Andrew Griffith

I beg to move, That this House regrets that unemployment is rising and causing misery for young people in particular, that this Government has displayed a negligible understanding of business and that investors and entrepreneurs are being driven overseas; further regrets that over 200,000 businesses have closed since Labour took office, as a result of the Government’s policies to raise employers’ National Insurance contributions, in breach of the Labour Party manifesto commitment, to scrap Business Property Relief, to impose £4.5 billion of additional costs on businesses through the Employment Rights Bill and increases to business rates; and calls on the Government to urgently change course to support jobseekers, small and medium-sized enterprises, family businesses and entrepreneurs who take risks to create wealth and jobs that benefit people across the country. Allow me to paint a picture. A small business owner navigates the early morning darkness to their high street shop. They twist the keys and lift the shutters. They turn on the lights, the card machine, the heater and the shop music. They open the door in time for their first customer of the day, putting to the back of their mind the question of how to meet the rising costs placed on them by this Government—the taxes they have to pay before they open that door and the unreformed business rates, with many more than doubling. How will they pay the jobs tax on their staff? How will they ever keep their business intact when they seek to pass it to their children after they have gone? Not one single person around the Cabinet table truly understands those pressures, yet this Labour Government have crossed the road to start a fight with Britain’s businesses. When it comes to business, the Government have broken every one of their promises. Members on the Government Benches looked business owners in the eye at the election and told them that they would be on their side, but it took barely 100 days for this Labour Government to revert to type. At the autumn Budget, the Chancellor slapped a £25 billion jobs tax on business, meaning that employers will have to pay an additional £900 a year for an employee on the median wage, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Only a few weeks later, the Business Secretary tabled the now 300-page, trade union-dictated Employment Rights Bill, drowning employers in red tape. Helen Dickinson, the CEO of the British Retail Consortium, said that businesses are “left with little choice but to increase prices”— as we have seen today—“or to reduce investment.” The CEO of UKHospitality, Kate Nicholls, said that these measures “will simply force businesses to cut jobs, freeze recruitment, cancel planned investment, reduce trading hours and, in the worst-case scenario, close their doors for good.”