Gregory Stafford

It is always a pleasure to follow the King. [Laughter.] I rise on behalf of my constituents in Farnham, Bordon, Haslemere and Liphook who are opposed to this fundamentally anti-business Bill. Nothing has highlighted more clearly than this debate the old adage that where we think the Labour party is wrong, it thinks that we are evil. Nothing that has come from Labour Members has given any consideration to the absolutely correct concerns that the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith), raised in his opening remarks. The Bill, which has been bodged both in Committee and today, has been put together simply to assuage the union paymasters that fund so many Labour Members. The Bill highlights Labour’s complete misunderstanding of how to help business, employees and, of course, the economy overall. We have a Government who talk about growth but legislate to destroy it. The Government claim to be pro-growth and pro-business, yet the Bill is precisely the opposite. The Institute of Directors has warned that it will lead to slower growth, deter investment and bury business under an avalanche of unnecessary regulation. Even the Government’s own impact assessment, which Opposition Members have mentioned on a number of occasions, concedes that business will face a staggering £5 billion in additional costs: an economic straitjacket that will choke innovation and job creation. Labour Members seem to have failed to realise that being pro-business, as the Conservatives are, is being pro-worker, because if businesses do not exist there will be no one to employ workers. In my constituency alone we have over 5,000 businesses, the vast majority of which are small and medium-sized enterprises. Many of them operate in the education, retail and hospitality sectors, which rely on flexibility to survive, yet the Bill’s attack on zero- hours contracts threatens to wipe out opportunities for students, part-time workers and those juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet.