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Industry and the Environment

May I say, Madam Deputy Speaker, how courteous you are and how appropriate it is for you to reprimand me for failing to use the right language, particularly when Mr. Speaker only recently issued a wonderful letter about the conventions and courtesies of the House? I am saying that our country’s economy is not in the state that many people would have us believe. With the country increasingly living beyond its means, the Government will have to face a day of reckoning in the near future. Before I finish, I want to emphasise the important role of manufacturing industry. I said earlier that I would refer briefly to the problems of MG Rover, which broke out just as the country went into the general election campaign. I am deeply worried, as are Members on both sides of the House, that a group of four people who inherited and took over huge industrial capital assets could end up so remarkably wealthy, when many thousands of people in the west midlands ended up without a job. There is something fundamentally wrong with our system when failure can result in the people who created it walking away with a huge package of money and assets, while those who have actually created the wealth and been part of an important manufacturing sector of the UK have lost their jobs. I am pleased to hear that the economy is, as the Government state, doing so well and that businesses will seek to employ some of those who lost their jobs in the MG Rover plant at Longbridge. However, will the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs tell us in her reply what action the Government will take against those who were responsible for bringing about the collapse of that plant, particularly as they have walked away from this sad saga with millions of pounds? If we are to believe in capitalism, as I do, it must be an acceptable form of capitalism whereby profits are shared not only by those who take executive decisions, but by those who do the work on the shop floor to produce the goods that the country needs. I believe that the Government have a duty to do so and I hope that the Secretary of State will, in her reply, deal with the sad circumstances of MG Rover. I must say, as a long-serving Member, that I am surprised that those problems did not feature more strongly in the election campaign. It is important to view the subject in a wider context. Many people work hard to generate wealth, but if a company fails, perhaps through bad management or bad executive decisions, those at the top often walk away with huge packages totalling more than the average working man and woman in this country earn in a lifetime, while those who hew the coal at the coal face walk away with very little. Increasingly, people are beginning to have doubts about the effectiveness of capitalism. As I said, I am a Conservative who believes in the generation of wealth, but I want it to be fairly distributed. Before I finish, I want to raise another subject that is relevant to industry. So many people in private industry are finding that the purchasing power of their pension is being dramatically reduced. Part of the reason for that—I hope that the Government will be prepared to admit their responsibility—is the way in which the pension funds were depleted in 1997, and have continued to be so to the tune of more than £5 billion a year. In eight years, more than £40 billion has been removed from this country’s pension funds—a situation exacerbated by the fall in the stock market. Tens of thousands of people throughout the country are now looking forward to a much less prosperous retirement than would otherwise have been the case. Will there be any meaningful move to try to help those people? Will the Government introduce measures to provide meaningful, real incentives for people to save for their retirement and to prevent companies from abusing their pension funds, often to assist their cash-flow problems? As the Secretary of State knows, just over the border in Derbyshire, Ferodo faces a crisis over pension provision. I have constituents who work there and they raised the matter with me. I believe that the success of industry is essential to the success of pensions, but we should not allow people to be deprived of the pension for which they have saved for so many years of their working lives to ensure that they retire with a decent standard of life. This debate is important. We can range widely, as I have, and we should never forget that manufacturing industry is the only sustainable source of non-inflationary economic growth. We should ensure that before any measure introduced in this place reaches the statute book, its impact on industry and the productive sector of our economy is properly understood.