure: High quality infrastructure is essential for supporting productivity growth. Delivering the right infrastructure at a local, regional and national level, across the UK, is therefore key to the government’s long-term economic plan. Since 2010, this Government has completed 55 major roads and local transport projects, completed major improvements to Kings Cross station as well as 400 other stations, opened Heathrow Terminal 2 and introduced £22 billion of private sector investment in water assets.

The National Infrastructure Plan for 2014 outlines a £466 billion plan for the UK’s infrastructure, of which £189 billion is future investment. This includes £15 billion of road improvements, £38bn investment in rail and £46 billion investment in the gas and electricity network.

Science and Innovation: The government funds and supports innovation in science, technology and engineering to help the UK’s high-tech industries to thrive. This has already seen £600m of government funding committed to the development and commercialisation of eight great technologies, a further £106m investment in new Centres for Doctoral Training, which will train more than 750 new students, and £42m in the creation of the Alan Turing Institute – a world-class research institute specialising in Big Data science. Details of the government’s on-going commitment to science and innovation will feature in the soon to be released Science and Innovation Strategy.