Andrew Griffith MP: speeches

Speeches

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  If the hon. Lady wants to talk about what the Government are doing to help employment, I would love to hear her intervention.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I will, but I suspect that I should then make a bit more progress.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I hope that the hon. Lady is rising to commit herself to repealing them too.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is exactly right. Let us be optimistic: we are here to celebrate our high streets, and perhaps all is not lost. The Chancellor could yet repent and reverse some of her most damaging policies, or adopt our policy of cutting business rates entirely for 250,000 high-street businesses.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I am enormously concerned. I was concerned when I woke up this morning, and I am even more concerned after hearing the intervention from our Chancellor: no certainty, confidence plummeting, and the promise of more taxes to follow.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  So many family businesses will be devastated by the family business death tax introduced by the Labour party. We often hear about the plight of farmers and food producers, but family businesses are even more numerous. If you have survived Labour’s job tax, if you have survived Labour’s more than doubling of business rates, if you have survived the red tape— so much more of it—that Labour is imposing, all that awaits you when you seek to pass your business or your family farm on to the next generation is Labour’s family business death tax. That is why, as part of our plan for the high street, we will repeal those damaging measures.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman must have overstayed oral questions to the Chancellor, because what we are doing in the Chamber now is celebrating, cherishing and supporting our high streets, not accusing businesses in our constituencies of tax evasion. However, I am sure he has impressed his Treasury colleagues, who are never shy about trying to transfer wealth from the private sector to the less productive public sector.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  You do not improve workers’ rights by making them unemployed, creating a generation of jobless young people who cannot find their way into gainful employment. And do you know what? It is not just the Conservatives who are saying that. Even that finishing school for socialists, the Resolution Foundation, opposes Labour’s Bill because of the unemployment that it will yield. What this shows us is that the Government are simply not serious about business. We Conservatives get it. Many of us have worked in business ourselves, and we understand that businesses take risks, create wealth and employ millions. That is why we introduced business rates relief before this Labour Government cut it, and it is why we will introduce a 100% relief for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses, taking 250,000 high street premises out of business rates entirely.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the choices that businesses face are enormously difficult. Every single day, they have to ask themselves whether they should put up prices to try to claw back some of the damage—some of that £25 billion cost—thereby increasing inflation and keeping interest rates higher for longer, pushing up the cost of living. Do they reduce the number of employees or the hours per employee, or do they simply fold in the face of disincentives, a lack of support and headwinds rather than tailwinds? Do they shut up shop before the Chancellor’s next intervention heaps on more and more burdens?

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I will make some progress. Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the Queen’s Head in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), which brought home to me the challenges that that business is facing. Of course, all hon. Members in this Chamber represent constituencies, and traders on high streets in places like Arundel, Midhurst, Petworth, Pulborough, Storrington and Henfield have worked tirelessly throughout history to make our high streets and our communities what they are today, but—from the unacceptable time it has taken to fix the fire-damaged Angel Inn in Midhurst to the imposition of higher parking charges by Liberal Democrat councillors—government is too often a headwind, rather than a tailwind.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. One only has to look at the wording of the motion we are debating and that of the Government amendment. We Conservatives talk about lifting burdens, removing business rates, cutting red tape, and taking more action to address crime on our high streets. The Labour party talks about compulsory purchase, more grants and more subsidies—it is not interested in lifting the burden on business.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend makes another excellent point. I recently had the wonderful opportunity to meet Dr Arthur Laffer, whose pioneering economic research showed that reducing taxes increased not only the growth rate of the economy but, as a consequence, the tax take to the Treasury. That is a very important point about incentives and what we in this House can do.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I am sure that the hon. Lady will wish to take that matter up with Ministers through the appropriate channels, but there will not be many fun factories on our high streets when they feel the burden of Labour’s further changes. Running a business—something that Conservative Members understand—is not easy at the best of times, but thanks to this Chancellor and this Government, these are far from the best of times. For the average pub, business rates have soared from £4,000 per year to over £9,000, and this morning, we have learned that the Chancellor is coming back for more. A year ago, she promised that she was done—that her tax raid on business was the end of it. She is leading us down the garden path. Spending is out of control, and she expects taxpayers, including businesses, to clean up her mess.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes exactly the right point: it was a devastating concoction of the Chancellor’s last year, and I believe that I am right in saying that UKHospitality calibrated the figures and estimated that 98,000 jobs have been lost across the hospitality sector. How proud this Government must be of costing mostly young and often vulnerable people their first chance!

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I will make some progress. We have talked about the damage being done by the Chancellor, and we have talked about business rates and our plan to reform them and give the high street a chance, but there is more. Our cheap power plan will cut energy bills by 20%, with the average restaurant saving a very real £5,000 and the average pub saving £1,100. Perhaps Labour Members would like to emulate that energy plan. We will save the high street from the scourge of crime and shoplifting, and early release of prisoners, by hiring a further 10,000 police officers, tripling the use of stop and search and reversing Labour’s release of criminals to make our high streets safer. We will repeal those most damaging elements of the Employment Rights Bill, and rather than paying lip service to cutting red tape, we will take a chainsaw to bureaucracy and blockages to business, from planning to licensing to IR35, and so much more. We stand with the makers, not the takers: the people who put their time, energy and money on the line to make our communities a better place. We know that one cannot build prosperity by punishing those who create it, that one cannot revive our high streets by taxing them into submission, and that one cannot protect a worker by bankrupting their employer. Our message to the Government today is simple: give businesses the confidence they need; remove the threat of taxes hanging over their head; listen to the voice of business; and support our plans to support our brilliant high streets.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend has made exactly the right point. It is genuinely bewildering—and we will see this again tomorrow—that when every single major business group in the country urges the Government not to proceed with their damaging unemployment Bill, when Labour think-tanks urge them not to proceed with that Bill, and when not a single business in favour of that Bill can be named by a Labour Minister—other than the Co-op and one that is overseas—they still seek to proceed with it.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  That was a valiant attempt to return to past history, but on this side of the House we are looking forward. Our plan for the high street would remedy the damage that has been done not over past years but over past months, and even again this morning—the collapse in confidence caused by our Chancellor.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend represents his constituents in Salisbury diligently, and makes exactly the same point. With respect, the Government have not understood business, and the Treasury did not pause to consider, or to conduct an impact assessment. In particular, the capricious change in thresholds from £9,100 down to £5,000, without any impact assessment from the Treasury, has done immense damage to high-street businesses. The Government should hang their head in shame.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  To coin a phrase, we are not going to balance the books of local government on the back of entrepreneurial businesses that are keeping our high streets alive, providing services for the community and allowing our economy to grow.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree. We are all here individually today representing our fantastic constituencies, our wonderful high streets and our entrepreneurial businesses—those residents and constituents who seek to be employed and contribute to a growing part of our economy. That is why we in the Opposition are here to talk about our plan to save the high street, not to make the sort of partisan points that we are hearing from Labour Members.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House calls on the Government to support high streets by cutting public expenditure to facilitate the abolition of business rates for thousands of retail, hospitality and leisure premises on the high street; and further calls on the Government not to proceed with the Employment Rights Bill to avoid hiring freezes and job losses, to remove red tape for businesses, including by reviewing IR35, to cut energy bills for businesses and to tackle retail crime, thereby protecting key pillars of local communities including post offices, pubs and pharmacies. I am pleased to move the motion in my name and that of the Leader of the Opposition. We celebrate and support our high streets—their independent shops, the warm refuge they provide from loneliness, and the way that they incubate new business. They bring us together as communities, provide markets for local farmers and food producers, offer venues for street festivals and often afford young people their first step on the career ladder, but across Britain’s high streets, the lights are dimming, the laughter in our pubs is falling silent, and shutters on shops are coming down for the last time. When high streets thrive, communities thrive. When our high streets retreat, so does civic society. We Conservatives profoundly value our high street enterprises, which is why one of our first actions in government will be to abolish business rates for thousands of retail, hospitality and leisure businesses. In July, the Chancellor said that she will make the UK “the best place to start and grow a business”. —[ Official Report , 29 July 2024; Vol. 752, c. 1051.] Well, goodness me, she has an odd way of showing it! In her very first Budget, the Chancellor slapped businesses with a £25 billion tax raid, and with a national insurance jobs tax, which hit high-street businesses the hardest, and meant that it cost business owners more simply to give someone a job.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I enjoy a full English as much as I suspect my colleague does. It is not just breakfast that is under threat; it is also lunch, supper, tea, dinner and the great British pub.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I have so many wonderful contributions to take from my colleagues. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will have his chance later.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  Rather than giving away our fishing for 12 years and getting nothing in return because of a dogma, or spending time on international affairs—giving away the British Indian Ocean Territory and paying for the privilege—the Government should be prioritising the needs of business and focusing on the specific barriers mentioned by the hon. Member. Doing so would make a huge difference to businesses in her constituency. It is not just the Chancellor. The Business Secretary seems to be doing his bit too, creating more small businesses by shrinking existing large ones. His 330-page unemployment Bill, which is due to come back before the House tomorrow, will make life a nightmare for every employer on our high streets. It will make flexible and seasonal working impossible, and will prevent employers from taking a risk on young people and work returners—some of the most vulnerable people in society—for fear of joining the backlog of 490,000 claims to employment tribunals.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Supporting High Streets · Hansard source

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  I am not sure that we were in charge in the particular area that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned, but I am pleased to know that, like so many of us, he had his first experience of work—his first leg-up, his first work opportunity—in the retail and hospitality sector. It is hugely important, and gives people great opportunities in life. I have talked about our promises— [Interruption.] I do not want to get too deflected by stories about the Animal store, of which the hon. Gentleman clearly has enormously fond recollections, and where he spent many a happy hour.