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Economic Downturn (Unemployment)

That is exactly right. Of course the Government want to ensure that we are given the glossiest picture, but in reality the hon. Gentleman is right: the probability is that the unemployment count is higher than the official figures suggest for the reasons—among others—to which he has just alluded. The Government need to think carefully about how they can encourage the banks to lend more. From the end of last year to this year’s Budget and with great fanfare and panoply, the Government announced seven different schemes to try to help businesses through the recession. Apart from one or two schemes, such as the car scrappage scheme, they have had a pretty mixed and limited success. During an earlier intervention I asked the Minister about the trade credit scheme, and the figures on that are worth repeating. The £5 billion scheme was announced with great fanfare by the Chancellor in the Budget. However, as the Financial Times reported on 1 May 2009, only 52 businesses have taken up £7 million out of that £52 billion. At a time when businesses desperately need that trade credit, it seems that something is going wrong with the administration of such schemes. Although the intent in announcing that scheme may have been good, as so often happens with this Government, the delivery has been very poor. The Minister said that he was going to mention other big trade sectors in the south-west, but I suspect that the number of interventions meant he did not have time. Perhaps I may mention one or two of them? Tourism is probably the biggest single business in the south-west. In 2009, there was a decline of 10 per cent. in the tourism figures for the south-west. I suspect that tourism provides a lot of jobs in every one of our constituencies, particularly for low-skilled people, and it is therefore a vital business to the whole of the south-west. Business tourism has been particularly badly affected, with a drop of 20 per cent. I have always thought that successive Governments have not paid enough attention to tourism, which is the world’s largest single business, and that the UK could do much better at it. The subject has always been spread across various different Departments, Government regions and county and local district councils, and it is something on which a Government should focus more because it would be of huge benefit to the country. In my role as the international trade spokesman for the Opposition, I would like to point out that we have the largest trade deficit in our history at the moment and that tourism is one of those areas where we can start to close that deficit.