Amendment of the law

The right hon. Gentleman, who made a good point earlier and missed my compliment to him, says that he uses them. The man who runs Pimlico Plumbers is exactly my age. He went to school and got nowhere. He was useless at school—I hope that he will not mind my saying that—and left and became a plumber. I should not be giving him an advert, but he was a skilled, good plumber and turned that into a business in which he guaranteed the quality, speed and so on of the plumbing, which is a wonderful thing in its own right. He turned it into a pretty sizeable, effective and successful business. I remember him telling his story in one of the newspapers. He was asked whether he would do it today, and he said no, because he did not like reading and writing, he did not like filling in forms and all that. The very thing that in some ways distinguishes the skilled working class in Britain from the rest of us is that they do not like the literary aspect of small business, although "literary" is hardly the word. They do not like filling in all the forms. I am afraid that that is a major impediment to the growth of small business. There is a deal to be struck with the European Union. A number of other countries in the EU, of which Denmark is one, have arrangements that protect small companies and give them exemptions or limit the size of the issues that they face on some aspects of employment law, health and safety law and so on. There is a deal to be struck across the whole EU, all of which faces this problem. Every company with fewer than 50 people could have certain levels of reduced regulation, or perhaps every company with fewer than 10, so that small businesses can start up. If we really want a solution to the problem of growth in the new era, that will be one big step.