James Wild

I congratulate the hon. Member for Rushcliffe (James Naish) on securing the debate, and welcome the opportunity to speak on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition about what is not only an important region but a great one, as he put it. As we have heard, the east midlands is home to world-leading manufacturers, a thriving logistics sector, pioneering aerospace firms and hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses. There is huge potential, as every Member who has spoken has attested to. These businesses, workers and entrepreneurs deserve a Government who are pursuing policies to help them to realise that potential and drive growth in the area. Concerningly, however, growth has been consistently downgraded; we need only look at the spring forecasts a couple of weeks ago to see that growth has been once again downgraded for the coming year, and that is before any impact is felt from the operations happening in the middle east. Today we have heard lots of ideas from Members across the parties on how to realise growth in the east midlands. That can be achieved, but will require the Government to change course. The region has many internationally renowned businesses. Members have rightly spoken proudly about Rolls-Royce, Toyota, Alstom and other businesses. The East Midlands Hydrogen zone is positioning the region at the forefront of clean energy transitions, and of course there is a strong university sector. It is a region with key strengths, and the last Government recognised that. Several Members referred to the East Midlands freeport, which was given the green light in 2023. The only inland freeport in England was backed by Government seed funding at the time and underpinned a projected 28,000 jobs coming to the area. If we look at the wider picture, the current Government have talked a lot about economic growth, but sadly growth has underperformed. As the Liberal Democrat spokesman—the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling)—said, we cannot ignore the impact of the higher national insurance charges. We cannot ignore the higher business rates that many companies are about to be hit with, as well as higher wage and other costs. The Bank of England has pointed out the impact that these have had.