Gareth Thomas MP: speeches 2024

Speeches

• 22 Oct 2024 · Pub and Hospitality Sector · Hansard source

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  In the usual way, let me take the opportunity to congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford) on securing this debate and celebrating the contribution of pubs to life in his constituency. He rightly talked about the contribution that pubs make to social mobility and the journey all the way up to manager that those who start out as pot washers can potentially make. I noted in particular his praise for the Curzon Arms and I can assure him we will consider that as the campaign stop for when we visit his constituency at the next election to try to increase our majority in this House. He, and I hope the whole House, will understand if I briefly praise pubs in my own constituency—the great Horseshoe, where I have been privileged to watch one or two great victories by the Welsh rugby union team, and the Trinity pub where we have celebrated one or two election successes in recent times. I will not be able to do justice in the time available to me to the richness of the contributions that we have had, for which I apologise to hon. Members across the House. Notwithstanding, let me try to make one or two points and to pick up some of the specific questions that people have outlined. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool Riverside (Kim Johnson) celebrated her constituency’s many pubs and venues, some of which I have had the privilege to visit during what seems like Labour’s annual trip to her great city. Perhaps she might like to buy me a round when I next have to visit one of those pubs—[Hon. Members: “Freebies!”] [ Laughter. ] Perhaps not, then. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner) referenced the Labour in Vain pub in her constituency. I am happy to sit down with her and talk about what else might be possible for that pub. She is right to celebrate community-owned pubs; I suspect that she, like me, comes from the Co-operative tradition in our ranks. The Co-operative party has championed the ambitions of many of our communities to own their own pub. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra), in his inimitable way, championed the contribution of pubs to the life of his constituents. I hope I will have the opportunity at some point to come up and take advantage of the hospitality there. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) rightly praised the contribution of business improvement districts to supporting the environment around pubs. The business improvement district in my constituency does a particularly important job working with the police to tackle antisocial behaviour, and I know that work is replicated in business improvement districts across the country. He made an ambitious claim that the best kebab in the country is found in his constituency—I wonder whether others might have a slightly different perspective. My hon. Friend the Member for Southend East and Rochford (Mr Alaba), who is unfortunately not in his place, rightly championed the soft skills learned by those who work in the pub trade. My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) made an interesting speech—I was not sure quite where it was going to end with the reference to nationalisation, but I look forward to having the opportunity to find out a bit more about the unique history of the pubs in her constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh (Chris Murray) underlined the role of pubs in his constituency and the crucial contribution that Scotch whisky makes not only to the Scottish economy, but to the UK economy as a whole. He will know of the work my right hon. Friend the Minister for Trade Policy and Economic Security is seeking to do to reduce some of the tariffs that Scotch whisky still faces around the world. If I heard him right, I think my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) promised to visit all 116 pubs in his constituency before the next election. The hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) referenced previous work she had done with the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and I will reflect on her contribution and the Committee’s work outside this House, if I may. I hope to touch on the contributions of one or two other hon. Members as I make my way through some of the broader points, where appropriate. This debate is important because our pubs and the wider hospitality sector are crucial to the UK economy, employing around 2.2 million people across 154,000 businesses and generating revenues of around £52 billion per annum.

• 15 Oct 2024 · Business Confidence · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for his earlier remarks and his intervention. Let me be clear that my Department will continue to work with local partners in Northern Ireland, including InterTradeIreland, to develop and deliver our trade and industrial strategies. If the hon. Member wants to speak to me, I would be happy to help the small businesses that have written to him to join up with the support available in Northern Ireland. Members across the House will be pleased that there is good news on growth. I welcome the generous support of the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield for the work done yesterday at the international investment summit and in the run-up to it. A raft of measures were announced to help boost business confidence going forward and to spur growth, and I will recap on some of them. We are determined to make it simpler for companies to relocate to the UK through a new corporate re-domiciliation regime, which I am sure will strengthen our position as a global business hub. We have announced a business-boosting lift to the thresholds on company sizes, which means we will have new legislation by the end of the year reducing the burdens on start-ups and SMEs, saving them nearly a quarter of a billion pounds. We will be consulting next year on our ambitious modernisation programme for the UK’s entire non-financial reporting regime. We are seeking to make shareholder communication easier, and we are clarifying the law on virtual annual general meetings. Those improvements, helping to reduce red tape, could be worth up to £16 billion a year to investment going forward. As a result of the pro-innovation, pro-business, pro-wealth creation policies we are pursuing, big-hitting global businesses are confidently investing in the UK. The total investment pledged by international and British firms, both in the run-up to and during the summit yesterday, now stands at an estimated £63 billion, which will help ensure that 38,000 jobs are created. I would gently suggest that that is a resounding vote of confidence in both the UK’s economy and the Government’s growth mission.

• 15 Oct 2024 · Business Confidence · Hansard source

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  If I may, I will come to that in one second. One of the measures announced yesterday that will strengthen business confidence further, and which many businesses have been crying out for, as they told us when we were in opposition and as they have been telling us since we came into government, is an industrial strategy. All Governments have an industrial strategy, consciously or not, through act or omission. This Government are choosing actively to have and implement an industrial strategy to help businesses plan, not just for the next year but for the next 10 years and beyond. That strategy will not just help large businesses or ones in urban areas, which is something the hon. Member for Chippenham (Sarah Gibson) asked about—I congratulate her on making her first speech as an Opposition spokesperson—but benefit all parts of the country and businesses large and small. Our industrial strategy will inject capital into eight high-productivity, high-export, high-investment sectors in which the UK has a significant competitive advantage: financial services, professional and business services, clean energy industries, digital and technologies, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, creative industries and defence. Above all, our industrial strategy will show that we are listening and responding to the needs of businesses. To that end, we will engage on those more complex issues that we know are barriers to investment: skills, data, finance, regulation, energy prices, grid connections, infrastructure and planning, which a couple of hon. Members rightly referenced. We want to view every single one of those measures through the lens of investment promotion. That is how we will continue to build long-term confidence, ensuring that our policies are made with business, for business. Hon. Members raised questions about our Make Work Pay plan, and the number of businesses backing that plan is striking. On flexibility for employees, over 60% of UK managers surveyed by the University of Birmingham a couple of years ago said that home working improved their teams’ motivation, and a staggering 75% said flexible working boosted their teams’ productivity —something Opposition Members have complained about in the past. It is a similar story on pay. Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research shows that 70% of managers believe that raising the national minimum wage to reflect living costs would help, not hinder, their businesses. The hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield referenced the fact that many of the measures announced as part of our package will come in in 2026. That will enable us to continue to talk to businesses and employee representatives to ensure that we get the details right. I have no doubt that the Budget on the 30th of this month will be a Budget for growth. We face a very difficult inheritance as a Government, and we have to fix the fundamentals of our economy. I gently say to the hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew) that he may not be comfortable with the mess his party left us, but figures released last month show that there was another month of record Government borrowing, with debt at 100% of GDP. That is the inheritance that the previous Government left us. We have to fix those fundamentals, and we will do. It will be a Budget for growth, and I have no doubt that our economy and British business will continue to grow from strength to strength.

• 15 Oct 2024 · Business Confidence · Hansard source

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  I too take the opportunity in the usual way to thank the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies) for securing this important debate. At the outset, let me echo her thanks to businesses across the country for the wealth they create, the better communities they help promote and, crucially, the good jobs they offer. I do not know where her “Taste of East Grinstead” event is taking place, but if it is in the House, I will happily come along if I can. If not, I would be happy to hear from her separately about the particular businesses that turn up to that event. As a number of interventions from hon. Members have made clear, small businesses, in particular, are the backbone of our economy. I feel particularly privileged to be the Minister for Small Businesses and to hear some of the remarkable stories about how those small businesses came into being and the successes they have had in each of our communities. That is why I am pleased that we have been making progress in government on following through on the commitments we made in opposition in our nine-point plan to back small businesses. If time allows, I hope to touch on some of those points. I welcome the support of all hon. Members who have spoken for their business communities, even if I did not quite agree with the tone of all their remarks. All of us need the businesses in our communities to succeed, and it is great to hear so many Opposition and Government Members wanting to back them to succeed. The Prime Minister could not have been any clearer about this Government’s guiding mission: we will go for growth at every opportunity. Growth and backing business is the surest path to prosperity and to improving the living standards of working people. We have made it clear that our goal is to deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7, more secure jobs, better wages and, as a result, much greater funding for our public services, including our brilliant NHS. It surely goes without saying that investment is key to driving that growth. I gently say to Conservative Members that the problem is that the Administrations of the past 14 years sadly starved our economy of the investment it needed. Whether it is the fall-out from the poor-quality deal the Conservatives negotiated with the European Union after the Brexit referendum, the revolving door of Prime Ministers— I think every Conservative Member here backed Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget—the seven separate growth strategies since 2010 or the 11 different Business Secretaries in as many years, I say to Opposition Members that all of that might help to explain why they lost the confidence of business at the last general election. If Opposition Members are not convinced by that, I would underline that there was also no plan to help small businesses grow, export or get into new markets. Support in that area was cut back and, in some cases, axed completely. There was no delivery on repeated promises to comprehensively reform business rates and no serious plan to tackle the scourge of late payments, which many small businesses face at the moment. Vital infrastructure projects that were fundamental to growth in many communities were cancelled, sensible measures to open up opportunities for investment in green energy projects were blocked, there was no obvious plan to back the high street—a point made by the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (James McMurdock) —and, in particular, there was no serious plan to tackle retail crime going forward. The result is that British firms have not felt that investing domestically was an attractive enough proposition. There has been much reluctance to adopt new technology, to upskill employees or to plough money into research and development. Sadly, that is why the UK has sat right at the bottom of global rankings for business investment for quite some time—27th out of 30 in the OECD last year, behind Mexico, Slovenia and the Slovak Republic.

• 5 Sept 2024 · High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  First, let me take this opportunity to say how much of a pleasure it is to see my hon. Friend back in this House; I went up to his constituency during the by-election campaign, and his result was one of many on election night that brought us all great pleasure. We set out a five-point plan when we were in opposition to support businesses on high streets. At the heart of that was a plan to introduce a fairer business rates system, which I know colleagues in the Treasury are working very hard on. We also want to tackle the high levels of retail crime that scar too many of our high streets, and we will be bringing forward proposals on that in due course too.

• 5 Sept 2024 · High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  As the hon. Gentleman may know, the towns fund is the responsibility of colleagues in MHCLG. I will happily draw his comments to the attention of the Minister who has responsibility for it. But we are determined to work across Government to breathe new life into our high streets, and I am sure that the Minister will be very interested to meet the hon. Gentleman and take forward his concerns.

• 5 Sept 2024 · High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  The decline of too many high street businesses was one powerful example of the failure of the last Government’s economic record and the cost of living crisis they caused. Working with business and others, we are determined to breathe new life into our high streets. In particular, we will stamp out late payments, tackle soaring levels of retail crime and create a fairer business rates system.

• 5 Sept 2024 · High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his election to this House. I gently say that he will have heard from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that we have already consulted widely with the business community about our plans to improve rights for employees. We did that when we were in opposition and we have continued to do it in government. I am struck by the support that our plans have from small businesses and high street businesses, but we will continue to work with small businesses on the details of those plans.

• 5 Sept 2024 · High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that there are policies across the whole of Government that impact on small businesses and particularly on high street businesses. One of the most significant issues is the need to see a fairer business rates system that creates better incentives for businesses to invest in the high street, in comparison with the competition from online giants, so we are working with colleagues in the Treasury on that. We are working with colleagues in the Home Office to address retail crime—there has been a huge surge in shoplifting—which my hon. Friend knows has scarred too many high streets. We are also working with other colleagues, as I referenced in response to the previous question, to try to bring forward a stronger offer to small businesses.

• 5 Sept 2024 · High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  As I have said in response to previous questions, we are looking at that with Treasury colleagues. In opposition, we made commitments to introduce a fairer business rates system. Work on that is being led by Treasury colleagues, who will bring forward proposals in due course.

• 5 Sept 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the question about a banking hub in his constituency. As he will have heard in answers that I gave earlier, reform of the business rates system to tackle some of the egregious disincentives in respect of the need to invest in our high streets and the competition from online giants is something we took seriously in opposition and continue to take seriously in government. Colleagues in the Treasury are working hard to bring forward proposals to reform the business rates system.