Supporting Small Business — House of Commons, 2021-10-19
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Peter Grant (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to contribute to this debate. I commend the Labour Front-Bench team for bringing it to the House and the shadow Chancellor, the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), for her well-informed and often thought-provoking speech. As a lot of Back Benchers wish to contribute to the debate and much of the substance of the motion concerns devolved matters, I shall not detain the House for too long It is important that we recognise the fundamental part played by small businesses in our economy—the economy of the United Kingdom and all its constituent nations. I am reminded that many years ago my good friend Alasdair Morgan, who served with distinction in this place and in the national Parliament of Scotland, addressed a meeting about economic regeneration and pointed out that there were twice as many small businesses in his constituency as there were unemployed people. This was in the days when the unemployment figures were not fiddled, so the numbers were a lot higher than they are just now. Alasdair pointed out that if every small business could be helped to take on less than half a full-time employee, we could abolish unemployment. Instead of helping small businesses to increase their workforce, though, we are far too often faced with a Government who take steps that seem deliberately designed to make it harder for small businesses to take on additional employees Small businesses face structural problems that bigger businesses do not. Although we hear a lot of rhetoric from the Government about supporting small businesses, a lot of the specific difficulties that they face seem to get ignored. I confess that I never appreciated one such difficulty until several businesses in my constituency contacted me independently of each other. What they all had in common was that they had been taken to the cleaners by dodgy suppliers, because the suppliers knew that even a small business that is not much bigger than a single-person operation is regarded as a business and so has no consumer protection. Tech companies and telephone supplies companies—which tended to be the worst, by the way—understood that they could fleece small businesses and get away with it, whereas if they tried the same tactics with individuals, the consumer protection laws, although not ideal, would protect those individuals from being too badly damaged. A couple of long-established small businesses in my constituency were brought very close to closure purely for that reason. The Government might want to look into that Business-to-business enterprise and business-to-business commerce tends to operate on the basis that it is between two equal partners, but when a two-person or three-person operation deals with a multinational corporation with a turnover of billions, that is not an equal contest or an equal deal. Perhaps, in the same way as we need to protect individual citizens from being taken advantage of by bigger suppliers or businesses, we need to do more to give smaller businesses some kind of consumer protection Smaller businesses are much worse affected when there is a recruitment crisis, as there is just now. The Government blame covid, but everybody knows that Brexit is as much to blame as covid. If a company has a workforce of 100 and loses two or three people, it still has 97% of its operation; if a company has a workforce of three and loses a person, that can make the entire business unsustainable and unviable. The clear message that we get from small businesses and organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses is that the labour shortages we see in key sectors of the economy just now have not yet been adequately addressed. I am not convinced that the Government have even adequately recognised them It is all very well to say, "Isn’t it great to have all these vacancies?" but if the people who are looking for work do not have the skills that are needed for those vacancies, or if there are reasons why they cannot take on the work in those jobs, it is quite possible to have very high vacancy levels. Businesses are struggling because they cannot fill those vacancies, and, at the same time, a lot of people are struggling because they cannot get a job that fits with their commitments or responsibilities outside the workplace Much of the debate so far has focused on the retail sector, partly because the traditional picture of the high street is one where there is a lot of retail activity, most of it generated by small independent retailers. That is a great thing to have in a town, but how many of us could walk down any high street in our constituency today and see more than half of the existing businesses independently owned and run, never mind locally owned and run There has been a huge shift in ownership in the retail sector, as there has been elsewhere. The sad thing is that, when times get tough, a big business, which has no soul in the community, is likely to clear out, whereas the smaller business, locally grown and locally based, is much more likely to dig in and to hang on in there for as long as it possibly can. That is why we will often find that, when things get difficult in the retail sector, the small locally owned shops will try to stay open for as long as they can, whereas the big chains will sacrifice 100, 200 or even 300 properties and the jobs that go with them at the stroke of a pen without a thought to the devastation that they are leaving behind. I have a particular situation in Glenrothes. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only town in the United Kingdom where the high street is shut at night. A stroke of genius by the then Conservative Government in the 1990s when the development corporation was being wound up was that they sold what the Americans would call a shopping mall to private owners, and it has been struggling ever since. We do not have a night-time economy because the high street is shut. People cannot get in. If they are in and the doors are locked, they cannot get back out In spite of that, there are still some remarkable success stories in the Kingdom shopping centre in Glenrothes. I was delighted to pay a visit to Jessop Jewellers to congratulate the owner on their 50th anniversary in the one premises in the town. I can highly recommend their products as well by the way, although I may have made a mistake by telling the owner that I am now only a few years away from my ruby wedding, so I think she may be going to contact Mrs Grant about that in the not too distant future A lot of the focus today has been on non-domestic rates. Clearly, because that is devolved, the specific way in which the rates system operates in England does not apply in Scotland. For a number of years, the Scottish Government have had the most generous and most supportive non-domestic rates scheme anywhere in the United Kingdom. We had small business support, whereby small businesses did not pay any rates at all for years, before it was introduced in other parts of the United Kingdom. We still have greater support for our small businesses than any other part of the United Kingdom My message to the Government, and indeed to the Opposition should they be in a position to move into government in the near future, is to continue to support small businesses in England, whether through supporting the domestic rates scheme or something else. That then generates additional funding through Barnett consequentials for the devolved Parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and allows those Parliaments to support our small businesses at the same time We could quite easily have filled this Chamber with a debate that would have run for four or five days if we had invited every Member of Parliament to come in and describe the exact situation for businesses in their constituency. I know that there have been a number of contributions along those lines from Labour Back Benchers already today, but the simple fact is that the party that used to be the party of small business is not recognised as that any more, certainly not by small businesses themselves. I suspect that, in their heart of hearts, it is not recognised as a party of small business by its own members and its own voters. It has lost sight of the part that small businesses have played in creating the economy that we have just now. It has lost sight of the fact that, without small businesses, we cannot have a successful and sustainable economy. [Laughter.] I can hear the laughter from the Conservative Back Benchers—that sums up their attitude. It is the attitude that a lot of small businesses feel they have received from this Government over the past two or three years—[Interruption.]