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Banking (Responsibility and Reform)

That is a very good point. Perhaps the hon. Lady will be interested to know that I am leading the establishment of an enterprise investment scheme fund in Bedford to get local people to invest in jobs and create businesses in Bedford. Government Members believe in practical action to support entrepreneurs and jobs, not the empty rhetoric that we get from Opposition Front Benchers. I invite her to Bedford to see the successes that we are having and from which perhaps her party can learn. The shadow Business Secretary made some interesting points, and I only wish that he had had time to speak more about his idea for moving forward with a UK equivalent of the small business investment company in the United States. That is an interesting direction of travel from the Labour party. It is always hard in a free society to explain or justify why some people earn more—sometimes fantastically more—than other people. That justification can be secure only when clearly based on merit—the merit that comes from taking a risk that works out or from delivering exceptional performance. It is clear, however, that throughout large swathes of the economy, those two forms of merit have been losing hold in the setting of compensation in our country. My hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris) spoke eloquently about that disconnect between the financial sector and our entrepreneurs. I know that the Government are committed to changing that. It is sensible to look for measures that focus remuneration more on merit, but that is precisely what the Government's recommendations seek to do. The problem with the speeches from Opposition Members was that they could not define the problem that they were trying to solve. Were they trying to solve the problem of compensation in state-owned enterprises? Were they trying to solve the problem of compensation in banking? Were they just hostile to high compensation generally in the economy? They could not define the problem owing to the different points of view among Opposition Members. Some call for a return to the rhetoric of the 1980s, attacking people for earning too much money and trying to draw false and upsetting comparisons between people who get paid a lot and those who cannot find a job. In this country, we need to support the risk takers and the entrepreneurs to create the jobs that people in my constituency and constituencies around the country want. The promotion of an anti-business rhetoric will be harmful. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) said, the reaction to Mr Hester's bonus sent the unwanted signal to business that this country was anti-business. As many have said today, Members on both sides of the House have a responsibility to make it clear that that is not the case and that we all want business to be strong in our communities. Strengthening shareholders' responsibilities will be central to that. One of the perhaps unintended consequences of the raid on pension funds by the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) was to weaken the ability of shareholders, particularly pension fund holders, to hold boards to account over remuneration. There was a change in the ownership of shares, which increasingly went offshore, while those custodians of long-term interests—our insurance companies and pension funds—had their voices and representation weakened on boards. It is right, therefore, for the Government to consider in detail how to strengthen shareholder representation and control over compensation in general. Several speakers made the connection between banks and support for small business. I ask the Government to be bolder in looking for alternatives to banks in meeting the challenge of financing our small businesses. We need to consider ways of growing bond markets for small business, and we need to go even further than we already have by adopting innovative schemes for promoting equity financing for our small and medium-sized businesses. There is no more honourable a thing for people with money today to do than putting it into equity and our small businesses, and the Government have already provided tax incentives for them to do so. I only encourage the Minister to do more. On credit easing, will the Minister be cautious about the ability of Governments to stimulate the economy in the short term? By the time that Governments get round to deciding what to do, often the problem has passed. However, credit easing presents another opportunity, which is to use financing, through a credit easing facility, to reduce some of the long-term debt obligations in this country. As the Minister knows, I have spoken before about the possibility of using either some or all of the credit easing financing to create a future fund and unburden the next generation of taxpayers of some of the tax that would otherwise be needed to meet the unfunded public pension liability. We must look to the long term when considering how to fund our small businesses, and not always think that the Government have the answer in the short term. They rarely do.