Today the Government have brought before us an exciting and much needed Bill that, if passed, will significantly and beneficially impact on enterprise in my constituency and, indeed, throughout our United Kingdom.
I would like to focus on the particular benefits brought by part 2 regulators and the business impact targets. This measure is an excellent way for the Conservative Government to help fulfil our manifesto commitments to our country by promoting a much better environment for business and enterprise to thrive.
As we have heard from my hon. Friends, Labour’s record on regulation is appalling. When last in government, Labour oversaw the creation of six new regulations every working day, and that new red tape cost British businesses billions of pounds from 1998 onwards. Indeed, Labour Members do not understand the needs of businesses—and, worse still, they appear not to want to understand those needs on the basis of what we have heard from the Opposition Benches today. Under the last Labour Government, taxes on businesses were too high, and by all accounts, Labour planned to increase the rates of national insurance.
Achieving £10 billion of regulatory savings for businesses over the course of this Parliament is a key manifesto commitment—I stood on it—of this Conservative Government. This will build on the success of the previous Government’s deregulation agenda, which itself delivered £10 billion of deregulatory savings over the course of the last Parliament.
Businesses constantly tell me and, I am sure, many Members that the actions of regulators are as at least as important as the content of legislation in determining their experience of regulation. For example—and this was mentioned earlier—according to recent business perception surveys, 46% of businesses agreed that preparing for inspections or dealing with inspectors was burdensome, 49% considered that they did not receive good enough
advice from regulators to make confident investment decisions, and 73% of scale-ups thought that they would be able to grow faster if dealing with regulators were easier.