It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown). I listened with interest to his points about cash retentions, particularly in relation to the construction industry. We have been looking at the issue in the all-party parliamentary group on the built environment, particularly the fact that such cash retentions do not apply to residential construction and whether that should be considered.
I rise to speak in support of the Bill because the most important thing that we can be doing at this time is talking about enterprise and how we further it. Let us
all remember, however, that the best people to run British business are businessmen and businesswomen, and that while many of us in this House may well have run businesses ourselves in the past—I was a director of an advertising agency—that is not our role here today. That role, whether as Ministers such my right hon. Friend the Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise or as parliamentarians, is to make sure that we have the right environment for business to thrive.
The Bill has the credentials to suggest that the Government are doing exactly the right things to make sure that British business is thriving. They have cut corporation tax to 20%, and it is now the lowest in the G20. We have the fastest growing economy in the G7. We are building the sorts of trade links that unfortunately were neglected for too many years before this Government came to power. It is important that we acknowledge this up front, because our role is to make sure that we create the environments for businesses to succeed and that we have a Government who understand how best to do that. Our Government do have a good track record on that, and perhaps that is why we are best placed in Europe in terms of starting businesses or growing new businesses.
I urge the Minister to assure me in her closing remarks that the Government are continuing to work collaboratively not only with local authorities but with our local enterprise partnerships, because through such collaborative work my constituency is now enjoying some of the lowest levels of unemployment we have ever seen. We have secured, with the tenacity of our local enterprise partnership, designation for Basing View as an enterprise zone, with the opportunity to create thousands more new jobs through the sorts of targeted interventions that the Bill sets out. We are working with award-winning organisations such as SETsquared, which is a business accelerator helping, I hope, hundreds of new businesses to come to Basingstoke and—thinking about the comments of the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright)—helping more businesses successfully to access finance.
There are two other aspects of the Bill that I want to talk about. The first is the importance of the Bill in supporting an even better environment for businesses to access the right people and the right practices to succeed. I applaud the measure in the Bill to further strengthen apprenticeships, and the commitment by the Government to support more than 3 million new apprenticeships. In my constituency in the past five years we have seen 4,000 people start apprenticeships. That is important because it will help to solve some of the productivity issues that we know we still have to resolve in Britain.
If this ambitious scale of apprenticeships is to be achieved, we need to ensure that the funding of apprenticeships works in the way that Ministers want it to do. I was pleased to hear the Secretary of State for Education say that she will do more to make sure that schools make children aware of the benefits of apprenticeships. I would like to hear more from the Minister about how we can ensure that, for organisations such as Basingstoke College of Technology in my constituency, which is seeing a 9% annual increase in the number of apprenticeships secured, the funding is available to support this dynamic growth in apprenticeships. There are at present more businesses wanting to place
apprentices than there are apprentices coming forward. We need a flexible way of ensuring the availability of funding to meet that increased demand and need.
The second aspect is the provision for establishing a small business commissioner—an interesting way of trying to overcome the problems that many hon. Members have talked about in relation to late payments. In Hampshire we have on average £109,000-worth of outstanding payments to small businesses—a figure supplied by the Federation of Small Businesses. Further measures in that area are to be welcomed. I urge the Minister to consider how we can ensure flexibility within these measures to adapt the role of the small business commissioner if we find that new and different ways could be used to support businesses struggling as a result of late payments.
There are many provisions in the Bill. It contains a further set of measures that will help support business, and I hope it secures the full support of the House tonight.
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