Liam Byrne

The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point. We have heard time and again—we heard it in relation to life sciences, defence and clean energy—that we have some of the best thinkers in the world, but they often struggle to get the start-up finance or the scale-up finance they need to turn those ambitions into new businesses. As someone who spent four years building a business before I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got elected to this House, I know that what small businesses need to grow are sales. That is why we need to be doing a much smarter job of marrying public contracts with access to scale-up finance, but that will take the institutions we have today working very differently in the future. Perhaps our most shocking evidence session was on the subject of public procurement, when the chief commercial officer of His Majesty’s Government was just not clear how many jobs, how much economic growth and what levels of wages were driven by £1 of GDP. That is simply not good enough. I hope that there is cross-party consensus about these reforms because, ultimately, this is a once in 50 years moment. Our recommendations should command cross-party support, because that is how we ensure that they are sustainable for the long term.