Robin Swann

Thank you for that direction, Mrs Harris; I will follow it directly. I want to focus solely on a small part of business confidence: the confidence of businesses across the United Kingdom in the UK’s internal market. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and the mover of the motion, the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies), said, small and medium businesses are the backbone of our communities, and nowhere more so in Northern Ireland than in my constituency of South Antrim. We have a real challenge at the minute with the outworkings of the Windsor framework and how our small businesses can sell to, and purchase parts and other things they want to sell on from, the rest of the UK. They are having difficulty getting parts to sell and selling across the Irish sea. Prior to this debate being called a small business wrote to me, which is why I thought it would be useful to come here. To survive, that small business went to online selling through Amazon. It was looking for some advice on what will happen after 13 December, when the EU’s general product safety regulation, which will apply to those selling online from Northern Ireland, will kick off. It said: “As an online business this is starting to do us a lot of harm already. Places like Amazon where we do most of our business are making us do compliance reports for every item and we probably have over 60k items that have to be done one at a time.” The GPSR is adding additional bureaucracy and cost to those small businesses to such an extent that suppliers are saying that they will no longer post to Northern Ireland, completely destroying business confidence across what should be our United Kingdom. I am meeting an English company later this week that tells me it wants to supply Northern Ireland, but, because of the introduction of the EU’s GPSR, it will look to cease trading into Northern Ireland. The GPSR comes into effect on 13 December: that is three weeks prior to the Christmas and new year sales, a crucial time for small businesses that rely on online sales. Two bodies were recently created and announced by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland: Intertrade UK and the Windsor framework independent monitoring panel. We thought that they could answer our questions and queries, but I have asked the Northern Ireland Office and we are still waiting for them to be appointed or established. All the while, the clock is ticking down on what our consumers, suppliers and sellers in Northern Ireland want to achieve. I hope the Minister can provide reassurance or guidance on that today, because I have asked the Department for Business and Trade and the Northern Ireland Office and still I can give no reassurance or guidance to the small and medium-sized companies in Northern Ireland who want it. The hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield referred to the international investment summit and the announcement of £63 billion of investment. I appreciate that she talked about double funding and the double announcement. I would have been happy if it had been indicated that any of that was coming to Northern Ireland. From what I see in the announcement that was made, England gets a fair share, Wales gets some and Scotland gets some, but nothing is coming to Northern Ireland. We would welcome any of the £63 billion or 38,000 jobs that were announced.