I thank the Backbench Business Committee for securing this debate. As numerous Members have noted, it has felt rather like finding a good pub on a long walk when we are feeling weary and looking for a welcome break. The debate has been conducted in a very good-humoured manner throughout. I was first elected at the end of the coalition Government, and pubs was the only vote I believe that that Government lost in all those years, whereas today we are united on this topic but it is just all the other votes we seem to be losing.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) for sponsoring the debate. Like the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), he spoke about the Black Country’s long association with beer and brewing. I grew up in the shadow of Banks’s brewery in Wolverhampton and spent my teenage years, like the hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), working in pubs that my hon. Friend’s constituents might drive out to Staffordshire and Shropshire to visit. I also thank the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) for her contribution; I have had a few drinks near her constituency in the Potteries, not least on the night I lost my first election in 2010. Given the scale of the result I probably should have drunk a pint from the Titanic Brewery.
But I do not want to be too negative about what we find today, because there are many great positives about beer and the brewing industry across the United Kingdom, many of which have been heard over the past couple of hours, not least the flowering of the British craft beer industry. That has brought fresh life to the market, creating a new generation of entrepreneurs, many of whom I know from my own constituency, a former brewing town, Newark-on-Trent, which has seen several new breweries created in recent years. This has given people across the length and breadth of the country unprecedented choice and, as we have heard, word has spread across the world and exports have risen very significantly.