Industry (Government Support)

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for your tutorial on how to be a good parliamentarian. I fear that many of us will let you down before we have learned to do our jobs properly. I came into this debate to listen, not to speak, but I have found myself compelled to get up and speak on what I think is an incredibly important matter. I apologise for being in and out of the Chamber. I have had a huge visit from the 3rd Regiment Royal Military Police, who I then took for tea. They were marking the maiden speeches out of 10. I am not going to say who did well, but they were quite impressed by some speeches on both sides of the House. I felt compelled to speak because I have a business background. I went to that bastion of capitalism, Harvard business school, but that was 20 years ago and I have been somewhat cleansed since then. I have had many years of working in consultancy, finance and running my own small business. Then I lived in the countryside and raised my children. On my campaign, I had a reputation for speaking from notes on the back of a fag packet. As this is a no-smoking zone, I have had an upgrade and am speaking from scribbles on the back of some very nice House of Commons paper. I want to make a couple of specific points and to say why I felt compelled to get up and speak. I am really worried, because I do not think that Opposition Members understand the fundamental reason why we are here today or how Government should support business. We hear lots about micro-interventions and RDAs. Everybody knows that if one visits one's RDA one will find that they have wonderful and often overlapping agendas with many other parts of the public and private sectors, but they are not lean, honed, efficient and joined-up mechanisms. In many cases, they are the worst bastions of the unaccountable and unelected public sector. They might, in many cases, be doing good work, and that is why they might well have a role to play in many places, as the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) suggested, but they are not the best way in which to spend precious pounds of taxpayers' money. However, the Opposition appear to think that that is the right thing to do. The Opposition also think that micromanaging the economy is the right thing to do. Let me just reference a couple of the myriad schemes that were put in place to support business during the recession. The £10 billion working capital guarantee scheme was designed to underwrite portfolios of loans held by banks, which is such an important part of unlocking the crunched credit system, but it made only £2 billion-worth of guarantees in the time that it was operational. It lent only 20% of its capacity, which suggests that it was not doing what business needed. Then we had the £75 million capital for enterprise fund, which was designed to do what we would all like to do—get high-tech, high-grade start-ups off the ground—but it lent only half of that money in the time that it was operational. That again suggests that there was a disconnect between what the then Government wanted to do and what business really needed.