Hudson Brett: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHudson Brett: New Zealand Business Number Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 09 March 2016. Volume:711;Page:9548. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]BRETT HUDSON (National): It is a great pleasure to rise to speak on this New Zealand Business Number Bill in this reading. I had the fortune to serve on the Commerce Committee which looked at this bill. We returned it with some small amount of changes.I have listened to the debate in this reading and I would just like to cover a couple of points first about what the bill is meant to achieve and then I would like to address a couple of the concerns that were raised. The bill supports the Business Growth Agenda of this Government helping to make small and medium sized businesses more efficient and helping to reduce the cost of compliance particularly the cost of doing business with the Government. We have this odd situation of course where for ever businesses have had to have separate representational credentials with every Government agency they have to do business with. So a change of address a change of any matter of detail a change of phone number and that business has to take a great deal of effort to update any number of agencies it may do business with individually and repetitively over the course of its business lifetime.The New Zealand Business Number Bill will provide a central way of maintaining some basic company information—the information that is already public—but will do so in a way where a business will have to give that information only once and every Government agency over time that it does business with will be able to draw from that source of information. It will also mean that not only is it easy for the business to do its business with those agencies but if it should need to change something—an address detail a phone number detail some small amount of material change—the business will need to make the change in only one location. It will be with the agency of its choice and that information will effectively filter through to all the other agencies.This of course means that the small or medium sized business can spend more time focusing on what it does which is providing products or services to its customers and spend less time actually dealing with New Zealand Government agencies which is exactly the way things should be. I think it is a very commendable objective and I am very confident that if enacted this legislation will achieve that.There are a couple of concerns that were raised that I just want to touch upon. One of them was the pace with which agencies may adopt the business number. The reality is that in order to participate the agencies will have to adjust their IT systems and applications to be able to make reference to this new 13-digit New Zealand Business Number.We could just have every agency immediately drop what they are doing and immediately undertake a project—in some cases quite a small one; in many cases quite a comprehensive one—to ensure that their systems can interface with this New Zealand Business Number. That is as simple as having a call centre application with a human being on the phone being able to draw upon that business number to identify a business that has called into them or a web application being able to call upon it or any other agent or employee within that agency being able to look up and verify and use that business number information. We could have just demanded that they all do it at once and they all drop other priorities things that are more pressing on their programmes of work and spend a great deal of money to do something right now. So it appears to me a very sensible approach that there will be a small number of agencies—about seven I think in total—that will come on quite rapidly but others will join this as they go through making system updates over time.The second point was around why we cannot just use a number that already exists today—like your IRD number for instance because virtually everyone has got one. It sounds good at face value but if we think about the reality of this if an agency surrendered its ID number as the number for all other agencies to use that would actually constrain the way on its internal systems—not the ones that are actually the source or the look-up point for this business number information but its own internal systems—that it could then use that number adapt it over time and how its applications could call upon that.By using a new and separate number it gives the agencies the freedom to do what they need to do inside their own activities with their existing identifiers and for them to all then call upon this new number so that the customer can continue to benefit from a range of services that will be developed over time but to do so in a way where they can all still benefit and make use of the New Zealand Business Number Bill. So I think it would be a major mistake to have picked a single agency to have taken its unique identifier and to have used that as the identifier across every agency. It would create more problems in the future than it would solve right now.In concluding I would say that this is a very pragmatic sensible bill. It will help to reduce expense time and effort for New Zealand small and medium sized businesses and over time for all businesses across New Zealand and I commend it to the House.