Britain and its businesses are crying out for a government that values enterprise and can spur jobs and growth. We are in the longest double dip recession since the Second World War. Even if the one-off boost from the Olympics finally brings us out recession, and growth was one per cent in the third quarter, as some are predicting, our economy will simply be the same size as a year ago. We desperately need a government firing on all cylinders to help businesses drive the recovery.
In this context, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, which returns to the House of Commons this week, could have been a great opportunity to put in place the measures necessary for business to plan ahead with long-term certainty.
While there are elements in the Bill with which we agree – we support the creation of a Green Investment Bank, which was set in motion under Labour in government, and want to see improvements to the competition regime – like many business groups, we don’t believe it meets the challenges facing our economy.
It will not provide the crucial boost to demand to get us out of recession and into recovery, but it is also a rag tag of a Bill: incoherent, insufficient and sadly reflective of Vince Cable’s own concerns, articulated in his letter to the Prime Minister earlier this year, that the government lacks a compelling vision for the economy. If you want to find a compelling vision from the government, the Business Secretary’s Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill is not the place to look.
Take copyright as an example. Britain leads the world in creative and cultural industries. One of the reasons for this is the strong, robust and clearly-understood legal framework that this country has in place. But the Bill threatened to undermine this with an unnecessary and unnerving measure which had not been worked through with the sector and which risked undermining growth and investment opportunities, giving the Secretary of State wide-ranging and far-reaching powers to amend, remove or introduce exceptions to copyright without appropriate or adequate Parliamentary scrutiny. Thankfully, last week, finally, the government saw sense and heeded the concerns we and the creative industries sector had raised, and has performed a welcome U-turn on these proposals.
However, it should use this opportunity to follow this up with U-turns on a whole host of other unwelcome measures within the Bill. Employment rights are a particular concern: ministers seem to believe that protections for people at work are the reason we are in recession, while in reality we already have the third most liberalised labour market in the developed world. According to a recent survey by BIS itself, only five per cent of small firms cited regulation as the main barrier to success, while 37% identified the economy as their primary obstacle.
The government has brought forward no evidence that making it easier to sack people produces economic growth. Indeed, when Adrian Beecroft, author of the No 10-commissioned report on employment law reform, came before MPs to give evidence, he admitted that his views “were based on conversations with a sample of people, which is not statistically valid”. Ever had a conversation with a bloke down the pub? Well that’s how government policy on employees’ rights is being devised.
Ministers’ stance on equality legislation is equally concerning. Quite what measures to water down the Equality and Human Rights Commission have to do with an Enterprise Bill needs questioning. This would seem to be further confirmation, if this were needed, of the return of the nasty party, aided and abetted by the Lib Dems.
It is disingenuous of Cable to suggest that these changes are merely “legislative tidying up”. The Liberal Democrat founder of the BAME Councillors Association, Cllr Lester Holloway, wrote in the Guardian in August that he was “deeply ashamed” at what Vince Cable was doing to the Commission, while Issan Ghazni, Chair of Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats, has warned Lib Dem ministers that the changes in the Bill “amount to effectively abolishing the EHRC by stealth, which could potentially reverse progress made on equalities over the past decades.”
The measures in the Bill, together with new amendments tabled last week by the government which weaken protections against third party harassment of employees, in direct contradiction to what Cable said to my Labour colleague Kate Green at the Second Reading of the Bill, will make life even harder for thousands of staff who run the risk of prejudice, abuse and harassment whilst doing their work.
We all want to see the economy grow and businesses thrive. As Chuka Umunna said in a letter to Cable last month, we would be keen to work with the government on a cross party basis to address the issues that matter to firms, to boost recovery and pull this country out of recession. But the rag bag of measures in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill fails to meet this challenge and, rather than helping business, makes the job of recovering from the recession made in Downing Street that bit more difficult.
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