Industry and Exports (Financial Support) Bill

I was struck over the weekend by the applicability to today's debate of comments made in the Health Committee. Let me remind the House of the conclusions of the Health Committee. Its report was""highly critical of policy design and implementation, which… has made meaningful evaluation of initiatives impossible."" It went on to say that""governments have rushed in with insufficient thought, a lack of clear objectives, have failed to collect adequate baseline data, made numerous changes and not allowed time for policies to bed in."" It went on to recommend that policies be introduced""with clearly defined goals and robust measurements for success."" Before we roll this Bill forward, relevant questions need to be asked about some of those issues and how they apply to the entirety of the Government's approach to the industrial and business sector. We need to know what the Government are trying to achieve with this money. I have read the descriptions in section 8 of the Industrial Development Act 1982 and they are obviously necessary to release the money, but they should not be sufficient to release it. We need to understand the Government's strategy; it must not be hidden behind words in continuing discussions that lead to no action being taken. It is particularly relevant for us to ask about the context of the disbursement funds, about how the Government view the business and industrial landscape and what it will be like post-recession. It is pretty clear from numerous Government statements that they think that the landscape post-recession will be very similar to what it was pre-recession. I do not believe that that will be the case at all. There will be fundamental changes in the way people deal with credit, for example, yet we see no initiative or great thinking to take that forward. A number of hon. Members have picked up on the issue of the car industry. Money has been thrown at it, but what has it actually achieved? The Minister may recall that in a debate on a statement of 27 January, I put it to him:""I have listened to the statement twice and I am none the wiser as to how many new cars the money will help to sell. Would the Minister like to tell us?"—[Official Report, 27 January 2009; Vol. 487, c. 179.]" It is, perhaps, not surprising that the Minister did not like to tell us. He merely said that it was all in the form of guarantees, and that therefore everything was all right. I do not think that answers of that kind take us much further towards being able to judge whether the money is appropriate and whether it is being well spent. I should like the Minister to confirm that the car makers are yet to receive any of the money, and also to set out the framework in which its use will be evaluated: the conditions, the success criteria, how value for money will be judged, and the method and speed of implementation. If the Minister thinks that he has answered the value-for-money question simply by saying that guarantees are better than grants, he has failed to appreciate that the House deserves to see below the top level, and to know how value for money is to be established as individual amounts are disbursed. All this bears the signs of pure, blind panic. We have seen a bank recapitalisation which is failing to get money moving and to establish the necessary conditions. Other Members have already spoken of the confusion and difficulty facing, in particular, small and medium-sized enterprises. That was brought home to me on Thursday evening when, in my constituency, I hosted a recession networking event. I brought together businesses and local providers of services, in both the public and private sectors, to help companies in recession. Making sense of the help being offered by the 20 or so representatives had been an impossible task for many businesses—and why should they have to do it themselves anyway? Why should things not be in clear English and easy to understand? I must tell the Minister that the event was a great success. I believe that it was attended by just under 150 people, and I think that they all benefited from talking to the providers as well as to each other. But is it not an indictment of the situation we are in, which the Government have made no real effort to improve, that 150 people felt the need to attend such an event because they could not work out what to do by themselves?