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Preparing Britain's Economy for the Future

With the leave of the House, I shall briefly respond to the debate, although I appreciate that it is not customary for a Minister to do so in a topical debate. We heard interesting contributions from the hon. Members for Banbury (Tony Baldry), and for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood), and from my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson), as well as contributions from Front Benchers, as is usual. My hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon talked principally about three issues: regional development agencies, the private finance initiative and the post bank. On the latter, I know that he has been in discussions with what used to be the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and is now the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. I would not want to say any more on that matter. My hon. Friend made some good points about regional development agencies. I am not sure what the Conservative policy on RDAs is, but I think that it would be a huge strategic blunder to get rid of RDAs. They have been on a learning curve and, overall, they now provide effective assistance to businesses in their regions and contribute to their regional economies. He referred to One NorthEast and some of the success stories of the manufacturing advisory service. I can confirm that those success stories are not confined to the north-east, but can be found across the regions of England. He also talked impressively about the action that companies in the north-east are taking on renewable energy, plastic electronics, industrial biotechnology and electric vehicles. Those are all important areas for the UK economy for the future. I have to say that I do not agree with my hon. Friend that the private finance initiative has let the country down. Under the private finance, many more schools and hospitals have been built than could possibly have been built using conventional financial routes. Independent investigation shows that there is good evidence suggesting that PFI projects are far more likely to be built on time and on budget than those built using conventional procurement, although the Government have made great strides to improve their record on conventional procurement. My hon. Friend also referred to the fact that payments are made over a period of years, because the costs of running a facility are often a large part of the total whole-life costs, which are taken into consideration when we talk about the private finance initiative. If he looks back at the bad old days of conventional procurement under the Conservatives, he will see that often, the attitude was, "design, build and fail to maintain." There was a scandalous record of failing to maintain the fabric of our infrastructure, and private finance has addressed that issue.