Industry (Government Support)

It is a pleasure to catch your eye, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to see you in the Chair. I am glad to see that you have adopted the traditional attire of the Deputy Speaker. It has been very enjoyable this afternoon to listen to the maiden speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) and the hon. Members for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher), for Bolton West (Julie Hilling), for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass)—the latter was a particularly charming speech. I agreed especially with the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell, and less so with all of the others. I wanted to speak in this debate on business because I grew up in a small family business. In a sense, that is what brought me into politics. It taught me the values of enterprise and responsibility as I watched that small business grow. It was my first job and it has informed the way in which I think about the world and how it operates. I still remember the occasion when I first realised the impact of Government regulation on small businesses and the amount of time that that could take up to no particularly beneficial effect. The Health and Safety Executive visited my family business—an office-based computer software business—and took two days of senior management time and its own staff's time to search for something that breached the health and safety code. I am sure that many small business people across the country will recognise that scenario. After two days, all that they had found was a bottle of bleach in the cupboard under the sink in the small office kitchen and no sign saying that it was there. This was put into the report and I remember laminating the sign that still hangs above the sink and says, "There is bleach in the cupboard. Please do not drink it." That gave the company a clean bill of health from the HSE. What a waste of resources, of management time and of the HSE staff time. I was therefore delighted to hear that the Government will review health and safety laws. We all recognise the importance of health and safety—indeed, it was a Conservative Government who introduced the Factory Acts—but the over-bearing, centralised, top-down, intrusive, suspicious, expansive and expensive health and safety system that has grown up in the past few years needs to be reviewed. I have given just one example of something that has happened frequently over the past 13 years. The end result has been the economic crisis that we are now in and that members of both parties on this side of the House are trying to face up to and solve for the future good of our country. I have been astonished that in this debate Opposition Members have joined in a leftward march away from the centre of political debate, ignoring entirely the depth of the crisis that we face. Even the former Minister, the hon. Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) could not specify a single reduction in spending in his Department, despite saying that he had identified £500 million of cuts.