Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)

My Lords, the Economist magazine got it right about the Chancellor’s speech on the spring forecast. It said that the Chancellor “did not announce a single major policy decision that will help Britain break out of its malaise”. The malaise is the OBR’s bleak forecasts for economic growth over the coming years— and that is before the current war in the Middle East. It is no surprise, therefore, that the right honourable Wes Streeting said in one of his WhatsApp messages that the Government had no growth strategy at all. I therefore want to focus my brief remarks today on one subject—the lack of economic growth—and I really want to make just one point. The ultimate driver of economic growth in an economy comes from people who work in business, industry and commerce. That, I think, was the main point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pitt-Watson, earlier on. Yet all those people and those companies—this is where I disagree with the noble Lord—and all those people in business and commerce have been hit by the Government’s stream of anti-business policies. We have had the jobs tax: the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions. We have had the burdens placed on business by the new employment regulations. We have had the tax on private pensions and the tax on private farms. And now—about to hit the self-employed—we have new and complex regulations which mean they have to submit four tax returns every year instead of one. Therefore, the question I ask is: are there enough people in government who have any idea of how to run a business? I grew up in the north of England, and my father ran a small manufacturing company, so I was brought up, like millions of people in this country, in a business culture. I learned about the risks you take when you invest money—and it is not just your own money, because the chances are you are having to invest borrowed money. You have no guaranteed revenue and no guaranteed salary. You hope to make a profit, but your margins are tight and you watch your costs like a hawk because you cannot afford to go into loss. You hope at some point to build up some capital, and you do not want to be penalised for success. In this House, we have a number of Ministers who have business experience—the noble Lords, Lord Stockwood and Lord Timpson, are two examples. I am sure they understand all of this very well, but—dare I say it—we could do with more MPs who have direct business experience. On the day of the spring forecast, there was published in the Times a very interesting article about how the profile of the House of Commons has changed and how different it was in the 20th century. There were many more people on both sides of the House—the Labour Benches and the Conservative Benches—who had direct experience of industry, and the article listed the names of some of those MPs. They included MPs who had been labourers, who had worked on the shop floor, who had been stokers, and who had been railwaymen. Some had risen to become trade union leaders. There were business leaders who had set up businesses in construction, engineering and manufacturing. We do not have enough such people in the House of Commons today. We should certainly welcome, therefore, the addition of a plumber who was recently elected in the by-election—I think she will be an addition to the House’s expertise. I conclude by suggesting that it would really help business if there were more people in government who had the outside business experience to shape policy, and who understood the impact of those policies on business and companies. That would stimulate business activity, and that—I say to the Minister—would be a real strategy for growth.