16:40 Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire) (Con)

However, I wish briefly to mention manufacturing. I do not want to talk it down—not for a second. It is right to say that, notwithstanding the current recession, manufacturing has grown over the past 13 years under this Government, but it has shrunk massively as a proportion of gross domestic product; it has done that so much more over this period than it did under the so-called Thatcher years. The Government need to think carefully about their policies to deal with that problem and this pre-Budget report does not do that. It talks a lot about future growth, high-technology industries and low-carbon industries, but many traditional industries, for example brick making in my constituency and glass making, have been hit very hard by decisions in this PBR about alterations to the climate change agreements. We are talking about very sharp stealth taxes on traditional manufacturing industries that will lead to further manufacturing job losses in this country, the import from abroad of the products that would have been made here and carbon leakage—no gain, just loss. I urge the Government to think a bit more about traditional industries, as well as about future industries.

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17:26 Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)

Any reasonable person should welcome the individual measures in the PBR to help industry and businesses, as well as the determination not to jeopardise recovery by cutting Government spending too far or too fast. However, I would have liked the Government to go further on manufacturing. The financial crisis has delivered the sharpest lessons on the dangers of over-reliance on the financial sector and the City of London with all its short-termism. It is vital that we have a whole new emphasis on and encouragement for manufacturing. Our major competitors—Germany, France and Japan—do this. There, it would be inconceivable that only a fraction of the machinery for one of the UK’s biggest renewable energy projects—the London Array—would be supplied by domestic companies. We have simply not taken enough advantage of new or existing industries.

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