Member

I have warned before, not in connection with this Bill but going back years, about how businesses have choices: they can set up abroad, do something different or occupy much cheaper premises. They can split off a part of their operation; if it is a warehousing thing, they shift it out of the back of a shop, where they are paying back-of-shop rental figures per square foot, and go off upcountry so that the communications in between are not someone running up and down a building with a trolley but a fleet of white vans going between, say, Wellingborough and Winchester. That is how things will happen. Unless we get confidence in the system, it will be like squeezing a balloon—if you squeeze one bit, a bulge will appear somewhere else because the thing is dispersed elsewhere. It is like tackling an amoeba.