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Economic Recovery

I was going to come to that; it is on my list of things that need fixing. We need access to working capital and more domestic orders to provide the volume that lowers the unit cost. We also need to keep control over the tax and regulatory burdens because most international businesses now look globally and do so on the numbers. They look at the costs, the cash flows and how easy it is to do business in each location. They do not have a romantic attachment to one country. I wish that they did—I wish that they shared my romantic attachment to my country and wanted to see success here—but they do not. They will look at the numbers and put the plant, the new jobs and the new projects in the place where they think that the numbers make sense. If the regulatory burden is too high, they will score that against the particular country—and regulation is a cost. Labour Members like to portray me as the man who would have no regulation at all, but that is a grotesque distortion. I have strongly urged stronger regulation of certain things in banking, and of course we need strong safety regulations in manufacturing. However, the overall balance is wrong. There is too much regulation overall. It means that there is too much cost and that we have fewer jobs as a direct result. Some voices on the Labour Benches have taken up an idea that I have launched into the public debate in recent years, which is that we should have regulatory budgets here. They have been adopted in Holland very successfully. The Dutch budgets do not go as far as I would like, because they just concentrate on the Government and regulation costs, whereas I also want them to include the impact cost on the businesses being targeted. However, the model is there and I urge the Government to do it, even at this late stage in this Parliament, because the sooner the signal is sent out that we want to start to curb and limit regulatory costs on businesses, the better it will be for generating new jobs here.