Liam Byrne MP: speeches

Speeches

• 9 Feb 2026 · UK-India Free Trade Agreement · Hansard source

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  I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. I want to start with huge thanks to my colleagues on the Business and Trade Committee for helping to inform the debate with a report that was agreed cross-party and that provided, if anything, a reasonably warm welcome for the Government’s work in securing this free trade agreement, but with a number of caveats, which I will touch on. Before I set out the Committee’s evaluation of the agreement, it is worth marking this moment. The Minister, who is not known for underselling such moments in the House, actually could have sold this one rather more. Although we do not know quite when he will get the Gulf co-operation deal, which is no doubt imminent, over the line, or the Swiss deal—presumably it is not too far off—this could well be the year when he crowns a number of free trade agreements signed since we left the European Union. They could, in effect, create a triple ocean system of alliances that basically brings UK free trade agreements to about 46 countries in all, home to 2.5 billion people and blessed with something like 60% of world output. That is quite an achievement. Pro-Europeans on the Government Benches will, of course, say that we can now look at the prize of what free trade agreements have brought compared with the losses entailed since we left the European Union. About £14 billion of GDP uplift is forecast as a result of the free trade agreements that we have signed. That is much less than the perhaps £140 billion hit to GDP that we have had since leaving the European Union. But I will not provoke you, Madam Deputy Speaker, by dwelling on that point for too long. None the less, this India free trade agreement is the keystone of that new architecture. It connects us to one of the world’s fastest growing economies and anchors us in the Indo-Pacific for decades to come. It is also worth saying that this is a significant moment for India, because this is not the only deal that India has signed, as the Minister said; it has also signed the EU deal, and it appears that there is a deal with the United States. India is on the cusp of the biggest transformation in its trade policy since independence. It is a country that has long been defined by its protectionism, but it now chooses to use its trade agreements as the anchors for ambitious domestic reform. If these agreements hold, as I hope they will, with the exception of agriculture, India is now moving from selective liberalisation to something approximating a near-open economy. That is a very significant moment in India’s long history, home as it is to about a sixth of humanity. These trade deals are not the traditional kind of “Swiss cheese deals” with lots of carve-outs, delays and exemptions. India is now set to almost fully liberalise its manufacturing sector within seven to 10 years. That is a step change by any historical standard. For the first time, India has agreed deals that will be policed by powerful external partners, not just the Minister—a powerful interlocutor in any trade negotiation—but by the combined might of the European Commission. For an Indian Government who have been protectionist by conviction for a long time, this represents an important reversal of deep nationalist instincts. As one of the world’s great homes of free trade, our nation should celebrate that. I hope that the Minister can use Delhi’s new-found philosophy in his conversations at the World Trade Organisation and elsewhere over the course of the year. Let us face it: we all need more allies for free trade in this world. If we are to build what the Finnish call “values-based multilateralism”, which is probably the best safeguard for peace in this world, India’s role in promoting free trade could be an important component. Another important dimension of that new posture relates to China. If India does indeed grow a low-cost manufacturing sector, the world will need to depend much less on China. All in all, it is important that the UK has played its role in securing that agreement. The Committee’s report confirms that the agreement secures substantial tariff liberalisation in what is a highly protected market. As the Minister said, Indian tariffs are reduced or eliminated —by our reckoning—on 92% of UK exports by value, with around 64% of tariff lines liberalised on day one. The Government modelling, such as it is—always a bit speculative; always some interesting assumptions; always a bit long term; and always a bit difficult to pressure-test—suggests that the deal will add nearly £5 billion a year to UK GDP by 2040, and raises UK-India trade by £25.5 billion. Those are the numbers that the Minister rehearsed in his opening speech tonight. The Committee’s analysis, however, presents more meaningful numbers for UK business. The £400 million-worth of tariff savings in year one is real revenue for UK businesses. That will flatter the bottom line, and, for businesses that are under pressure for reasons that we will set out in a report on Wednesday, it could provide much important cash flow. Those tariff savings could rise to about £3.2 billion over 10 years, as export volumes improve. There will be clear future gains for particular sectors. We think there could be a significant prize in the automotive industry, although there are implementation challenges, and clarity is required on how the quotas will work in practice. As the Minister said, and as we heard from other hon. Members, spirits exporters will do extremely well from this new bargain. They will see reductions in the extremely high tariffs of today. As the Minister belaboured, UK firms will for the first time secure access to India’s central Government procurement market. That is a very large number. Whether our firms can genuinely compete for those new contracts is something that the Committee plans to study carefully. When the deal was signed and first published, there was a lot of noise in the media about migration and mobility, and the Committee took a lot of evidence on that. We concluded that the agreement is not, in fact, a big migration deal, and nor does it materially change overall migration policy. As the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith), pointed out well, it provides limited facilitation of mobility for skilled professionals linked to trade and services delivery. It could go much further in the future, but given where the Home Office positions itself on that policy at the moment, we accept that there will not be much progress in the near term. The other real advances reflect years of negotiation and should not be dismissed, but the Committee wishes to underline that there are very significant risks attached to this agreement. India is not a frictionless market; tariffs were never the only barrier. The regulatory system in India is complex, decentralised and highly discretionary. Many of the barriers—be they licensing requirements or certification documentation—are at the state level, and the state-level variation, and state-level stubbornness in bringing those barriers down, will require an awful lot of work in India by His Majesty’s Government. That is why the successes of this agreement depend less on what is written in the treaty text, and far more on whether firms can operationalise it in day-to-day, week-to-week business. I am glad that the Minister sought to take this bull by the horns in his opening remarks, because we are being asked to debate a treaty at a time when the Department for Business and Trade is seeking 40% reductions in export support staff. He went out of his way to stress that those headcount reductions would not be in India—I think that was the guarantee that he gave the House. That is important because those officials are responsible for helping firms to navigate the rules of origin, quota management, regulatory blockages and enforcement failures. They will also be required to staff a lot of the working groups that he and his counterpart will oversee. I worry that the reduction in export support staff in the United Kingdom will deny firms in Britain the knowledge and connections they might need to exploit the full possibilities of this new agreement.

• 9 Feb 2026 · UK-India Free Trade Agreement · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is exactly right. When the Committee published our report, we lamented that there was not a full-scale, full-blown implementation plan alongside the proposals. To a degree, those are difficult things to write, because it is difficult to forecast how quickly the treaty will go through the ratification process needed in India, for example, but we heard evidence that some markets—not least in automotives—had been chilled. Of course, if people know that there are huge tariff and price savings on the way, why would they not delay their purchase rather than make it today? We think that there could have been some wisdom in at least attempting an implementation plan, not least a resource plan that goes alongside the treaty—and perhaps even something tabled in time for tonight’s debate, to reassure the House that the Government will watch the implementation of this deal like a hawk. The Select Committee has decided to go to India in March to understand how this deal will be implemented in real life. If our export support work is hollowed out, the consequences will be predictable: smaller exporters will walk away, utilisation rates for the treaty will remain low, and the headline gains will fail to reach the wider economy and benefit the constituents who sent us to this House to debate this treaty. I hope that the Minister will, as quickly as he can, rustle up an implementation plan to tell us how the agreement will be implemented. I very much hope that he will be able to align the ambitions for the treaty with the level of resource that he and his Department are investing in it. The House will want to know that the Committee also tested the treaty against the deals secured by our allies in the European Union and the United States. Compared with the EU-India deal, it seems that the UK has moved faster and secured earlier liberalisation on some tariff lines. We have liberalised 92% of the value of our exports, while the EU has secured 96.6% of its exports, but both were for roughly the same level of market access offered to India—offers covering over 99% of India’s exports by value to the UK and EU markets. The EU deal obviously covers a much wider volume of trade than we deliver with India, so the EU will therefore enjoy much bigger total tariff savings and a much bigger quota access, particularly for the automotive sector, among others. However, as the Opposition spokesman rightly flagged, there was limited progress on services—we flagged that, too. Services are the lifeblood of the British economy and of our exports—we are a services superpower. The EU’s negotiating position appears at first blush to be broader and deeper, but the final outcomes will remain unclear until the final text is published. Compared with the United States, the contrast is different again. It appears that the White House has prioritised strategic leverage and tariff pressure over comprehensive liberalisation, extracting concessions through market power, not through traditional FTA approaches. The UK has chosen a different path: ruled-based, negotiated commitments and long-term engagement. I think that choice can work for us, as long as we are ruthless about ensuring good implementation. We are sceptical about the level of services mobility that has been delivered, and about the absence of a bilateral investment treaty—we think that is a significant gap in our long-term framework. We also recognise that policy volatility and regulatory risk still matter. In particular, India’s record on investor protection remains uneven, and its tax administration is still too often used in a way that is, frankly, weaponised. Ensuring that we have good ways to monitor and escalate this will be important if the deal is to be a success. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) flagged up, some UK sectors, like textiles and ceramics, will face increased competitive pressure, and although the agreement does contain binding human rights provisions, the responsibilities of UK firms do not end at the border. Being strong on human rights protection, upgrading the dysfunctional Trade Remedies Authority and pressuring the Competition and Markets Authority to publish a foreign subsidy control regime would be extremely welcome. The final point I want to flag is an issue that came up during the Minister’s appearance in front of the Committee, and I have not heard enough tonight or since he came to the Committee about its progress. The reality is that India remains one of the biggest customers of Russian oil. That money is fuelling Putin’s war machine, and as recently as January, His Majesty’s Government had not introduced controls that were in place in the European Union to ensure that oil derivatives made from Russian oil were banned from this country. Indeed, when Politico reported on this earlier in the year, it noted that something like one in six units of Britain’s aviation fuel imports were derived from Russian oil. That is not something that the Minister will want to tolerate for very long. For a long time, he has been one of the leading voices in the House in standing up to Putin and the evil of Russia, so I hope during the wind-ups he will say more about exactly what he is doing, along with his colleagues, to ensure that we are stopping the possibilities of importing Russian oil derivatives from India. In conclusion, our overall take is that this is a good deal that is in the UK national interest, but I do want to supply one final note of dissent. When the CRaG legislation was introduced to the House in 2010, it was always the intention of Parliament that when free trade deals came for debate, there would be a votable motion. That would allow Parliament to exercise the licence that it was promised to delay ratification if it was discontent with the terms of an agreement before us. I am grateful to the Leader of the House and the Minister for ensuring that there is a general debate tonight, but it is not a debate on a votable motion. If this Parliament is to be a strong watchdog and guardian of the Executive, it is important that what were once prerogative powers are transferred to us, here in this House. I hope that this is the last debate on a free trade agreement that takes place on a general motion; in a democracy, we decide things by voting.

• 9 Feb 2026 · UK-India Free Trade Agreement · Hansard source

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  The evidence that we took in the Business and Trade Committee did raise concerns about the impact of the deal on both the brick industry and the ceramics industry in the UK. The Minister knows that the Trade Remedies Authority is not really equipped with the tools that it needs to defend us in this new world; nor has the Competition and Markets Authority yet seen fit to finalise its foreign subsidy control regime, despite two years of consultation. Will the Minister at least assure the House that he will keep a very close eye on this matter, and will not hesitate to bring forward protections or trade remedies if the need arises?

• 5 Feb 2026 · Economic Security · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right. I salute her work on the Committee, which is far stronger for her contribution. The bottom line is that the Government has said, in strategy after strategy, that sovereign capabilities are important and that they need to be developed. What we have in the response that has been published today is a clear statement that those capabilities will remain secret, that we will publish a few of them in the defence industrial strategy and maybe if a defence equipment plan is ever published, we might see more in there too. The point here is quite stark. If we are to ensure our economic security is stronger in future, we have to mobilise the private sector and private sector investment consistently and at scale over a long period of time. It is impossible for us to mobilise that money unless the private sector knows where to invest. If we keep the list of sovereign capabilities secret, how on earth will we send the right signals to the private sector to invest in the future?

• 5 Feb 2026 · Economic Security · Hansard source

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  It is an open secret in this House that every day, every week, there is some controversy between the growth Departments and the security Departments in government. If we are to stand on our feet in the years ahead, we have to make sure that our industry is fighting fit and not undermined by unfair foreign competition. We were grateful to the OECD, whose representatives met the Committee in Paris last week. They set out in black and white the sheer scale of over-subsidies in China—that Chinese industry is subsidised six times more than industry in Europe tells us that the playing field is not level. Yet the CMA has been consulting, without conclusion, on control of foreign subsidies for almost two years. We heard loud and clear from allies in Europe that the divergence of UK policy on China from that of Europe may indeed confound the ambitions of some of us to draw closer to the European Union in future. I know that is not a view that is shared across the House, but it should give Ministers pause for thought.

• 5 Feb 2026 · Economic Security · Hansard source

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  When we published the report, we sought to compare the regime that we have in this country with the regimes that are in place among our allies in Japan, Europe and the United States. It became clear that, unlike our allies, we have a loose collection of strategies—some might unfairly label them strategy by stapler—that are basically collated together but which lack any statutory basis to ensure consistency and persistence over time. Again, we must remember what we are trying to do. We are trying to ensure that public and private sector are able to work together on big risks over a long period of time. If we leave policy unpredictable, inconsistent and subject to the changes of wind each day, we cannot provide that signal. Ensuring that there is a proper statutory basis for economic security in the way that the hon. Member suggests and our allies have actioned would be a significant step forward in the Bill that he refers to.

• 5 Feb 2026 · Economic Security · Hansard source

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  Let me first express my gratitude to the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this short statement today as the Business and Trade Committee publishes the Government response to our flagship report on economic security, which was published in the summer last year. I want to start not with Committee papers but with people—with workers and businesses. It was just in April last year that we found ourselves in this place on an unusual Saturday sitting to ensure that British Steel was kept alive. Not long thereafter, our agencies were supporting the high street retailer Marks & Spencer as it suffered one of the worst cyber-attacks in our country’s history. Not long thereafter, the Exchequer was required to underwrite the Jaguar Land Rover supply chain to the tune of a billion pounds as it suffered a cyber-attack of unprecedented proportions. All of that took place while our allies in Holland were battling over Nexperia chip supplies and our allies in America were battling China over rare earth restrictions. Five shocks but one message: economic security threats are now a concern to this country’s security. The message from our Committee is that those threats are going to multiply significantly in the years ahead. The combination of AI-powered weapons, the advent of hostile states, the reality of unpredictable allies, and the need for us as a country to mobilise something like £100 billion of new foreign direct investment means that the threat surface confronted by our businesses is about to multiply exponentially. That is why we need new economic security defences. If we have learned one lesson from Russia’s illegal invasion in Ukraine, it is that economic security is the foundation of national security. Just as we need a whole-of-society approach to defence, so too do we now need a whole-of-society approach to our economic security. That is why the Business and Trade Committee undertook its review last year. Our conclusions were stark: we found that the institutions, policies, posture, funding, laws and regulation that we now have in place means that this country does not have an economic security regime that is fit for the future. We set out to provide a blueprint for how the Government can overhaul the system that we have in place. We recommended, like our allies, putting our regime on a statutory basis with a cross-Government Minister for economic security and a proper centre for economic security at the centre of Government. We then made a number of recommendations, including on how we can improve the diagnosis of threats that we confront, how we develop the sovereign capabilities that we need as a country, how we diversify our supply chains and sources of critical minerals, how we defend our critical national infrastructure against new perils, how we deter those seeking to damage us economically, and—crucially—how on earth we are going to dovetail the efforts of His Majesty’s Government, the private sector and the work of this country and our allies around the world. Those were the recommendations that we made to Government, and today we published the Government’s response to our report. Let me start by saying to the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Kate Dearden), on the Front Bench that we welcome the constructive tone that the Government took in response to our report. We realise that this is a novel, fast-moving field of policy, and where we end up at the end of this Parliament will be very different to where we are today. The Government have clearly accepted four of our recommendations and partially accepted 11. But I lament that they rejected 10 of the recommendations. For the benefit of the House, let me canter through them very quickly. What we felt was good about the Government’s response was that there are some clear principles that will guide our economic security policy for the future. We had lacked those until today, so I am glad that we now have them in black and white. We welcome the commitment that the Government have made to stronger alliances. We welcome the promise of tougher deterrents to bad actors, particularly from Companies House, and we welcome the slightly half-hearted commitment to parliamentary scrutiny of this field of policy in the future. In some areas, the Committee concluded that the Government have made some progress but not gone far enough. First, although there is a promise to improve forecasting of future threats led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, we felt that the commitment was a little too vague for our taste. Secondly, we are sorry that the national exercising programme does not have a clear commitment to bring together the public and the private sector to wargame the kind of threats that we know will come together. We are not going to face one threat after another; they will compound and hit us all at once. That is why we need business and Government to be working together to scenario-plan for the future. We welcome some of the progress on critical minerals, but frankly we do not think that the money or strategy put in place is up to scratch, so the Committee concluded in a report it published earlier this week that one of the inquiries we undertake this year will be an inquiry into critical minerals security. In the field of cyber-security, we do not think that the recommendations on software and cyber-security standards were really heard, and we would like to see more progress on mandatory reporting of cyber-ransom attacks. We did not feel that the Government have yet made a clear commitment to developing anti-coercion systems or instruments. We welcome what the Ministers have said about the need to get something in place. Our allies already have that infrastructure in place. We welcome Ministers’ recommendation that they will listen to us in this House and our Committee, but we would like a little more specificity from them. Finally, we simply do not think that there has been enough progress on controlling foreign subsidies. The Competition and Markets Authority has been endlessly consulting on that for the last two years. At a time when Chinese industry is six times over-subsidised compared with European industries, we do not think that there is a strong enough regime for policing a level playing field in competition and that imperils our manufacturers. We do not think that the Trade Remedies Authority is fit for the modern day and we believe that significant reform will be needed. We most lament the instances where the Government rejected our recommendations. As a cross-party Committee, we felt that we had some common-sense proposals for Ministers to consider. We regret that there is no clear plan to overhaul Government co-ordination and leadership, as there was for counter-terrorism policy after 7/7 and, indeed, for economic security policy back in the 1920s and 1930s. There is a resistance to publishing a clear list of the sovereign capabilities that we will need as a country. I understood from Defence Ministers at the time of the defence industrial strategy that there would, indeed, be a clear list of sovereign capabilities that we as a country would need to develop. Today’s Government response says that no such list will be published. We regret that the managing public money framework will not be updated to take into account the need for investments in resilience. The Government response said that the current regime was adequate. That is clearly a nonsense. When ministerial directions are needed to ensure the subsidies that were delivered to British Steel or the underwriting that was delivered to the Jaguar Land Rover supply chain, it is quite clear that the managing public money framework does not give Ministers or officials the right framework for balancing the security needs of our country and the growth objectives of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. We remain concerned that the tax incentives for improving the resilience of small business are not adequate. We lament that there is no backstop for the cyber insurance market and we regret that there is no extension of the brilliant Pool Re to provide that insurance for the future. It is also quite obvious to us that the pay scales for our frontline specialists in the war on economic crime are simply not adequate. We look forward to continuing the dialogue constructively with Ministers and I welcome the tone that they struck and the progress that we have made. However, let me conclude with this. Over the last year, as we have set about our work, we have heard consistently from our allies fears and concerns about the economic security regime in this country. We have heard loud and clear from them that they worry that the UK is the weak link in the western defence when it comes to economic security. If we believe, as I think we should, that economic security is the foundation of national security, that is not a position that can go on. The fact that our allies tell us on the Committee that they worry that we are the weak link is not something that our country should put up with, and it is not something that this House should ignore.

• 2 Feb 2026 · China and Japan · Hansard source

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  I want to welcome the Prime Minister’s serious engagement with serious power: it is essential to safeguarding our national interest. The complexities of China require from Britain a whole-of-society approach, which is completely impossible until the Government publish a clear China strategy to explain what is off limits and how we are going to rebalance competition with Chinese industry that is six times over-subsidised compared with our firms. Last week in Europe, I heard very clearly from our partners that they are worried that the lackadaisical approach to policing Chinese competition risks deeper integration with Europe. The EU has 143 trade measures in place against China; we have none. So will the Prime Minister now follow up his meetings last week and publish a strategy, co-ordinated with our allies, so we can take out the guesswork and put in place the guardrails for this important relationship?

• 19 Jan 2026 · Business Rates: Retail, Hospitality and Leisure · Hansard source

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  The £4 billion package in the Budget is very welcome, but the manifesto commitment was to replace the business rates system, not tinker with it or subsidise it. Pubs alone will see bill increases of 4% this year. Alongside that, VAT thresholds are strangling hospitality businesses on the high street, and that is on top of a tax compliance bill of £25 billion for small business, not least because His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs does not answer 4 million phone calls a year. I repeat the question posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), the Chair of the Treasury Committee: when will the Government table comprehensive, radical reform that meets the test of the manifesto commitment?

• 11 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  May I welcome the deal with the United States to set zero tariffs on pharmaceutical exports? Together with the British Business Bank’s investment of £100 million in biotech, that is a real boost. However, the US offer was for just three years, whereas the price adjustment we have promised for the NHS is permanent. When the Secretary of State met the Secretary of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative in America last night, what assurance did he get that the Americans will not come back and reimpose tariffs on UK pharmaceuticals in three years’ time?

• 11 Dec 2025 · US National Security Strategy · Hansard source

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  The language of the US national security strategy is deeply regrettable. Frankly, it is not hard to see the rhymes with some extreme right-wing tropes that date back to the 1930s. The publication of this document came at the same time as the collapse of talks about the UK joining the European Union Security Action for Europe programme to help boost rearmament, so it is now essential that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) said, the Government specify the sovereign capabilities that we have decided to adopt in this country. It is essential that we now implement the recommendations of the Business and Trade Committee’s report on economic security. I am afraid that it is vital that we begin opening talks with our closest neighbours in the European Union about the kind of economic security union that could draw our countries closer together, and help provide the economic support and growth that rearmament will require.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Pension Schemes Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Many members would say that they wanted their investments to help to create a more equal country—a less unequal country—not least because we now know from the work of the OECD and the International Monetary Fund that more unequal countries grow more slowly.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Pension Schemes Bill · Hansard source

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  I begin by congratulating the Minister on bringing the Bill forward to this stage. He has been one of the country’s practical idealists since I first began working with him in 2008, and he is demonstrating those credentials once again in stewarding this Bill through the House today with such expertise and intelligence. He, like me, has long been concerned not only by the endemically low investment rates in this country—now languishing at the lowest in the G7—but that we should build up a system of universal basic capital, so that the wealth we create in this country is more fairly shared. I rise to speak to clause 17, which is in my name, and I give enormous thanks to the 33 Members from all parts of the House who have added their names to it. That depth of cross-party support tells us something important: that here in this House is broad and deep support for the principles enshrined in the new clause. There is a shared belief across this House that working people should be able to use their savings to build a richer and stronger country in which to retire. My new clause calls for something very simple. It calls for something that has been missing for far too long. As we know, pension fund trustees have fiduciary duties to the people they represent and the people they serve, but those duties need clarity, and for too long that clarity has been missing. What we have instead is confusion, and from that confusion comes a caution, and from that caution comes a world in which pension scheme providers are simply not investing what they could and what they should in the productive assets of our country. The flight of British savings from investment here has long bedevilled the country. It is a sight to behold. We are not short of savings, but we are desperately short of investment. We have somehow magicked a situation in which we have £3 trillion-worth of long-term savings, but we have the lowest investment rate in the G7. I think the Bill will help to turn that around. I think it will help to break that curse. There is much in it that is welcome: the consolidation of funds, the consolidation of pots, the simplification of structures, and a stronger framework for long-term investment. For all its virtues, however, as it is drafted today we are still left with the core problem, and unless we solve that core problem, the Bill’s noble ambitions will be defeated by its notable omissions. We risk creating bigger and better-managed funds that still fail to invest in our country, and still fail to invest in our country’s future. The Bill will fail to channel the investment that we need in affordable homes, in net-zero investments, in cleaner power systems, in affordable transport systems, in the social care that we all need for the future, in regeneration, and in the national infrastructure of growth. It will fail because it fails, as currently drafted, to clarify exactly what it is that pension fund trustees can consider. We want those trustees to have the freedom to invest in good things here, not out of some patriotic flourish but because it is plainly in members’ best interests. When national investment grows, our national productivity rises, and when pension pots get bigger, they will get bigger faster if we have a country that is more productive and growing faster than it is today. When a country grows, the returns that shape retirement grow with it. Many scheme providers today simply do not feel that they have the permission to make those investments. They are unsure of the law. They fear litigation. They worry about the possibility that looking at system-level risks, from low productivity or high housing costs or climate stress, might fall outside their legal remit. This is where the problem lies. It is a paradox that I think we can no longer ignore. We ask trustees to act in members’ best interests, yet the law today is so unclear that many of them feel unable to invest in the very things that could secure the long-term interests of their members: growth, productivity, and the living standards on which those members will one day rely. Today’s rules were built to ensure prudence, but what they are doing is creating paralysis. A framework that was meant to safeguard the future is, in practice, preventing pension savers from shaping that future. Scheme providers want to do more, members expect them to do more and our country needs them to do more, but all that can only happen if Parliament now provides the clarity that the courts have not provided. This is not an academic matter. At a recent conference, fewer than one in five practitioners said that fiduciary duty was “completely clear”. I believe that 31 industry leaders have now written to the Minister for Pensions to request that legal clarification, including a dozen chief executives. Publicly, the chief executive of Nest, the provider of the UK’s largest defined-contribution scheme, has said much the same. Fiduciary duty dates back to case law that is centuries old, back to a 19th-century brick factory in Pontefract and, before that, the inheritance of a market lease at some point in 1726. I am afraid that these cases simply cannot answer the questions that trustees must answer today, and they cannot help with the challenges that trustees face today: globalised portfolios, system-wide risks, intergenerational impacts, and the real-world living standards of their members. That is why the spirit of new clause 17 is so important, modest though it is. It does not alter the statutory purpose of pension schemes, and it does not ask a single saver to accept lower returns. What it does is cut through the confusion and allow the Government to produce regulations and guidance that spell out clearly and consistently what trustees must consider, and what they may consider, when making investment decisions. I warmly welcome the Minister’s commitment to introduce new legislation. I hope that if he gets his skates on, he can table an amendment in the other place once the Bill moves from our precious hands, but mere guidance is not enough, because sometimes it can be ignored. Guidance does not eliminate liability risk and does not give trustees a solid statutory floor, so I urge the Minister to ensure that the legislation he brings forward delivers guidance that is statutory in its bite. I urge him to go big, by pairing guidance with underpinning regulation that gives trustees legal clarity; to go broad, by ensuring that every single kind of scheme falls within the ambit of the legislation; and to be specific, by explaining precisely what those powers can be used for and the way in which they can be allowed to ensure productive investment. That clarity, if we get it right, could avoid the need to resort to the mandating powers that some Members of this House have objected to. It could unlock investment by giving schemes confidence to act, rather than making them fearful and hesitant. We in this House have a profound duty to ensure that the maximum amount of pension savings in this country not only yield a return to give comfort to savers in their golden years, but do a double duty: they should help to provide the productive investment that we need to build a bigger and richer country. After all, a nation that invests is a nation that builds, and a nation that builds is a nation that will grow its pension pots to help ensure that pension savers enjoy their golden years in comfort. The steps that we have heard from the Minister go some distance towards helping us deliver on the spirit of new clause 17. I am very grateful to him for his announcement today, which could unlock billions of pounds for affordable homes, clean energy and comfort in retirement for millions of the people we came to this House to serve.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business and Trade Committee · Hansard source

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  It is a privilege to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. Let me record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this debate; to a brilliant team of Select Committee members—it is a privilege to serve alongside them—and to a first-class team who help to ensure that the Select Committee does its work so expertly. The report we present today sounds a note of agreement, but is also designed to sound a warning. The note of agreement is this: we agree that national security is economic security. But the note of warning is stark: we do not find that our economic security regime is fit for the future. If we think about the risks we faced this summer, with the Jaguar Land Rover cyber-attack, which ended up costing a £1.5 billion state guarantee; the struggles that our Dutch allies went through with Nexperia; and the struggles that our American allies went through in the spat with China over rare earth technology exports, we can now see that the question of economic security is front and centre for businesses and policymakers, each and every day. The warning that we sound is that the risks are going to multiply significantly over the years to come. The threat surface that most businesses now operate is much bigger than in the past. Artificial intelligence is going to transform cyber-aggression. We now have states and state-backed actors operating in this space. This is all at a time when our country is going to seek to entice around £100 billion extra in inward investment, much of it from abroad and much of it in our energy infrastructure. What Ciaran Martin calls the private ownership of public risk is about to expand exponentially. Yet, right now, we simply do not have the defences in place that we need. The core argument of our report is that just as we need a whole-of-society approach to defence, so we now need a whole-of-society approach to our economic security, but we do not have the systems in place to deliver that today. That is why change is needed over the years to come. In order to help understand precisely the gaps, we worked together with experts at the Royal United Services Institute, gathered lots of evidence, took lots of witness testimony and heard from Ministers. What that basically revealed is that many of our allies, such as Japan, but also in a way the European Union, have legislative backing for many of the regimes that they have in place. Our allies in Japan in particular, who have had to think about this for a lot longer than we have, have a very sophisticated set of defences and state machinery. Equally, we could find very durable institutions in the United States and real policy innovation in the European Union today. In this country, we have a number of strategies, which are growing in number, but frankly do not really add up to a comprehensive regime for economic security. There have been welcome advances, not least the critical mineral strategy that was published this week, but the risk is that ad hoc papers become strategy by stapler, where we have policy papers published that are not durable for the long term. That is a problem, because only the public sector and the private sector working together can mobilise the kind of investment that is needed to transform the country’s resilience for the threats we will face in the future. We argue therefore that, just as we comprehensively overhauled the doctrine to tackle counter-terrorism after 7/7 with the publication of CONTEST, we now need a new doctrine of economic security in order to ensure that there is a whole-of-Government and whole-of-society approach, all pointing in a similar direction. We conclude that it does not make a great deal of sense for policy to be guided by a hard definition of economic security, because things are going to change: this is a dynamic environment, and a hard definition might entail more risks than it solves. However, we believe that this doctrine should be shaped by a set of strategic principles in the years to come. Colleagues across the House will have many ideas about what should go into that. We conclude that our approach should be guided by six Ds: diagnose, develop, diversify, defend, deter and dovetail. On diagnosis, we think there should be a long-term technology forecasting centre in Government that supplies not just Government but the private sector with, if not intelligence, then certainly insight, to shape their understanding of risk in the future. We need to build on the work of the National Cyber Security Centre to create a proper platform where public and private sectors can work together in new ways to understand the risks that the country confronts. We need to specify the sovereign capabilities that we need to develop as a country. Two or three are defined in the strategic defence review, but that is about it, and the defence industrial policy promised some further definitions. We cannot understand what we are going to decouple from allies—or in some cases from enemies—unless we have a more sophisticated understanding of the sovereign capabilities that we need as a country. We then need to line up the national wealth fund and other resources behind this understanding. We also need to modernise the “Managing Public Money” framework so that Ministers, like the excellent Minister in his place today, are not hidebound and forced to issue ministerial directions every time a strategic investment is needed, as was the case with Jaguar Land Rover and the nationalisation of British Steel. Our third D is diversify, which is well understood. We need to diversify supplies of critical minerals and diversify our critical supply chains, too. The targets for critical minerals published on Monday were important, but there was no investment plan to go with them. We cannot do this alone; we can only do it by acting with allies. We then need to better defend our infrastructure, including our critical national infrastructure and our cyber-infrastructure, in both the public and private sectors. That is why we think that the mandatory reporting of ransomware attacks is a good idea, and why we think we should be radically expanding the work of Pool Re so there is a backstop to the cyber insurance market, which there currently is not. We need capital allowances to be modernised, so there are real incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises to invest in cyber-security. Critical SMEs should probably enjoy access to Government support too. In the field of deterrence, we need to ensure that we can fast-track investment into our country from trusted sources. That is why a trusted investor scheme would make a lot of sense. We need to explore anti-coercion instruments in the way that the European Union has. We need to name and shame those involved in sanction breaches much more aggressively than we are today. Crucially, we need to make sure we have the right skills in both Companies House and the National Crime Agency. It is ridiculous that there is something like a £28,000 gap between the pay that someone in the National Crime Agency can get and the pay that someone in an equivalent police force can get. That is not the way to ensure that we have the right people on the frontline. We note with concern that Companies House has a 20% vacancy rate in its digital workforce. That is a real risk. Finally, we need to dovetail what the Government are doing with what the private sector is doing. That is why we need new spaces in which they can work together. We also need to dovetail what we are doing with what our allies are doing: we call for an alliance of free-trading democracies to work together, like the work of the UK and the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership—the Minister has just returned from a CPTPP meeting. The work that we are pioneering in the South Korean trade deal is a good example of the kind of thing that we should be doing more generally. We need almost to be driving forward an economic security union with our closest neighbour, and of course our allies in the United States need to be drawn into this work too. We need to make sure that the blueprint has a backbone. That is why we call for a cross-Government Minister and an office of economic security to bring everything together, the restoration of the sub-committee on economic security in the National Security Council, and parliamentary oversight through the reform of section 54 of the National Security and investment Act 2021. We think that much of that should be enshrined in a Bill. We have done this before. After world war one, we comprehensively modernised the state to combat the world of economic warfare. That is a wise lesson and a wise experience to guide us in new times.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business and Trade Committee · Hansard source

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  This is a very good point. We want to ensure that there is an enshrinement of the principles of the Bill, so that the private sector has clarity, certainty and confidence in the durability of the economic security regime that we operate in this country. In the inquiry, we heard overwhelming evidence that businesses frankly do not know whom to ring when there is a problem. They did not know whether there were particular spaces where they could work together, certainly with agencies but also with economic security services more generally. Providing clarity, certainty and durability is the only way in which we will be able to mobilise the scale of long-term finance that we will need in order to upgrade the resilience of this country for new times.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business and Trade Committee · Hansard source

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  We have a very good Minister in place, but in a way, the report is designed to ensure that that Minister is empowered in his work and across Government. But first we must understand, and help the Minister have the powers to understand, the full breadth of the UK supply chains and where the risks are. The Jaguar Land Rover case was striking because the supply chain information was kept on the computers that went down. When the computers went down, they had to generate, I think, almost paper lists of tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers to work out who needed cashflow and who could survive without direct help. We must ensure that we have a full picture of supply chains and where the critical dependencies are, as the Japanese have been doing for many years. Making sure that there is a proper backstop to the cyber-insurance market is important. That is why the proposals for a much bigger and better-equipped Pool Re are so important. Pool Re, as many will know, was set up to backstop terrorism insurance during the height of the IRA attacks. It now needs modernising for new times. The tax regime that we have in place today simply does not incentivise small and medium-sized enterprises in the way that we could, to draw down on subscription-based cyber-security policies. Making sure that there are the right incentives, powers and insights available are just some of the tasks that we think an economic security Minister needs to be fully empowered to perform.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business and Trade Committee · Hansard source

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  I think there is a real opportunity in the course of the next year to modernise the way we export arms, and we will need to do that because of the simple reality that the definition of an arm in new times is very different. Many of our allies talk to us, as members of the Committee, about the need to strengthen in particular intellectual property export controls in the future. In a world where ideas can be weapons if they are, for example, novel artificial intelligence programmes, we have to take a much broader approach to this in the future. It is not clear to us that the way we license weapons and control adherence to licence conditions is strong enough, so it is an area to which the Select Committee will need to return. Again, if we are upgrading our economic security defences, I do not think we can do that, in the world in which we live, without comprehensively upgrading our arms control systems too.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business and Trade Committee · Hansard source

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  I was very grateful to receive the hon. Member’s email. He is absolutely right. The shutdown of branches all over our country is a really serious problem that creates real risks. One answer is to ensure that we lean in behind the Post Office plans to create banking hubs, not just in a couple of hundred high streets, which is the proposal of the main banks, but in thousands of locations across the country. The Post Office has in place an agreement with the banks until about 2030, but the future thereafter is not clear, so I hope that Ministers can take up this point in the Department for Business and Trade to ensure that we lean into the plans that the Post Office has developed to transform the availability of banking services on thousands of high streets up and down the country.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business and Trade Committee · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Member for the question and for his sterling work on the Committee as our inquiry has been driven forward over the last seven or eight months. I have not. It was striking to compare the evidence we took with history lessons from the 1920s and 1930s. As a country, we have developed infrastructure to tackle these kinds of threats in the past. Indeed, the forces that we assembled in the 1920s and 1930s were so important that they became known as the fourth fighting service. It was certainly crucial in helping us to stand up the Ministry of Economic Warfare in world war two with the speed that we did. We are now in a world of chokepoints, coercion and weaponised interdependence, and today’s cyber-attacks will be nothing compared with those in future. Frankly, the country is simply not ready. We have to get our skates on.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I will in a moment. That is why I absolutely welcome the package that the Chancellor has set out today to mobilise investment capital in a radical new way: the expanding of enterprise management incentives, the boosting of the venture capital trusts, and UK listing relief. That is almost £3 billion of extra incentives for entrepreneurs in this country. That is a game changer not just for start-ups, but for scale-ups, so we can end the craziness of brilliant inventors in this country starting new businesses, growing them nicely and then them having snapped up and shifted out to the United States. We have to ensure that we are growing and fostering more big, global dominating companies here in this country, so I welcome the way the Chancellor leant in behind those firms today. The third thing we have to do is to improve the return on investments made in this country. That means a couple of things. It means bringing down energy costs radically. We did not have a business energy cost scheme scored in the Budget today, but that is because I know the Government are out to consultation on it. Every single member of the Committee would implore the Government to do whatever it takes to ensure that business energy costs in this country are internationally competitive. It is wrong that firms like Nissan say to us that their energy costs up in Sunderland are the most expensive of any Nissan plant in the world. We must bring business energy costs down. Alongside that, the message that we hear from small businesses in particular is that we must bring down business rates. From looking at the policy decisions in the scorecard, it looks like there is a £4.2 billion subsidy to help bring business rates down. That should mean that we have the lowest business rates this country has seen, which is a good thing, but I urge the Chancellor to go further by cutting the cost of red tape in a bold and radical way. As the Committee travelled around the country, business after business told us that they want not just less red tape but better regulation. Crucially, they want Departments and regulators to co-ordinate with each other, so that we do not have one Department over here making one decision and another over there making a different one. Ensuring that the Whitehall machine moves at the speed of business in this new age of AI will be more and more important as a competitive advantage. This is one of the best places in the world to be an inventor or build a start-up business. We now need to ensure that we are one of the best places in the world to scale up a business. That will be the nature of the questions that the Committee will put to Ministers over the weeks to come. One thing above all shone through in the Chancellor’s statement: ambition for, and confidence in, the future of this country. That is why one of the most important numbers we will read in the OBR forecast is that business investment is not flat or falling but is set to soar by £6 billion over the forecast period. That ambition for this country stands in stark contrast to the amnesia of the Conservative party. That is because we on the Labour Benches know how futures are really built.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Before we hear any nonsense about covid, let us remember that 80% to 90% of the increase in debt that the Conservatives saddled us with came before the covid lockdowns began.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I do not know what Budget the right hon. Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) was reading, but it was not the Budget that was put on the table this afternoon. I think the Chancellor got the judgment exactly right today. She had a difficult inheritance, a difficult hand and difficult decisions to take, but she got the calls absolutely right. Under the Budget, growth this year and business investment over the course of this Parliament are forecast to rise, and inflation is coming down. Forecast interest rates are coming down, energy bills for our constituents are coming down, and child poverty is set to collapse. That means that 8,900 people in my constituency will be better off because of this Budget—a Labour Budget delivered by a Labour Chancellor this afternoon. I have been in this House for 21 years. I have sat on both Front Benches and on both sets of Back Benches, and over the years I have seen the selective amnesia that bedevils debate in this place, and the problem of unreliable narrators, but I have to say that I have never seen amnesia on as epic a scale as I did from the Leader of the Opposition today. It is quite well established that back in 2010, I thought the numbers were a little bit tight. I thought difficult decisions were going to be needed, which is why we left a judiciously balanced Budget—two thirds spending cuts, one third taxes rises—that would have halved the deficit in four years and brought debt borrowing down by 2016. That, of course, was not the strategy pursued by the last Government, and what difference did that make? The Conservatives saddled this country with an extraordinary £1 trillion of debt more than the situation we left. That is why we are paying £1 in every £10 in interest rates today—it is because they more than doubled the national debt.

• 26 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I can tell the hon. Member. I do not know what his facility with maths is like, or if he realises that a trillion has 12 noughts, but we left the national debt £1 trillion lower than it is today—£2.7 trillion. That is how much this country is now borrowing. The great tragedy is that if the previous Government had borrowed money at low interest costs and invested it in something that enhanced productivity, we would be in a better position today and the Chancellor would not have had to deliver the Budget she had to deliver today. Don’t take my word for it; the International Monetary Fund was clear in its report on 25 July that our productivity growth under the Conservatives collapsed by a third compared with the good old new Labour years. Our productivity divergence with the United States is so serious. Our productivity growth has been half that of the United States, and the OBR is clear today that the downgrade on growth that it has baked into its numbers is entirely due to the productivity collapse because the Conservatives wasted the money during their 14 years in office. I should just say, by the bye, that because the Conservatives are the Conservatives, they managed to put £1 trillion on the debt and to collapse the productivity numbers, and still to put inequality through the roof. That is why we have all had food bank queues in our constituencies that we will never forget. I will never forget for as long as I live the phenomenon of collecting food in inner-city Birmingham because our food banks had run out of food. I will never forget the children at Adderley school who were literally helping restock our food banks by taking Penguin bars out of their lunch boxes to put them in food collection crates so their classmates did not go hungry at lunch time. That is the reality of the child poverty legacy the Conservatives left us with, and that is the legacy that the Chancellor got to grips with today. The Business and Trade Committee looks forward to scrutinising the proposals that have been laid out today. We have been travelling the country over the last couple of weeks talking to businesses about what they wanted out of this Budget, and three things were clear. These are isles of wonder. We now stand on the threshold of an extraordinary new era of innovation. This is an extraordinary and inventive country; we have been since the industrial revolution started in Birmingham back in 1761, but that will be nothing compared to what is about to unfold in this country. We are at the front of the grid in the race for the 21st century, but we need to mobilise capital on a completely new scale. That is why certainty, certainty, certainty for business was so important. I welcome the fact that the headroom has been put up to £22 billion today. I welcome the fact that the Chancellor is ending the biannual circus of fiscal speculation by having one forecast a year. I have to say to the House that I seriously think that Mr Hughes needs to consider his position. The fact that we had a leak of the OBR forecast before this House got to debate the Budget is appalling, and this uncertainty has bedevilled us. Alongside that, we have to step up the mobilisation of capital on a completely different scale.

• 19 Nov 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  This Friday we commemorate the 51st anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings, where 21 people lost their lives in what is still the largest unsolved murder in our history. The families do not believe that the approach set out by the Government will discover the truth, and they think that only a public inquiry will do. Can we now have the meetings in order to hear the families’ concerns directly, and agree an approach that will not just command confidence but find the truth about who bombed Birmingham?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Asylum Policy · Hansard source

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  I commend the Home Secretary for getting the balance absolutely right. I think that her announcement will be widely welcomed throughout our diverse community in Birmingham, because we know that our generosity of spirit is upheld by our rule of law and the kindness that we show is protected by the justice that we share. Will the Home Secretary confirm that while we will always give sanctuary to those who need our protection, what she is advancing today is in effect a form of earned citizenship, and that only those who step up to the full responsibilities of citizenship will enjoy the full rights of citizenship of this country?