UK Parliament / Open data

Reducing Costs for Businesses

Proceeding contribution from Lord Grayling (Conservative) in the House of Commons on Tuesday, 11 January 2022. It occurred during Opposition day on Reducing Costs for Businesses.

I refer the House to my entry in the Register.

I have great respect for the hon. Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds). He deserves to sit in the front rank of his party, but I have to differ from him when he says that this Government have provided inadequate support to the business sector. I take him back to 2010. Both parties have faced a crisis; Labour had the financial crisis, we have had the pandemic. Both parties have had to spend hundreds of billions of pounds to prop up the economy. But back in 2010, when I became Employment Minister, unemployment was 2.7 million and the pressures were all upwards. Today, in the wake of the pandemic, having just before the pandemic managed to get unemployment back to the levels of the 1970s, and having feared that the pandemic would take us back to where we had begun, actually we have ended up, as we are, I hope, coming to the end of the pandemic, with unemployment heading down towards 4% and hopefully below, and significant numbers of vacancies in our economy. That has happened because Ministers took the right decisions at the right time and targeted their support in the best possible way. It is not possible to do everything for everyone—

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
706 c517 
Session
2021-22
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
Back to top