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Economic Recovery

At the moment, 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds are out of work. As I said earlier, apprenticeship schemes are an enormously important way of training people to get back into the work force. However, the red tape and bureaucracy that we are now suffering from are stifling companies and preventing them from dealing with their problems. The hon. Gentleman must accept that there are now 2 million fewer jobs in manufacturing in this country. That has happened over the past 12 years, and it is not good news. There has not been the necessary investment by this Government in the backbone of British industry and the manufacturing sector that we rely on now and will rely on in the future. Thetford, in my constituency, is a great manufacturing and engineering base. The businesses there want to work and to make a contribution, but every time they take a step forward, they have to take two steps back because of the way the Government treat them over employment, bureaucracy and the regulations with which they have to comply in order to get their products into the marketplace. Of course that adds a burden of cost to those businesses and makes them uncompetitive. The Government have not walked up to that problem, and I do not believe that they will do so. We need a change of Government—we need a Government who understand the dynamics of business and how that affects the economy. If we are going to get out of this recession, businesses need to know that the Government are listening. I do not believe that they are. Businesses are being stifled. I believe that there is now adequate time for the Minister to address these problems. At the end of the day, the people of this nation need to know that they are being listened to. Alas, that did not happen in Monday’s debate. The Minister is an honourable and decent man, and I hope that he will address these issues today. If he cannot answer all our questions, because there are not enough officials in the Box to give him the necessary responses, will he, having read Hansard at the end of the day, have the courtesy to come back to us on every point that we have made? These are serious issues that need to be dealt with, constituency by constituency, as a matter of urgency now, and not by another topical debate in a few weeks’ time.