Damian Hinds

It is a pleasure to join this lively debate. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy in my constituency. In fact, 99.9% of businesses in East Hampshire are small or medium-sized enterprises. We over-index in professional services, retail, information and communications, and, of course, agriculture. [Interruption.] I thought there were few Labour Members present before I stood to speak! The biggest sectors for employment are retail, health and care, and manufacturing. [Interruption.] I am starting to get a complex! I have heard from all those sectors, which are worried about the prospects for their businesses and the economy under this Government. We must always remember two things about business. First, contrary to what the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher) said—he is no longer in his place but I know he will return—only business can create the wealth and jobs, make the livelihoods and generate the tax that, in turn, makes the high-quality and brilliant public services that we all so value and on which we rely. There is a second thing that we should always remember about business, and I encourage Ministers to remember it. Accountants talk about the entity principle and describe a business as an entity that is separate from the people who run it. That might be true in an accounting sense, but in a broader sense, businesses are people. They are collections of people coming together to achieve something. The joint stock company was created to share risk among different people, and the way that organisations work within companies is a way of increasing efficiency and productivity, compared with everybody doing their own thing as a sole trader. So, because businesses are ultimately people, there is ultimately no such thing as a tax on a business. Taxes can only ever fall on people. A so-called business tax falls on one or more of three groups of people: the business’s customers, the business’s employees or the business’s owners.