George Freeman

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and for her chairmanship of our Select Committee. I welcome bits of the Budget, including the £20 billion commitment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), the former Prime Minister, and I secured an historic commitment to raise R&D investment to £20 billion when he was Chancellor, and I heard the Government ringfencing that amount today. I support the notion of an industrial strategy, as long as that does not involve earnest committees of Whitehall mandarins far away from the innovators, entrepreneurs and people on the ground. I support the wealth fund and the Mansion House reforms, but I have sincere concerns about the message that today’s Budget sends about innovators, entrepreneurs, wealth creators and businesses. They are the people who turn great science into great businesses that drive growth. Let me talk about why the innovation economy is key. If we want to get out of debt, the innovation economy provides the only model of growth that will deliver the productivity increases we so urgently need. It will reduce our reliance on the low-wage labour that has been completely built into the service economy, which has dominated this country since the 1980s and since the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years of “Cool Britannia”. That model was based on letting London boom and pulling in cheap labour, which drove an immigration crisis that my party got itself twisted up about and that put huge pressure on our public services. We have to get away from that model of growth, and move to a model of growth led by innovation, with higher skilled jobs, much greater efficiency and productivity. Sectors are growing in this country that could attract billions of pounds of investment from all over the world. There is a wall of capital to invest in agritech, clean tech, fusion energy, satellite manufacturing—I could go on—and all the sectors where we are strong. That is the part of the economy that we should focus on, and it is the only bit of the economy that drives genuine regeneration. The sustainable levelling up is happening in Glasgow through the satellite manufacturing economy, in Edinburgh through quantum computing, in Newcastle through data, in Leeds through digital health and in Norwich through agritech. The R&D economy is the best mechanism for driving that levelling up and regeneration, and creating the opportunity society we all need. We cannot have an innovation economy without an opportunity society. I would go as far as saying that we cannot have an opportunity society without an innovation economy. That is key if we want to tackle the problem of debt.