[Relevant Documents: The Fourteenth Report from the Business and Enterprise Committee, Session 2007-08, HC 1116, on the Departmental Annual Report and Scrutiny of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, and the Government response, Cm 7559; oral and written evidence taken by the Committee on 16 December 2008, HC 90-i, on Financial support for small and medium-sized enterprises; oral evidence taken by the Committee on 14 January 2009, HC 143-i,on The work of BERR in the current crisis; and uncorrected oral evidence taken by the Committee on 23 February 2009, HC 199-i, on Exporting out of recession.]

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That, for the year ending with 31 March 2009, for expenditure by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—

(1) the resources authorised for use be reduced by £1,870,622,000 as set out in HC 240,

(2) the sums authorised for issue out of the Consolidated Fund be reduced by 2,011,255,000 as so set out, and

(3) limits as so set out be set on appropriations in aid. — (Mr. Frank Roy .)

I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this important subject. My speech will fall into three main sections: first, an assessment of the structure of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and of the need for a business Department at all; secondly, an assessment of how well BERR is coping with the consequences of the recession; and finally, drawing on the Select Committee on Business and Enterprise's 14th report and the Government's response to it, an assessment of the accountability of the Department to this House.

It is somewhat ironic that a Department that the Prime Minister was apparently once set on abolishing is now at the eye of the biggest economic storm to hit this country for at least a generation. It is a much-shrunken Department; as these estimates remind us, it has lost responsibility for energy to the new Department of Energy and Climate Change and before that it lost responsibility for science to the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. However, it is still the business Department—the Department for commerce— and it faces some of the most important questions that our nation faces.

As a Select Committee Chairman, it would be quite wrong of me to apportion blame for the crisis that we face, so I am not going to do so. I am very glad that we still have a business Department to address those problems. My own party once toyed with the idea of abolishing it and the Liberal Democrats may still have that as official policy—I hope that that is not the case, because we need to have a new consensus based around the need for such a Department, so that the voice of business can be heard loudly and clearly in Whitehall. After all, most of what the Department does has to be done by someone, so it is better for it to be done by someone with a rough understanding of the needs of business.

I know that opinions differ on how well the Department does that job; last week's custard thrower thinks that it sweeps all before it in the argument about Heathrow, whereas others, in the business world, think that it has sometimes been slow and inadequate in its response to the current crisis. This debate provides an opportunity to see who is right.

Debates on the economy are all too rare in this House, and I have mixed feelings about this half-day debate; I am pleased that my Select Committee and the Liaison Committee are providing this opportunity for a debate on the economy, but I am sorry that the Government have not done so before now, and although I understand the reasons for the two statements made today, it is regrettable that, once again, an estimates day debate is being truncated by very important statements.

My hon. Friend rightly says that we need to probe these estimates in the Department of his choice, but is he aware that the biggest single item in these estimates is a massive £20 billion increase in the estimates for the Treasury, yet we have been given no explanation and no opportunity to debate it?

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. If we are being honest, we must say that this House is not always very good at scrutinising the expenditure of government generally.

My hon. Friend is being most indulgent in giving way at the outset of his speech. Does he agree that at a time when we need to hold the Executive to account far more thoroughly on a day-to-day basis, our task would be far easier if the Secretary of State were in this House and not in the other place?

I shall be exploring that theme at some length towards the end of my remarks, but for now it suffices to say that I agree with my hon. Friend.

Although we have a Budget debate starting on 22 April, that is still six weeks away. We should be having regular debates on the economy—on the central issue of our time—and not relying on estimates days and Opposition supply days. We are talking about the Budget, so I should point out that one of the three Commons Ministers to whom I wish to refer is in his place—the Economic Secretary, who is also a business Minister. I am intrigued by the suggestion that his very presence in two Departments—again, that is one of the issues that I wish to address later—may inhibit his ability to stand up for business. I am told by business that it sometimes wants tax cuts—the last thing that the Treasury wants—and sometimes its interest in issues such as the VAT reduction may not be being properly represented because the economic and business Minister has to defend Treasury decisions.

That interesting situation leads to a rather important point about the current structure of BERR. I do not think that sharing Ministers is a very clever idea on the whole, and BERR has far more than its fair share of shared Ministers. My view of Whitehall is that it works on constructive tension between Departments, and although internalising too much tension may look like joined-up government, it makes for bad government. There has even been criticism—I see that Andrew Miller, my friend who is Chair of the Select Committee on Regulatory Reform, is in his place—of the fact that responsibility for regulatory reform has been taken away from the Cabinet Office and given to BERR, because that has internalised a very important conflict.

I was pleased to hear Lord Mandelson express concerns in public about the level of planned future business regulation. I have a lot of sympathy with the view of the British Chambers of Commerce that there should be a three-year moratorium on non-essential Government regulation that imposes a cost on business. Although business has been talking about this for a long time, when preparing for this debate I was struck by the new urgency from the business community about the need to curb the growth in regulation.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, as part of that debate, we should look at business rate reform, because small businesses in our constituencies, particularly small retail outlets in our shopping centres, are suffering terribly in the current economic crisis? We should be doing something specifically about that particular problem.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but it would have been nice to have seen him in the Chamber on Friday when we debated this issue. He would have had the opportunity to speak up for his constituents then and it is a shame that he was not here to make that point, with which I agree.

There are conflicting views about the status and activities of BERR. One leading business organisation member said:

"BERR needs to clarify its authority on the business agenda and should require ultimate sign-off on business issues."

He means across Whitehall. He added:

"The risk is that other government departments are using businesses for more and more outcomes that benefit" their own

"department's core stakeholders—councils, schools etc—and leaving BERR with the role of managing the fallout amongst the business community."

The construction sector has continuing concerns about the Department, and the constant merry-go-round of Ministers who are responsible for construction does not help. The current Minister responsible for that issue is in his place, but if I am right, there has been quite a lot of change in who has worn that hat over the past few years. A representative of the construction industry said to me:

"One of the difficulties that BERR found fairly quickly, however, was demonstrating that it was actually 'fighting the corner' for business. Decisions on a number of tax issues"— tax issues again—

"in the autumn of 2007 which went in favour of Treasury despite strong protestations from business harmed its credibility, as it seemed to industry that the department had rolled over with little or no fight on behalf of those it represented."

Perhaps more worryingly, that representative also said:

"Proposals earlier this year to develop a strategy for the recovery seem to have been put in abeyance and the focus is more and more on fire fighting. Strategic thinking seems to have gone out of the window."

I am delighted that the Department has accepted the key recommendation of our Committee, which was the recommendation for a chief construction officer. I think that that will do a lot to address the inevitable flux in Ministers, but it would be nice to have that person in post soon. I know that the consultation has begun and I welcome that, but there are big issues. For example, there is tension between the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which has unspent capital in its budget, and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, which cannot find the money to fund the essential further education college building programme. A modest transfer from one to the other would help the nation's skills agenda and the construction sector. The chief construction officer could and should be knocking heads together to achieve that.

The good news is that BERR seems to be doing better than its predecessors. That is the judgment, it seems, of a number of organisations. The CBI said that it saw an improvement from the old Department of Trade and Industry, a positive change and transition and greater emphasis on shaping policy across government. However, the CBI also said:

"BERR still has some way to go to achieve its mission. BERR should continue to strive to influence critical business issues across Government, including tax competitiveness, labour market flexibility, infrastructure, skills, and energy prices and security."

The Engineering Employers Federation, Ministers will be pleased to hear, is quite kind too. It states:

"BERR appears to have developed a greater sense of purpose and a more confident relationship with other government departments. In part this is down to personalities and there is no doubt that the Department has a forceful and often impressive Ministerial team. It is arguable that the economic downturn has helped give BERR a clearer sense of purpose."

So, there are mixed views outside, but the general sense is that the Department could and should be doing better.

One matter that does not seem to have been mentioned by the CBI is over-regulation and the role of my hon. Friend's Committee and the Department in the context of billions of pounds-worth of over-regulation. Commissioner Verheugen has already identified a cost of £100 billion a year for the whole of Europe, Boyfield and Ambler and others have calculated a figure of £23 billion for the City and, as my hon. Friend mentioned earlier, according to the British Chambers of Commerce, cost increases to business amount to £20 billion a year. In that context, is it not absolutely essential in weighing up the cost-benefit of the Department to start digging deeply into that over-regulation and to take all necessary steps in this House and in Europe to ensure that the whole thing is dealt with properly?

I am very pleased to agree with my hon. Friend. To be fair to the Department, many of the regulations that impact on business come from other Departments. We need to get a handle on other Departments' behaviour, too, and not just on BERR's.

I had hoped to discuss at some length the distraction of Sir Fred Goodwin's pension scheme and the real issues that we face but given the time available, I will not do so. Sometimes I think that the Government are throwing up a smokescreen in front of our eyes and promoting some issues over some of the more fundamental issues. I shall not talk about that today, but shall simply say that the banks and the Government got us where we are by allowing indiscriminate lending and over-borrowing, both public and private. My friends in business find it somewhat confusing to be told by business Ministers that the Government are suggesting that banks must restore lending, especially lending on property, to the very levels that helped to create the problem. I hope that it is uncontroversial now to say that we believe that the Government and the Bank of England should have acted sooner to correct the huge asset price bubble that we knew was an unsustainable boom that was bound to end in bust.

We have just heard from the Financial Secretary to the Treasury that the new deal with Lloyds will release an extra £3 billion for home loans. Does not my hon. Friend share my concern that that extra lending will be without any direction from the UK taxpayer, who is the majority shareholder, on the income or assets on which that lending should be based?

I hope that we will again move towards a world where more prudent guidance about lending is offered to individuals who are making the most important purchase of their lives. One of the great failures of the past few years has been the failure to provide that guidance, so I am very sympathetic to what my hon. Friend says.

The trouble is that the indebtedness in our economy— the indebtedness of individuals, companies and the Government—poses huge challenges to business. There is an overwhelming need to refinance corporate debt this year, a lot of it held by foreign banks that are now desperately short of liquidity and unprepared to offer that refinancing. Intriguingly, one senior banker said to me that in the great scheme of things, given the scale of the tidal wave of corporate debt requiring refinancing this year, the schemes that we are debating in our consideration of the estimates today, such as the enterprise finance guarantee scheme, amounted to little more than "a rounding error". That is a salutary thought. When I think of the hundreds of billions of pounds that we have been talking about, I see what he means.

It would have been nice to have had a statement in the House on the implications of quantitative easing; that would have been good, and I am surprised and disappointed that we have not had such a statement. Quantitative easing may make the refinancing of corporate debt more achievable, but its scale does not match up to the level of corporate debt that needs refinancing. Anyhow, the smaller businesses that are rightly of concern to the Government and the House will not be selling bonds to the old lady of Threadneedle street for a while yet; that is for sure. What businesses, and small businesses in particular, need is working capital; it is often overdrafts that they need, not loans—a point that my hon. Friend Mr. Binley made in a very fine speech on Friday in the debate on my private Member's Bill on small business rate relief. I am sorry that the Government could not bring themselves to back my Bill. Small schemes of that kind add up and form a big picture; they would make a world of difference to small and medium-sized businesses. I will not repeat all that my hon. Friend and I said about the importance of small businesses to the economy. Members of the House who are interested can read the debate in Friday's Hansard. The fact remains that small businesses are still finding it desperately difficult to access the finance that they need.

The Business and Enterprise Committee had a session with the banks before Christmas. Their evidence appears in the tagged bundle of papers provided for today's debate. Intriguingly, we heard clear evidence from them that the political pressure that they were under had led them to make improvements, as regards base rates and overdraft rates, particularly for small businesses. It is important that the House keeps up the pressure, and reminds banks of the need to address the issue. However, the CBI's chief economic adviser has said:

"Significant government measures aimed at restoring credit flows are gradually being put into place, but the pace of delivery is slow. As can be seen in this survey"— that is, the CBI's February survey—

"businesses' access to credit is just as difficult as it was a month ago.

The cost of borrowing, the credit freeze and the lack of a solution on trade credit insurance"—

I shall come to that issue in a minute—

"are having a growing impact on business activity."

The CBI's director general, Richard Lambert, has called for the Government to use a clearer, louder voice to explain the recovery plans, as there is confusion in business about what those plans cover and how they fit together. That follows what the CBI said in January about the need for a clearer timetable. The Federation of Small Businesses told me that it really appreciates what the Government are trying to do, but it adds that

"feedback from our members suggests that generally, small businesses are not satisfied with the speed with which measures to help small businesses are being passed on."

The Engineering Employers Federation told me:

"The government has announced a number of support measures for business, with BERR in particular leading on measures to free up the flow of credit. There has been some criticism of the piecemeal nature of these initiatives and the lack of an overall discernible strategy."

The enterprise finance guarantee scheme is aimed at viable businesses that have a history of borrowing from banks, but the EEF gave an example of a shortcoming in the detail of the scheme. It says:

"The Enterprise Finance Guarantee (EFG) Scheme, announced in January, has been slow to get off the ground. In January, EEF's steel division, UK Steel, also pointed to the incorrect exclusion of steel from the scheme and this has only recently been reversed."

I have had to write to Lord Mandelson to seek clarification on whether the scheme fully applies in Northern Ireland; that is apparently still not clear. On 16 February, the Financial Times reported that only £12 million had been lent under the scheme a month after it was launched.

The FSB has carried out a survey, which is available today. It says that a third of all small businesses are expecting to close down, or to lay off staff, if they do not have more help, but fewer than half of them had even heard of the enterprise finance guarantee scheme. In another FSB survey, no respondents said that branch bank managers were promoting the Government funds at all. The FSB says:

"Generally, it is apparent from responses that while some businesses have benefited from Government measures, for the most part, high street banks are either not aware of the detail or Government schemes, do not know how they would operate, and/or are concerned about the risk they would carry (25 per cent.)."

I saw a long story about that issue in The Sunday Times yesterday, and there are serious concerns about the level of personal security still being sought from companies under the enterprise finance guarantee scheme. There are big questions there.

If I had more time—if it were not for the statements—I would cite some case histories that prove that these are not anonymous concerns. They have specific roots in reality. I can show business after business that is not getting the help that it thought it would get as a result of issues with the way in which the schemes work, but I will not do that, to save time. I shall also not expand at length on the delay to the much bigger working capital scheme—a £10 billion scheme, which was revealed in the Financial Times last week as being "weeks behind schedule". It is another example of a scheme winning headlines, but still lacking tangible reality.

What about the promise of 10-day payment from the public sector? All members of the Federation of Small Businesses who responded to the survey cited waiting more than 30 days to be paid by central Government Departments, local authorities and primary care trusts, so the 10-day deal is not working.

The Government have said that they are looking at trade credit insurance. The importance of that cannot be overstated. All business organisations are concerned about the withdrawal of trade credit insurance. It is affecting a growing number of businesses, particularly in the construction, retail and electronic sectors. I know that manufacturing businesses in my constituency are suffering from the lack of trade credit insurance. We need to know soon—very soon indeed—whether the Government intend to act on trade credit insurance or not.

Let me give one example. Focus DIY, one of the largest DIY retailers in the UK, owns 183 stores and employs almost 5,000 people. I am told, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that it is in healthy economic shape and has just opened two new stores. It has had all its trade credit insurance withdrawn. The consequences do not need to be spelled out. That is happening across the retail sector, leaving otherwise completely healthy businesses facing an inevitable funding crisis. If those retailers collapse, jobs will be lost not only in those businesses, but in the manufacturing industries that supply those retailers. Sorting out trade credit insurance must be a very high priority for BERR. I look for reassurance from the Minister when he replies to the debate that that is indeed the case.

Another issue that we have not heard much about, but that ought to go on to the Minister's agenda, is leasing. Despite Government's initiatives and support for UK banks, there continues to be a sharp decline in the liquidity needed to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to lease essential business assets, such as telecoms and data services equipment. Demand from the SMEs continues at last year's levels, but the almost complete withdrawal of UK banks from funding smaller businesses on normal terms, if at all, means that specialist leasing companies have to rely on foreign banks and to take more risk on their own books, and they cannot afford to do that for much longer. That reduces the number of SMEs able to access affordable leasing arrangements. There will be serious consequences for SMEs if we cannot give them the quality systems and technology that they need to develop their businesses. Leasing, sometimes of quite small items of kit, is hugely important in the SME sector, but the money is not available to finance it. I hope the Minister will be prepared to look into that with representatives of the leasing sector.

The hon. Gentleman is the Chairman of the Select Committee on which I sit and I have listened to his list of issues affecting small businesses. As a representative of a constituency with an enormous number of small manufacturing businesses, I recognise some of the problems that he has outlined. Does he agree that where there are problems with the schemes that the Government have introduced and that do not seem to be getting through to the businesses, the local chambers of commerce and the regional development agencies will have a crucial role to play in bringing the finance sector and the local manufacturing companies together to ensure that those schemes get through?

Some schemes have been put in place, but people are not being told accurately and in detail what is involved. Other schemes are not yet in place and ought to be. Yet other schemes are hinted at but are not yet offered, even in broad terms. Those are three separate problems, but I agree that the RDAs have an important role to play.

I regret the moving of Business Link from my Hereford and Worcester chamber of commerce to the regional development agency. It was a very well run Business Link which had strong links with the local community. It is now more remote, so communication is sometimes a more difficult challenge in my area. That situation differs in different parts of the country and even in our shared region. I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's thoughtful contribution.

Leasing is important to the automotive sector. That leads me on quickly to a discussion of one of the topics in the estimates—the package of loan guarantees to automotive manufacturers. I am worried about the lack of attention to the supply chain and small suppliers. We know how important that is. I have at least one automotive supplier—I am not prepared to name him in the House—in desperate difficulty with his bank, for no good reason. He desperately needs access to finance and cannot get it. We need to look much more than we have at the supply chain in the automotive sector.

I welcome, I think, what the Government have done for the automotive sector, as does the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. However, we still have to be clear in our own minds about the basis for supporting the automotive sector as opposed to any other sector. We must not allow dangerous precedents to be set; the Government cannot support every sector.

rose—

I see that the hon. Gentleman wants to intervene; I think that he will have particular views about the automotive sector.

I am surprised at the lack of consistency among those on the Conservative Benches. I welcome the comments that the Chairman of the Select Committee has just made; it is a pity, however, that Mr. Clarke, who went uninvited to Vauxhall last week, did not say the same thing. He was still trying to talk down the business.

If my right hon. and learned Friend were here, he would be able to answer for himself; I think that he will be here a little later. I do not know what he said, but I had a discussion with him last week about the merits of scrappage allowances, for example. The Government have been slow to move on that issue, and that concerns the SMMT. There may be a case for scrappage allowances, although it may be weaker here than in Germany or France. The Government are talking about the issue, but nothing has happened.

The SMMT shares my concern about the failure to develop a proper package of support for the automotive finance houses. That is crucial. I know people—perfectly sound risks—who want to buy cars, but cannot get the finance to do so. Again, the Government have been promising action on finance, but it has not been taken. That is another example of an idea being talked about that needs to be brought forward.

The SMMT would also like Government support for short-time working, which might help in the constituency of the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston; I do not know. Lord Jones of Birmingham has put that interesting idea forward, and it involves a shared package of employees taking less money, employers making a contribution and the Government helping to subsidise part-time working, so that the companies do not lose the skills that they will need again when the recession ends. The chambers of commerce share that view and such a scheme was in place from April 1979 to March 1984; there is a precedent. Other European countries are introducing such schemes, and I hope that the Minister will say that the issue is being considered with some urgency—and, if it is not a runner, that it is being dismissed. We need clarity about the Government's intentions.

The Government will have to move more swiftly than they have until now, and pick the big issues to address. They need to promise to do less, but do it better and more quickly. I am not talking about doing nothing; we all agree that action is needed. However, the Government must make sure that what they do is done with care and speed, and that they then explain themselves clearly to the House of Commons.

That leads me to my final points, which are about the accountability of the Department to the House. I am still proud to be a Member of the House and I want to reinforce its position in society. We should be debating great issues not only in television studios and on the "Today" programme, but here in the House. Today's debate is an estimates day debate, one of the most important things that the House of Commons does.

By the way, it is worth pointing out that only the decision of the Liaison Committee to hold this debate fleshed out the fact that the Department had failed to provide the customary written statement on the estimates. That was a regrettable oversight. For reasons that I shall explain a little later, it is really important that the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, above all others, fulfils all its obligations to the Commons to the letter—that includes replying to letters more speedily than it sometimes does and not transferring to other Departments letters to which it should reply. The Department has to treat the House of Commons with the utmost care at present because of the relative paucity of its representatives on House of Commons Benches.

I am still surprised by the introduction of the Industry and Exports (Financial Support) Bill, a hugely important Bill, without any explanation or statement. I have had no letter about it and have seen no written statement about it—it was just suddenly published. I am likely to support it, although I have not seen a detailed debate on it yet. It is a really important measure, and it would be good to see the Government explaining themselves rather more clearly about such important steps.

We have the power to grant money. That is what we are doing today; later this evening, we are voting on millions of pounds. The Government rely on the Commons to approve the estimates. Today, we are debating requests for money, including potentially significant liabilities for business and the automotive sector. But the Secretary of State cannot come here to explain his policies and the Minister with responsibility for small businesses cannot come here to explain hers. Furthermore, neither the Minister for Trade and Investment nor the Under-Secretary of State responsible for communications, technology and broadcasting can come here and explain their policies. They are all in the Lords, although I know that Ian Pearson has a lot of sectoral responsibility, which is welcome.

I do not know what this Government would have done without the ability to create life peers in the House of Lords. We have had five life peers at the Department in my short time chairing the Select Committee. One roared briefly and gloriously across the parliamentary sky—Digby, Lord Jones of Birmingham—but he was not a real Minister. He was never a member of the Labour party, and he had no policy responsibility and not much collective responsibility, but he was a very good salesman for UK plc: an important job well done, all too briefly, but not a ministerial one. However, he gave the Prime Minister some help in his early days, and I suppose we must thank Digby for that. To be fair, Digby, Lord Jones, has a quality shared with the other four life peers now serving in the Department—real ability.

Why alone among Government Departments is this Department unable to find enough talent from this House to take the most important decisions that we face as a nation? We have just three Ministers in the Commons, two of whom are here today. They are the two—I do not say this pejoratively—part-time Ministers, one shared, in the case of the Minister for Trade, Development and Consumer Affairs, with the Department for International Development, and the other with the Treasury. Only the Minister for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs dedicates himself full time to the Department and this place. They are all able and decent Ministers; I can say that genuinely. I like them, get on very well with them personally, and respect them—but they do not have Cabinet rank, and they do not have enough time to do justice to their portfolios or to make themselves properly responsible to this House. This is not an arcane constitutional issue. Our constituents must have confidence that we can raise on their behalf the most pressing issues of the time with the Ministers who are taking the decisions on those issues.

BERR now even has a YouTube presence—I went on it at the weekend. People can ask Lord Mandelson a question, and the most popular one will get a video response. I have asked a question, although I do not know if it is popular. There are some very good questions on it. When last I looked, there were 38 questions and no responses. However, in the House of Commons itself only members of the Select Committee—there are many here today—have the privilege of being able to ask Lord Mandelson questions on the record. We read about the consequences in last week's edition of The Sunday Times, where we were told, of the controversial proposals to part-privatise Royal Mail Group:

"Several government aides have joined the Labour rebellion, piqued by the role played by the divisive Mandelson. 'Because Peter Mandelson is in the Lords, I have to make do with asking him questions in corridors', said Geraldine Smith, the Labour MP leading the rebels. 'I asked him, 'How much do you expect to get?' and he said, 'I haven't got a figure.' No one has any money right now.'"

That is a rather important question for this House to ask, but we cannot do so. Lord Mandelson's speeches are always reported. They are very well written, although I am not sure that they are always as radically new as he thinks—"industrial activism" sounds remarkably like the policy of successive Governments since the war. They are always worth asking about, but we cannot ask him on the record. I can, and the other members of the Committee can, but none of the rest of us can, and we should be able to.

This is not just about scrutiny but legislation. The Commons will be asked to legislate without access to the head of the Department. Will junior Ministers really have the power during those debates to make the concessions that this House needs? When the Postal Services Bill comes here after Easter, that will become a very important question. Indeed, we have the curious spectacle of a major Bill that will spend large amounts of money to address a massive pension deficit and breaks the spirit, if not the letter, of a manifesto commitment, beginning its life in the Lords—its Second Reading is tomorrow—simply because the Minister with prime responsibility for it is a Member of the House of Lords. There should be a Commons Cabinet Minister in this House and the Bill should begin here.

The hon. Gentleman does a fine job chairing his Committee. Does he recall that Lord Home was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Harold Macmillan's Government, and that even more recently Baroness Chalker headed the International Development Department from the House of Lords, and we had 10 minutes for a junior Minister, Lennox-Boyd, to deal with all the big issues here? I share the hon. Gentleman's confidence in my hon. Friend the Minister for Trade, Development and Consumer Affairs. When Ted Heath stood in for Lord Home, he was clearly on the ladder to becoming Prime Minister, so I am expecting great things.

The right hon. Gentleman tempts me to recite the Committee's 14th report, which I recommend to him. There is a particularly good footnote about Lord Wellington appearing before the Bar of the House of Commons. I think that there was only one occasion of substance in recent history when there was a Minister in the Lords without a Cabinet Minister to match him here in the Commons—Lord Cockfield, from 1982 to 1983. As far as I recall, Baroness Chalker was not in the Cabinet at the time and was only a Minister of State; her post did not involve a separate Government Department. That was a mistake then, and it is a mistake now.

In our 14th report, we said that

"it would be possible to follow earlier precedents and ensure that a Cabinet Minister in the Commons is able to answer on behalf of the Department".

We discussed accountability with Lord Mandelson and he suggested

"you alter the Standing Orders of the House of Commons to allow Lords heads of department to come and answer questions in the Commons", although he admitted he was

"way beyond my comfort zone".

We thought that that was an idea worth exploring and we looked at some ways of doing it. In view of the time, I will not labour the point, but we said that detailed discussion about a mechanism was probably best left to the Procedure Committee. We were

"convinced such a mechanism is needed, particularly at a time of such economic turmoil", but we were comprehensively rebuffed by the Government in their response, Command Paper 7559:

"The Government is content that the current arrangements provide for rigorous scrutiny in both Houses of the work of the Department. The Secretary of State has indicated that he is keen for the Business and Enterprise Committee to act as the principal conduit of his accountability to the Commons and he is happy to discuss further with the Committee how that role might be developed."

The Government observed that

"the Secretary of State has already appeared twice in front of the Committee".

Yes, he has, and we welcome his preparedness to come before us. It is always entertaining, and often illuminating when he does, and we are grateful for that, but we have not got the time to spend our entire lives asking House of Lords Ministers to come before us to be accountable to Parliament, when they should do so in this House. We cannot do that, and to do so would not be an adequate replacement for making them accountable here.

The Government said:

"Ministers have a duty to Parliament to account, and to be held to account, for the policies, decisions and actions of their departments and agencies. They do this in a number of ways. In the House in which they sit, Ministers answer questions, make statements and participate in debates."

I apologise to the Ministers on the Front Bench, but the four most important Ministers in the Department do not sit here. They sit in the other place, and that is the problem. I am sorry if that hurts, but they are the four most important Ministers taking the most important decisions, and we cannot question them.

One of the most extraordinary claims in the Government's response was this:

"A Minister who is a Member of the House of Lords may make a statement to a grand committee of the House of Commons and answer questions on it."

There are only three Grand Committees—for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—and I am advised by the Journal Office that so far during this Parliament, only the Welsh Grand Committee has met, and it has only met twice. The Scottish Grand Committee has not met since 2003. This idea of Grand Committees as a mechanism, even if we got the English regional Grand Committees, is not a good one because we want the whole House to be involved in this process. Allowing regional Grand Committees to call Ministers is not a substitute for the democracy of this House.

Another point raised by the Government, which we were just discussing, was this:

"There have always been Cabinet Ministers in the House of Lords...The Government does not believe that the current situation is any different in principle from any of these other recent examples."

I just do not accept that; it is factually wrong. This situation is different by an order of magnitude. For a start, this is a time of economic crisis, and the decisions being taken by these Ministers are hugely important. When I was a special adviser at the old Department of Trade and Industry and Lord Young of Graffham was Secretary of State, my right hon. and learned Friend Mr. Clarke was a Cabinet Minister, sitting here and answering questions. We should have something similar now. Actually, it would be good to have my right hon. and learned Friend in the Department again, and sitting round the Cabinet table, not just the shadow Cabinet table. But that is a partisan point, and Select Committee Chairmen must not make those. It would be good to have a Cabinet-ranking Minister in this House at this important time.

The Government finally said:

"There is also a risk that the burden on Ministers of having additional duties in the other House might compromise their ability to participate fully in the work of the House in which they sit."

Almost all Ministers in the Department have other responsibilities in other Departments—only two out of a team of seven do not fall into this category. That is all right, then: Ministers can have those conflicting responsibilities, but they cannot make themselves accountable to this House. That is a great shame.

I have spoken for far longer than I meant to. It is an unusual opportunity, and this is a series of important questions that the Department needs to answer. It is doing better, but it needs to up its game. It must deliver on what it promises, and promise the right things, and it must improve its accountability to this House. I do not regard the Government's response to our 14th report as anything other than a severe disappointment.

Several hon. Members:

rose —

May I remind the House that there is a 15-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches?

It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the Select Committee on Business and Enterprise, Peter Luff. When the Department was restructured, we had a discussion about where regulatory reform fits into it, given the new responsibilities of my Committee, the Select Committee on Regulatory Reform, and we now have a good working understanding of how that relationship fits together. That is an example of how we can build bridges and make structures work.

I wish to make some observations about the departmental structure. I, too, was concerned when I first saw the structure that was set up after the last election. In fact, my Committee passed comment in its first investigative report on the moving of responsibility for regulatory reform from the Cabinet Office to the new Department. When we took evidence during that investigation, it was interesting to find that the majority of people had come to the conclusion that there is always difficulty in creating the right structure of government, as successive Governments have demonstrated. The hon. Gentleman mentioned science, which has been around five or six different Departments. There is never a perfect place to put it. The important thing is not creating departmental structures but creating mechanisms to make Departments talk effectively to each other.

I have come to the conclusion that the hon. Gentleman is wrong about Ministers with a foot in both camps. There is a role for them, and it is particularly useful if there is a foot in the Treasury camp, as there are cross-cutting matters to consider. It is interesting to note his observation that both the CBI and the Engineering Employers Federation have said that certain things are working better in the new Department than in its predecessor. That is partly down to the new cross-cutting arrangement.

My Committee's report concluded that we would want to revisit the role of regulatory reform in future, based on experience. There is a good argument to be had about whether it can be dealt with effectively by one Department, given that it should transcend every Department of State and every aspect of local government. I respect the hon. Gentleman's view, but I believe he would acknowledge that, on some matters, we can come to conclusions only when we have the advantage of hindsight. It is a great benefit to be able to use hindsight from time to time, but of course it can be too late if we have got things wrong. However, I believe that we have made some important steps.

I commend to the House the survey of business undertaken by the National Audit Office during the past year. It has thrown up some fascinating data about where individual businesses perceive the burden of regulation to come from. There has been a slight move in the right direction, with businesses perceiving that the burden is shrinking. Interestingly, the perception is sectorally based. The Committees that the hon. Gentleman and I chair will consistently have problems in being able to drill down on the impact of Government legislation on individual sectors of the economy and come to conclusions about the best way forward. I would like detailed work of the type that I have mentioned to be commissioned, so that we can get away from the rather silly headlines about the number of regulations and so on and consider how individual sectors are affected.

Does the hon. Gentleman appreciate that the cost to business of additional regulation amounts to £66 billion over the past 11 years? That is not a silly figure—it is a most disturbing burden that businesses have to face and tackle every day.

That is an easy headline, but missing from it are the cause of the regulations, the sectors on which they have an impact—

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The hon. Gentleman is so anxious that he will not let me finish my sentence. It is important to consider the way we try to shift the burden away from businesses, and which regulations have gone through the House with all-party support. We must also recognise that some burdens that we place on businesses are necessary. It is easy to cite figures that sound horrendous, but when one asks what the burdens are—as the National Audit Office asked businesses; clearly, the hon. Gentleman has not read its report—it is interesting to note that only a few businesses, which totalled 5, 6, 7 and 8 per cent. of the 1,000 surveyed, identified the same burden. However, the survey had an extremely long tail of little gripes from individual businesses. I am concerned that we are not drilling down and considering those properly.

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. Does he also appreciate that, when the sets of regulations were examined, 62 per cent. were found to be gold-plated by the Government? Is that a silly statement, too?

Neither our report nor the National Audit Office found that. I am not sure whether it is proper for me to try to recruit, but there is a Conservative vacancy on my Committee, and I would look forward to the hon. Gentleman's participating because we are desperately short of Conservative Members. Indeed, no Conservatives bother to turn up.

My hon. Friend takes a great interest in regulation. Does he agree that it is rather odd that Conservative Members complain about the so-called burden of regulation on businesses, but almost in the same breath blame the Government for not regulating the financial services sector more heavily in the past few years? Is the Regulatory Reform Committee considering the possibility of analysing the appropriate regulatory framework for the financial services sector?

The financial services sector is, of course, the purview of my right hon. Friend John McFall, the Chairman of the Treasury Committee, but we are discussing our next subject of inquiry with him to ensure that we consider issues in which industrial and financial matters cross over. I will deal with some of those problems when I speak shortly about the vehicle industry, which is dear to my heart. However, my hon. Friend makes a good observation.

I agree with the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire about credit insurance. It is increasingly a problem, especially, as he said, in the construction industry. A couple of weeks ago, I visited a company in my constituency that has successfully traded for two generations. The father started the business and the son continues it. It deals with ground-level works, ground clearances and environmental clean-up. The Minister for Trade, Development and Consumer Affairs will be interested to learn that the company—Morgan's—won a major health and safety award as a result of its work, in competition with other, much bigger companies.

Morgan's is typical of the kind of company that the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire spoke of. It is genuinely concerned about the problem of credit insurance, which is an area where we need some rapid movement by the Government to try to help to underwrite some of the important work that is available. There is a lot of potential in the publicly funded contracts that can emerge as a result of the Building Schools for the Future programme and other such projects, but we must ensure that the potential contractors can fully participate without risk to themselves.

My fourth point is about vehicles. I am delighted that Mr. Clarke has joined us, because he visited my constituency last week—he did not bother to tell me of course, but that is the nature of things these days. We are not as polite to each other as we used to be. [ Interruption. ] I can see that the right hon. and learned Gentleman is seeking to stand up and apologise, but he does not need to bother, because I accept that from him. His was supposedly a private visit—that was what it said in one newspaper, but last Saturday's Daily Post quoted him at length on what he thought of the vehicle industry. I am sure that he will not have seen that, because the Daily Post does not circulate in his neck of the woods, but I commend the online edition to him, because he is quoted in it at length, suggesting that the Government have done nothing to aid the vehicle industry.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman and I would probably start with some common ground, in that Vauxhall, which is part of GM Europe, which is part of General Motors, has transformed itself beyond all recognition. He will have seen a company that is tooling up for a new vehicle that is going to come on stream in September, part of which has been supported by a significant degree of public money—so significant, in fact, that it was subject to inquiries from Europe about whether it was legitimate under competition rules. That money has been given the green light and is being used.

That work is being done by the company in partnership with West Cheshire further education college, which is upskilling people, and not just for the new vehicle in September. Plans are afoot to keep that training programme, so that we will be in a position to capture some of the new work that will come into Europe and, I hope, into the UK as a result of the investments being made in electric cars. I hope that we can get a cross-party consensus to encourage companies such as General Motors to work with all parties in the House in bringing that about.

If we do that, not only will the 2,200 people who work at Vauxhall in Ellesmere Port be beneficiaries, but there will be massive supply chain implications. The hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire touched on the supply chain and he is absolutely right. In my constituency we have just lost a tiny company called Cabot Carbon, which had been there for 60 years. It had certificate No. 1 under the Marshall plan and was formally sponsored and backed to the hilt by the late Harold Wilson when he was President of the Board of Trade. Cabot Carbon made carbon black, an essential product in tyres, but the market in carbon black has collapsed across the world. Factories around the world have closed because of the failure of vehicle companies to sell their products.

The problem starts at the raw materials level and goes up from there. It is not just the companies that make components that are affected; it is companies that make the raw materials that make the components. We have to look at the supply chain comprehensively and ensure that the programmes that we put in place as a result of the Government's proposals reach out to all parts of the industry. It is no good our simply saying that we can do nothing, as some have suggested, and that we should leave things to the market. That is not good enough.

There must be some direct intervention to offer support with short-time working and scrappage, as I indicated in the Liaison Committee—the hon. Gentleman will recall that I asked the Prime Minister about that. There is a raft of issues that we can examine, although it would be wrong, incidentally, to use the scrappage scheme as a pretend environmental scheme. We must be clear that the issue is not whether the project is environmentally friendly; it is about intervening in the market to help to stimulate it. We ought also to look at the finance companies, as the hon. Gentleman said.

Those are the kinds of things that are being examined, along with the training programme. We now need to see those things translated into action well before the summer, so that the companies are lined up, just as Vauxhall is lined up to launch the new vehicle in September with gusto and confidence. It is a great vehicle and I am sure that people in this place, as well as many people outside, will buy it, but I will leave it at that.

I congratulate the Chairman of the Business and Enterprise Committee, Peter Luff, on introducing today's estimates debate so competently and on his neat summary of the work in which the Committee has been involved. It has been a privilege to serve on the Committee and I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate him on how he has chaired it through consideration of some complex issues over the past six months. It is an extremely successful Select Committee and I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being part of it.

I want to start with the Chairman's end-point, which was about the accountability of the Department. As a member of the Committee, I am one of the fortunate 15 or 16 hon. Members who are able to cross-examine the Secretary of State. As the Chairman said, we have quite rightly been privileged in having the Secretary of State give evidence on a couple of occasions. However, other hon. Members have not been afforded that privilege.

When the Department has such an enormous work load and when there is such an enormous focus on its work, we need accountability in this Chamber. I am sure that I am not alone in having had constituents and businesses saying to me, "When you next see Peter Mandelson or one of the Ministers, will you ask them this?" I do not think that I have known businesses to be in contact as much as they are now with direct questions that they want taken up. It is extremely frustrating not to be able to do so on the Floor of the House.

As the Chairman of the Committee said, we have some extremely hard-working and able Ministers coping with some extremely difficult circumstances. What I am saying is in no way a criticism of their ability; in fact, we are arguing that it would help them with their role and function if they could be more accountable. It is not acceptable to have so many Ministers in the Department in the House of Lords. In principle, I have no problem with Ministers coming from the House of the Lords; in fact, the appointment of Peter Mandelson was a good thing in many ways. It certainly raised the profile of business and he seems to have brought a lot of energy and vigour. One of the advantages of appointing from the Lords is being able to bring in such individuals. However, the one weakness in the system is the lack of accountability.

In considering that point, the Committee suggested a number of solutions, some of which the Chairman touched on. The most obvious solution is for Peter Mandelson to be at the Dispatch Box in this Chamber. I just cannot understand what is tied up in our history that does not allow a Member from the other side of the Palace to come and be answerable at the Dispatch Box. That would be the simplest thing to do. I am sure that there are all sorts of archaic reasons why we cannot do it, but now is not the time for old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy ideas; now is the time for the Government to demonstrate that they recognise and understand that there is a crisis. If that means more accountability by allowing a Member of the House of Lords to stand at the Dispatch Box in this Chamber, that is what we should do.

I cannot understand the arguments against that happening. It is not good enough to say that it has not happened before. That is never an argument for change; if we use that argument, there will never be any change. Even if we are prepared to accept that Lord Mandelson is unable to answer questions here at Question Time, surely he should at least be able to come to this House to make key statements. I feel disfranchised when important statements on business and the economy take place in the House of Lords and we are unable to put questions to the Cabinet Minister on the Floor of this House.

I appreciate the work that the hon. Gentleman does in the Select Committee. I do not want to trivialise what he is saying, but what he is suggesting has been done before: the Duke of Wellington was here in 1815. [Interruption.] Also, we have Westminster Hall and Committee Room 14, so it really should not be difficult to achieve this. I endorse what the hon. Gentleman is saying.

My hon. Friend Mr. Heath says that he remembers that occasion; I do not. I do not really give a damn about whether there is a precedent or not. The point is that it is a good idea now, and we should adopt it now. Whether there is a precedent or not is irrelevant. If we are not prepared to do that, however, we might consider that there is a precedent for Members of the other place appearing before Grand Committees—albeit that the Scottish and Welsh Grand Committees would be pretty useless forums when it came to the matters that we are talking about. Why could the Secretary of State not come to Westminster Hall, for example, so that we could ask him questions there?

There is also the matter of written questions, and of not being able to go through directly to the Secretary of State with them. It would be an incredible response from the Government if they were to recognise this unique situation and to create some kind of accountability. However, their response has not been helpful, as the Chairman of the Select Committee has said. I will not repeat all the various issues, but the one that I found the most ridiculous was the suggestion that, if we were to allow some such accountability, Peter Mandelson would not be able to meet his commitments in the other place. Peter Mandelson would be more than able to do all that at the same time, as he indicated when he appeared before the Select Committee, although he did say that he was beyond his comfort zone. However, he would probably appreciate being able to do so.

It is not good enough simply to allow Peter Mandelson to appear before the Select Committee on a few more occasions, as the Government have suggested. That would not create parliamentary accountability. It would hijack the work of the Select Committee, and genuine accountability would be provided to only about 11 Members. It is certainly not good enough to say that there are opportunities to have quick conversations with Ministers in corridors, because we want the ability to have their answers placed on record. People do not get on the record by talking in corridors.

I want to touch briefly on a few of the issues that the Select Committee has considered in relation to the present economic crisis, and to pick up on the theme of its impact on small businesses. Having talked to small businesses, my biggest concern is the mismatch between central Government announcements and reality. That is a constant theme from those who represent individual businesses. A number of examples spring to mind, the first of which is the small business finance scheme. The initiative sounds incredibly worth while, and it was welcomed by Members on both sides of the House. In the months since the scheme was announced, however, it has been extremely difficult to tie down the Government and find out what is actually happening.

I asked the Minister in a parliamentary question last December when he expected the first payments to be issued under the small business finance scheme. I asked further questions about access and about the resources being set aside for that purpose. That question was asked at the beginning of December, and it was due for answer on 15 December. I have checked with my office today, 9 March, and we have still not had a reply to that question about an important Government scheme. How quickly the Government respond to questions about how the schemes are working on the ground sends completely the wrong message.

Another issue that has been touched on by the Chairman of the Select Committee is the way in which banks are providing for implementation of the various schemes. Having spoken to business men and those working in the banks, I have discovered several problems. First, there is a lack of awareness at branch level about what the schemes are and how they work. Worse still, different banks are offering different interpretations of how the schemes operate. The same business could approach three or four banks and be told different things about how to apply for the schemes.

Figures have already been cited on access to the various schemes that the Government have put in place. A Federation of Small Businesses poll showed that only 8 per cent. of small businesses found that banks were making the enterprise finance guarantee scheme available. Other figures have shown how many businesses were actually accessing the scheme, but if only 8 per cent. are saying that banks are making it available, there is a poor chance of increasing take-up for those who have to jump through all the various hoops to obtain it.

I had a meeting this afternoon with one of the trade bodies representing the insolvency firms, and I was told that there was confusion about the schemes and about which businesses are able to take advantage of them. For example, some businesses are being told that, because they are still viable and successful, they are not able to access schemes to help them to grow. Other businesses, however, are being told that they are unable to access the schemes because they are not viable or successful. That is a complete contradiction. If businesses are struggling—and therefore not viable—these loans might get them back on track, yet they are unable to access them. It is also important, in a recession, to look after the companies that are doing well, yet companies that are doing extremely well but need support to get them to the next stage are being told that they are doing too well and are therefore unable to access the schemes. These confused messages and inconsistencies are causing great concern in the small business sector.

We have been promised that the Government will report back on how the banks are performing on lending. We touched on that matter during the statement earlier. I would welcome any promises or commitments that the Minister can make, and any information on how the Government's lending panel is working. Will he also tell us who is on the panel and what assessments are being put in place to look at lending? Does he think that we can improve on the present commitment for the panel to report back on its work only on an annual basis? If that is still the target, I am sure that the House would want at least a quarterly update on lending, rather than having to wait for an annual report from the panel.

I want briefly to touch on two other issues. The first, which we raised in the Select Committee, relates to procurement. For many small businesses, procurement is an absolute nightmare. Trying to win contracts from Government Departments is a real headache for them. I must declare an interest, in that I occasionally help out a business in my constituency, and I have sat with representatives of that business trying to help them to win business in the health and local government sectors. The chief executive of the company has shown me a document of some 100 pages of forms to be filled in by the company just to try to get on to a tender list to win business from Government Departments. Some of the questions in that procurement process are breathtaking. They include questions such as: what is the average age of the people working in the company? The forms go on and on in that kind of detail.

Businesses are being put off trying to win any business from the Government because of the long, cumbersome procurement process. In the Select Committee, Lord Mandelson acknowledged that the Government needed to do more about that. The Glover review was put in place by the Government to look at procurement, and I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us what Glover is doing now to sweep away some of the ridiculous form-filling and red tape that businesses trying to win Government contracts have to deal with. I know that a lot of businesses are trying to win work on the back of the Olympics, and that process is quite complex, although some work has been done to make it easier. However, across the board, in local government, health and all the various Government Departments, we could do more to help our small businesses to reduce the time it takes to win business.

Finally, I want to pick up on the points that the Chairman of the Select Committee made about the 10-day payment target, and to welcome DBERR's commitment in that direction. When I asked a question about that in December, I was told that 96.9 per cent. of the Department's payments were made within 10 days, which is excellent and represents good progress. At the same time, I asked whether the Department could report on whether other Government Departments were meeting their 10-day targets. I have not yet had a response to that question, and I wonder whether the Minister could tell me whether the other Departments are following DBERR's lead in scoring a percentage in the mid-90s.

The concern goes further than central Government Departments; the commitment was to try to speak to those working in health and local government to see whether we could speed up the 10-day period in those sectors. Again, the word coming back from suppliers in health and local government is not promising: some of the figures suggest that in many cases people are waiting way beyond 30 days, let alone achieving any improvement towards 10 days. In his winding-up speech, will the Minister give us some comfort that we are looking seriously at putting more pressure on those public bodies to meet the 10-day target? I would appreciate that.

In conclusion, I believe that the Government are doing good work in hard times, but it would help enormously if two things came out of this debate: first, if we made some progress on accountability so that we could cross-examine Ministers more regularly and more clearly; and secondly, if we could gain a real understanding that an announcement had to result in action on the ground very quickly afterwards.

I do not think that any of us on any day can underestimate how deep the present recession is becoming and just how many jobs are being lost. In a patch like mine, which most hon. Members would consider to be a relatively prosperous part of the country, there is barely a day—certainly not a week—goes by without very significant announcements being made of further job losses in the automotive industry, retailing, automotive components and pretty well every sector of the economy.

What is also frightening is just how quickly businesses are running out of cash and the number of job losses that is leading to. Last week, for example, a very professional printing business in my patch announced that it would have to make about 60 people redundant—simply because of a somewhat disappointing order book for January and February. In the past, if a business had a cash-flow difficulty of that kind, it would have either gone to the bank to sort out future financial loan arrangements or gone to the shareholders to raise extra funding: neither of those options is now available, so businesses that are running out of cash find that the only way they can respond to it is by making people redundant and laying them off.

Even in the most recent unemployment figures—for January—we are already seeing the highest unemployment figure in Oxfordshire since May 1997, when the present Government came to power. In the month of January, unemployment in Oxfordshire jumped up by 1,104 people since the previous month—the biggest increase in a single month since March 1991. I suspect that, as the months go by, we are going to continue to see unemployment figures tragically beating those of previous months. Twice as many people are out of work in Oxfordshire now as compared to a year ago, and it is getting worse.

What we need, then, is for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform to be a champion in Whitehall and it should devote all its attention to being an advocate for businesses in these particularly difficult times. Against that background, it is disappointing that so many of the relevant Ministers are in the other place. They are also somewhat distracted by trying to sort out the problems of the Royal Mail and, indeed, sort out the internal workings of the Labour party in terms of Royal Mail.

Lord Mandelson obviously appreciates that the Department should help business and be an advocate for it, because on 9 February, he wrote us all a letter to tell us what the Department intended to do. We should compare the promises in the letter with what is actually happening in reality, because, as Mr. Oaten rightly said, all too often the statements and promises made by the Government in the House do not compare with the reality on the ground.

Let me mention one good thing that the Department has done. A number of us who participated in a Westminster Hall debate recently were very concerned that, with so few Ministers based in the House of Commons and given that the issues faced by our constituency firms are so immediate, by the time we wrote to Ministers and the information went all around Whitehall, it would take far too long to get responses. We suggested to the Minister responding to the debate that it would good if there were a hotline that MPs could use to raise urgent and immediate issues with officials in BERR. The suggestion I put forward had all-party support on the day and I am pleased to credit Ministers for introducing it. For the first time, the Department now has a helpline and MPs are able to communicate directly with officials on policy issues. Lord Mandelson made it clear in his recent letter that if we had any urgent matters relating to a local company in difficulty, we could get in touch with David Smith, the director of special projects at BERR, by e-mail on economy@berr.gsi.gov.uk. Having used it on several occasions since it was announced, I have to say that officials have not only been courteous, but have interacted, responded and taken up issues with other Government Departments. That is what we need them to do.

Let us look, however, at what else the Department says it is doing. On finance and the various schemes for business support, I really question the real value to business of the enterprise finance guarantee scheme. First, the banks have 75 per cent. of their lending guaranteed by the Government; secondly, individuals or companies have a 2 per cent. premium charged on the outstanding balance—presumably that is some sort of insurance scheme on the remaining amount. It has now become clear, however, that the banks expect personal guarantees for 100 per cent. of the loan and that those 100 per cent. loan guarantees are offered with the support and agreement of the Government. As Phil Orford, chief executive of the Forum of Private Business, has said:

"It is outrageous. The guarantee scheme is supposed to be lending of the last resort when small firms have explored every other route".

If personal guarantees of 100 per cent. are sought, what is the advantage of this scheme over any other banking scheme? A director of a public company, a small plus-listed or alternative investment market-listed company is not in a position to give personal guarantees, so those smaller public companies are effectively being excluded from the scheme.

What happened with the enterprise finance guarantee scheme? First, for a number of weeks, it was clear that the banks did not understand what was going on. Then they did understand—and only too well, because the Treasury told them—that they only needed to lend money if they could get 100 per cent. personal guarantees. It will not be surprising if the take-up is not huge. One business man put it very well:

"To my mind, the guarantee scheme is one of those things that makes the government sound good without it actually having to come up with anything."

All too many of these schemes seem to be about wanting to make the Government look good, without actually delivering anything.

Another scheme that Lord Mandelson mentioned in his letter of 9 February was the working capital scheme. One would assume from the letter that the scheme was up and running and that people would know how to access the funding, but all of us who take an interest in these matters know that the detail of the working capital scheme has yet to be sorted out—a point made by my hon. Friend Peter Luff, who chairs the Select Committee.

There is no point in banks such as the Santander, Abbey National or others saying very virtuously that they are putting an extra £100 million into the enterprise finance guarantee scheme, when it seems to me that those bankers are taking on no risks at all. In the announcement earlier today, we heard about supposedly large sums of money coming from Lloyds for extra lending, but what is the point of it all if the money is released only if secured by the personal guarantees of small business men? I do not see how the scheme will work or how it will help any companies with their present cash flow. It is not surprising that in a recent survey of the Federation of Small Businesses, more than half of those questioned said that they did not think that the scheme would encourage bank lending.

Does my hon. Friend agree with me and the Federation of Small Businesses that the people you are talking about are actually saying that they are being forced into personal guarantees, which puts their home on the line, and their partners are saying "We are not carrying on the business if that is the choice"? Do you find that to be the case in the real world out there—

Order. I have no view on the matter, I think the hon. Gentleman means Tony Baldry.

The scheme is putting unsustainable pressure on many businesses, but my real point is that if a business wants to raise money on a secured loan it can do so with a bank anyway, so why are the Government trumpeting their introduction of a scheme that does very little?

Lord Mandelson's letter also trumpets the following:

"HMRC is also working with businesses on tax or VAT deferrals."

Actually, when we get down to the detail, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs says that will be only for new inquiries. A company in my constituency, which I will not name for reasons of commercial confidentiality, wrote to HMRC on 11 November 2008 asking permission for deferment of pay-as-you-earn and national insurance contributions. It was not until 6 January, nearly two months later, that HMRC wrote to the chief executive of the company:

"I am writing to advise you that I have assumed responsibility for collecting any tax debt owed by the company. I can also confirm that I have received your correspondence dated 11th November".

It is wholly unacceptable for HMRC to take from 11 November 2008 until 6 January 2009 to reply to a sizeable company that is clearly in difficulties and asking for help with deferment of tax and PAYE. My impression is that what happened in that case happens in most instances and HMRC is merely telling companies that approach them, "Well, if you get your tax affairs up to date we might consider what we could do in the future".

There is another way for the Government to help small businesses in their dealings with HMRC, and BERR could help as an advocate. When customers fail to pay for goods or services, companies have to pay the VAT on the bad debt, but they cannot reclaim it for six months, which adds insult to injury. With today's technology one can scarcely believe that it would be impossible for the Treasury either to remove the need to pay VAT on bad debts—thereby easing cash flow—or at least to repay the VAT much more speedily than taking six months. For a number of businesses in my constituency finding that they have to pay VAT on bad debts just adds insult to injury.

What is BERR doing, as a champion in the Government, to deal with the mismatch between the jobs we are losing and the jobs we need? I shall give just one example. For me, one of the most depressing things recently was talking to skilled young automotive engineers who were made redundant at Prodrive because Subaru no longer sponsors a Formula 1 racing team. I then happened to hear a presentation from Transport for London and Crossrail about the Crossrail project and the refurbishment of the London underground. The House may not know the average age of a London underground engineer—it is 58. Who in the machinery of government is trying to ensure that the skills of those young automotive engineers, who clearly recognise that they will not be working in automotive engineering for some time, are put to good use working in other parts of the economy where their skills are needed?

We hear much trumpeting of the 2012 Olympics. There are still considerable skills shortages in construction in London, and I cannot believe that in other parts of the country where house builders and others have been laid off there is no potential to match up some of their skills with the skills needed for the 2012 Olympics, but who in the machinery of government is doing that? It should be a task where BERR acts as an advocate to try to ensure that there is not a skills mismatch.

Many of us are organising job clubs in our constituencies to try to support people who are out of work so that they can get back to the world of work as speedily as possible. However, that needs people in the machinery of government to ensure that everything is pulled together. At present, one has no sense of that happening. One has no sense of the regional development agencies or anyone else trying to ensure that the skills we have are put to the best possible use.

The other day, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change made a long and passionate speech about what Britain can do in terms of green technology. Undoubtedly, the market is worth trillions of pounds and it could produce large numbers of new jobs, but one has no sense that anyone in the machinery of government is trying to see how areas such as mine in Oxfordshire—connected to the universities and to new technology—can promote green technologies and take the opportunities they offer.

Indeed, one does not even have a sense that BERR is sorting out basic things such as broadband so that the country has the right technological infrastructure. We have the slowest broadband speeds in the developed world. The situation is atrocious. We need much greater energy and effort from BERR. The Department should be the champion and advocate of business in what are clearly some of the most difficult times ever for UK businesses. We need Ministers' 100 per cent. attention on that task

I congratulate my hon. Friend Tony Baldry on wanting to explain the situation of business in the real world. That is one of my concerns, and I hope to make the point to the Government equally forcefully.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend Peter Luff, who as Chairman of the Business and Enterprise Committee has done a tremendous job. His speech—especially on accountability —was immensely valuable, as was the contribution of Mr. Oaten who also made points in that respect.

I want to talk not only about accountability but about assessment and the monitoring of performance, because there is a sizeable shortcoming in the Department in assessing how the actions of Government work in the real world. I shall concentrate most on that area. It is true that the CBI and the manufacturing associations have paid tribute to an improved DBERR performance, which is to be welcomed, but the jury is out as to the Department's performance for small and medium-sized businesses—the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury particularly underlined that point.

I want to add to my hon. Friend's comments by drawing to the attention of those on the Treasury Bench the reality faced by many small businesses. I make no apology for repeating some of the things I said in my contribution on Friday in support of the Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire. I am sorry the Bill was not accepted by the Government at that time.

The truth of the matter is that small business faces a harsh reality that is quite unique. It has never faced such a situation before. I worked in a small business in 1979-80 and created my own in 1989-90, and both those periods were pretty harsh. But believe me, this situation is unprecedented. Small businesses face problem upon problem, and I shall give just four examples.

Cash flow is a real problem, especially when caused by a one-off debt default. For a small business, it is a massive problem when someone does not pay a bill of £5,000 or £10,000. That might not seem a lot in the great world of the City, or in the portals of the headquarters of the CBI but in our market towns up and down the country, it is the blow that puts small businesses out of business, especially if the Government's promised schemes are not forthcoming, which they are not at the moment. The truth is that the money is not getting through.

Debt repayment times are lengthening. For a small business—not in the cash business—that invoices every month and expects its money back in 35 days, the period is now extended to 60, 65 and 70 days. If businesses cannot get that working capital, that alone has the potential to put them out of business. Working capital is at a massive premium, and cash is king.

So what are businesses doing? They are reviewing staff—I said this on Friday, and I repeat it so that the current Front-Bench team can take note—and cutting staff. Small businesses with 10, 15, 20 or up to 140 or 150 people are asking themselves how they can make savings, because their working capital—their cash flow—is under great pressure. They are tightening credit controls—if they were invoicing every month, they are now invoicing every two weeks, and some are doing so every week, in an attempt to ensure that the cash flows in.

Finally, small businesses are cutting back on capital expenditure programmes, marketing and advertising budgets. All that tightening does not help the Government or the economy, because it means more unemployment, less spending and a deepening recession, and all for the sake of working capital and help with cash flow. The Government have been spreading new projects as though broadcasting or sowing in a field of corn, but most of those projects are not doing the job that the Government tell us that they are doing. The money is simply not getting through.

I urge the Government, as I have on several occasions, to tell me about their assessment and monitoring of those schemes. I have not had an answer, which suggests to me that we are not monitoring and assessing how those schemes are working. That is a major problem, and I urge the Minister to take that on board and ensure that the Government understand what is happening in the real world. Although their fine words are welcome, the fact that what they say is not being put into effect certainly is not. It is causing businesses to go to the wall.

BDO Stoy Hayward says that 33,900 small businesses will close this year. If that does not make the point that there is an urgent need, I do not know what does. Let me assure the Minister that for most small businesses there is only one game in town—survival. Their only objective is to be around this time next year. I urge the Minister to take that on board most seriously, because as BDO Stoy Hayward and businessmen in our constituencies tell us, businesses are going to the wall for want of working capital and help with cash flow.

I am concerned about the sector, and about the lack of monitoring, accountability and assessment of how well the Department is doing. Let me give a couple of examples. In 2005, 11.6 per cent. of adults in Britain were considering going into business, and the Department made it an objective to turn that into 12.3 per cent. The Department's 2007-08 report made it clear that there had been no change, but the reasons for that are simply not in the report. The Department does not know why it did not hit its targets or achieve its desired figures.

The audit report of August 2006 found that there were 3,000 national, regional and local government projects to support small and medium-sized businesses. The Government wanted to reduce that figure to 100. The report also criticised the Government for not assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of those projects. So what has happened? I have asked questions about the monitoring of the objective to cut the number of schemes from 3,000 to 100, and asked questions on three separate occasions. If Members can believe it, I phoned the Department today, and asked how many of the 3,000 had either been amalgamated or ceased to exist. I was told that the Department did not have a list of the 3,000. It defeats me totally how one can amalgamate, take over and carry out the work of 3,000 different projects if one does not know what they are. If one wants a cut to 100, it would seem essential to know the starting base. However, the Department simply does not know.

The Government can use fine words to tell us about their schemes again and again, but unless they are prepared to monitor and assess the effectiveness of those schemes, and to fine-tune them when the assessment tells them that they are not as successful as they need to be, the Department is wasting its time, and so are the Government. There is no way that they will achieve their objectives unless they know the performance of the schemes. It is no good just talking about new projects unless they also talk about the delivery vehicles, and assess and monitor their performance. The truth, however, is that that assessment and monitoring are simply not happening. I checked Lord Mandelson's speech on the new schemes that he would put in place, and it contained not one word about how he would monitor or assess their performance.

I do not have to tell you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, how vital the small and medium-sized business sector is to the well-being of our country. I do not need to tell you that most of the job creativity over the past six or seven years has come from that sector. I do not need to tell you that most of the original thinking—about 70 per cent., it is estimated—has come from that sector. I do not need to tell you that the supply chains are totally dependent on small and medium-sized businesses. For example, Airbus, in this country, employs 13,000 people directly, but it employs a further 140,000 in 400 small and medium-sized businesses throughout the country. That simple fact underlines the vital importance of the sector to UK plc.

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, because he is presenting us with the benefit of his considerable commercial acumen and experience.

Am I not right in recollecting that somewhat over 99 per cent. of businesses employ fewer than 100 people, that those businesses account for somewhat more than 50 per cent. of the private sector work force, and that they generate two fifths or thereabouts of our national output?

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am grateful to him for further emphasising the importance of the sector, thus helping me to make my point effectively.

When we talk about small and medium-sized businesses, we are talking about a sector that will lie at the very foundation of any recovery from recession when green shoots appear. We need to ensure that that sector is as healthy as it can be, we need to ensure that it retains its skills, and, most of all, we need to ensure that the necessary structure is in place.

My hon. Friend may be intending to deal with this point later, but in the light of the telling figures given by my hon. Friend John Bercow and in the light of his own excellent speech, does he not agree that one of the most crippling problems for small businesses is over-regulation? They complain about that almost as much as anything else, and rightly so. Is it not in the Government's gift to repeal legislation of this kind, whether it comes from their own Departments in the United Kingdom, from across the board or from the European Union, and does not the failure to do so let down small businesses? The Federation of Small Businesses, the Forum of Private Business and many similar organisations are leading in this regard, and they deserve full support.

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. On a number of occasions I have called for sunset clauses to be included in every new regulation that the House accepts. I have also called on the Government to stop gold-plating, and have pointed out that they have been found to have gold-plated 62 per cent. of a number of sets of regulations. It is not only Europe that causes regulatory problems and increases the regulatory burden faced by business; it is our own Government as well. But of course we can do something about it in both quarters, and I hope that we will.

The Government have made promises about regulation, but again we have not seen the results. Indeed, we heard earlier in the debate that a supporter of the Government felt that some of the remarks made about cutting regulation were silly. I thought that a rather silly thing to say, because I know what businesses are feeling out there. They feel that they are being overburdened, week in week out, year in year out, by additional regulation that is costing them a great deal of money.

I call on the Government not only to consider the projects that they spread around, the new deals and the promises that they make to the wealth-producing sector, but to recognise that while it is easy for them to make promises, they increase frustration and cause immense concern in the business sector if they fail to keep those promises. When the Government say that something will be put into effect, businesses expect it to be in effect when the Government say that it will be. They said that their loan guarantee scheme would come into effect on 1 March, but it was not there on that date. People ask for papers and cannot obtain them: they do not exist.

I ask the Government, and the Department, to be particularly aware of the need to monitor, to assess and to fine-tune in a way that will help business, and to report to the House regularly on that monitoring. So far, they have failed to do so.

Today's debate has centred on two crucial issues: the accountability of the BERR ministerial team to this House of Parliament, and the Government's ability to deliver and implement the various promises and initiatives that they have announced.

The debate was ably and lucidly kicked off by the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend Peter Luff, who set out the case admirably. He was followed by another Select Committee Chair—Andrew Miller, who is not here at the moment, although I am sure he will return soon—and was bolstered by others making the same points: Mr. Oaten, my hon. Friend Tony Baldry and, in a typically rumbustious and passionate contribution, my hon. Friend Mr. Binley.

This is the crucial question relating to accountability: is the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform truly accountable to the House of Commons, the directly elected, most democratically legitimate Chamber of Parliament? I'm afraid the answer must be "not really". Of the seven BERR Ministers, four—more than half—sit in the House of Lords, and five are part-timers shared with other Departments. During one of the most severe economic crises in a generation, possibly in several generations, the Government have just two full-time Business Ministers. They are led, of course, by Lord Mandelson, the puppetmaster controlling policy from a safe distance in the House of Lords, where he does not have to face Members of Parliament directly.

I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman's speech. Is it his party's policy to create an elected upper Chamber, if it were ever to come to power?

I am struggling to work out how that intervention is directly relevant to the BERR estimates. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to take up the point with me later.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire presented the various options that might be pursued to improve the accountability of Lord Mandelson and other House of Lords Ministers to the House of Commons. He mentioned the excellent footnote in his Committee's report stating when such a thing last happened. I understand that the Duke of Wellington was invited to answer questions here in the House of Commons. When he walked into the Chamber, the entire House rose spontaneously in a demonstration of admiration and support for the great man's abilities. I just wonder whether the same would happen if Lord Mandelson turned up here. I know that Labour Members hold him in the highest regard, and that it is their great aim to make him loved by their party. Perhaps we could try it; then we would see how they genuinely feel.

Before we go any further, let me say that I am sure the Minister is eager to point out that in Lady Thatcher's Government, the then Department of Trade and Industry was also led by a peer—Lord Young—for a time. The difference is that Lady Thatcher continued to ensure full House of Commons accountability by ensuring that the DTI was headed by not one but two Cabinet-level Ministers, one of whom—my right hon. and learned Friend Mr. Clarke—is sitting next to me: one for the Commons and one for the Lords.

The comparison between then and now is not flattering. I mean no disrespect to the individual BERR ministers in the House of Commons, who I am sure are all assiduous and hard-working, but the plain fact is that their roles and authority have been reduced by this Government from one of the plum jobs in Westminster to the shrivelled and wrinkled parliamentary prune that we see today.

The second issue is delivery, and it was the subject of much debate.

Before my hon. Friend moves off the question of accountability, there is a second point that has been made by many Members in the Commons, which is that some of those Ministers who sit in the Commons also serve in other Departments. The future of business rates is one issue of current concern to businesses, particularly small-shop retailers. One would expect BERR Ministers at least to be advocates in that respect within Whitehall, but how can they be so if they are simultaneously Treasury Ministers, for example? They are totally schizophrenic on this issue because they seek to serve two Cabinet Ministers, which it is impossible to do properly.

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire, made the same point, saying he thought Whitehall would work better if there were a tension between the Departments and each set of Ministers were putting across their view—not trying to reconcile internally, but batting for their own team properly.

The problem of delivery will be familiar to every business man and woman throughout the country. They can have the best, most expensive, glossiest strategy or business plan in the whole world, but it is not worth a penny if they cannot put it into practice. The Government's record in this regard is spectacularly awful. Regulatory reform has been mentioned. In 2005, the Government promised to cut red tape by a quarter by 2010. We are now just a few months away from that deadline, but the British Chambers of Commerce "burdens barometer", which tracks these things, tells us that the costs of red tape and regulation have got worse, rather than better, every year since it began.

It is not just red tape and regulation that have got worse. We are in a credit crunch, so the Government have rightly pledged to pay their suppliers promptly—within 10 or 14 days, depending on which announcement we believe—to help their cash flow. That is admirable, except that many NHS hospital trusts are, apparently, routinely failing to pay their suppliers within 30 days—far beyond Ministers' much-hyped promises.

Even worse for Great Britain plc, what about all the different loan guarantee schemes, personally announced by Lord Mandelson, which are supposed to get the banks lending again, and which the Government have launched amid huge fanfare over the last few months? I am afraid it is clear that they have stalled. The working capital scheme was supposed to be the Government's flagship measure for getting credit moving in the economy. It was announced way back in January, but as of last week it had not guaranteed a single loan. The enterprise finance guarantee scheme was supposed to help small firms. It was announced in January but, as we have heard from the hon. Member for Winchester, the Federation of Small Businesses says that only 8 per cent. of its members can find a bank that is actually offering it. The loan guarantees scheme for car manufacturers was announced in January, but the Government have only just asked for applications from firms needing help, and they have not disbursed a single penny so far. The Government's guarantee scheme for asset-backed securities was announced in January, but will not start until April. The home owners mortgage support scheme was announced last December, but has not yet helped a single family that is falling behind with its mortgage. The recruitment subsidies scheme to get people into work was launched in January, but has so far not helped anyone to get a job, and the graduate internships scheme was announced in January, but has not even got a launch date yet.

For the Government who are supposed to be the voice of business to be so weak on delivery and implementation is scandalous. As Alan Sugar has repeatedly rightly said on "The Apprentice", business men and women need to be practical. They need to be doers, not just talkers. They have to make things happen but, as this list of delay and failure shows, these Ministers and this Government are far better at press releases and glossy announcements than they are at the grubby, and often messy, business of delivery and implementation.

I suppose we should expect that from a Department led by Lord Mandelson. The PR and spin are excellent, but the follow-through is rubbish. If the Secretary of State and his team were applying for jobs on "The Apprentice", I doubt that they would last 10 minutes. The electorate of this country have reached a decision, too. Their message to this Government is very simple: "You're fired."

I, too, welcome the opportunity this debate provides to look at the measures that the Government, and particularly the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, are taking to help our families and businesses through the current difficult economic times.

It is a particular pleasure to be able to respond to a debate opened by Peter Luff. He made many points, and some generous comments about the Department's ministerial team. I have to say, however, that I do not agree with his points on accountability. There are many precedents for Departments being led by peers. There are also many devices to hold the Department to account—not only through the work of the hon. Gentleman's Select Committee, which I commend. There are regular Business questions in this House, during which hon. Members of all parties can scrutinise the Department's work. I am sure that there is no Minister in DBERR who feels unscrutinised. I remember that in one 10-day period I appeared before seven different Select Committees, of both this House and the House of Lords.

I welcome the comments of Tony Baldry about the immediate response he has received from DBERR officials when he has raised particular issues. That is a small indication of the commitment in the Department, from both Ministers and officials, to do all we can to help businesses and families through the recession.

I will not repeat the debate on accountability, as I have made my points—although I profoundly disagree with the Minister, and think he is absolutely wrong on it.

I did not know about the helpline that my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury drew to the House's attention. He kindly showed me the letter that he mentioned. The relevant reference comes in the last paragraph of a three-page letter, the contents of the first two pages of which I was entirely familiar with. It would be prudent for the Department to draw that excellent helpline to the attention of the whole House in a single, dedicated letter just to make the point that it exists, because I did not know that it existed.

The hon. Gentleman has drawn the House's attention to it, and we will certainly consider whether we need to do so further, but I am sure Members will read Hansard and reflect on the speeches of the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Banbury.

I want to pick up one further point that the hon. Member for Banbury made. He raised the question of Ministers working across Departments. That is not a new innovation. It seeks to break down the silo mentality that can, on occasion, bedevil any Government of any colour. In a time of economic difficulties it makes absolute sense to have, in the case of my hon. Friend Ian Pearson, a Minister with one foot in the Treasury and another in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. For other Ministers who also have joint responsibilities, there is the opportunity to bring, on occasion, a slightly broader view to their discussions internally.

I hope that the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire will forgive my saying that I was slightly surprised by two omissions from his opening comments. I am sure that he would accept that DBERR Ministers have a key role to play in continuing to encourage trade, and particularly in encouraging the avoidance of protectionism. That is another key part of the Department's work, in which Ministers are playing their part. I am sure that only lack of time meant that the hon. Gentleman could not also raise issues to do with help for families, which my Department is offering, such as the increase in support to debt advisers, the national debt helpline and citizens advice bureaux. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman and the House in general will recognise the importance of that assistance.

The hon. Gentleman asked a number of specific questions. I will deal with one of them now, and I hope to address some of the others during the course of my remarks. He asked for final clarity as to whether the enterprise finance guarantee scheme applied to Northern Ireland. I can tell him that it does; I hope that deals with the remaining confusion on that.

My hon. Friend Andrew Miller made a very good speech, in which he drew attention to the important work he has done in making the case for the car industry, and also his work as Chair of the Select Committee on Regulatory Reform. It was striking that Mr. Binley, who I hope will forgive me for saying is not the silent and retiring type, went quiet when offered the chance to attend the Regulatory Reform Committee, which is chaired so ably by my hon. Friend. I hope that John Penrose is not only a talker, but a doer, and will thus investigate why Conservative Members of Parliament are not turning up to the Regulatory Reform Committee—my hon. Friend alluded to that.

I thank the Minister for his compliments. He is making suggestions to Conservative Members, so I should say that if they did attend the meetings, they would understand that not only has the administrative burdens reduction of 25 per cent. been achieved, but it has been praised by Governments elsewhere; John Penrose is mixing his targets.

My hon. Friend makes the point for me; I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will ensure a better Conservative attendance in future.

Mr. Oaten made an interesting speech, in which he picked up some of the comments about accountability that the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire made. I recognise that the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire will not agree with me, but I hope that he will accept that I have addressed those points, and I shall try to come to some of his other points a little later.

As the House will recognise, the shocks that the global economy has recently experienced are unprecedented in their scale and scope. This recession was not made in Britain, but its consequences are having a profound impact on the daily lives of many families and businesses. That is why the Government have developed a number of key policies aimed at providing real help now. A series of our measures are making a real difference for many businesses and families as we speak. I recognise that there is more that not only the Department but the Government need to do—all contributions from hon. Members from all parts of the House have alluded to that—and we will do it.

Our measures include providing advice to businesses to help them weather the current economic storms and check that they are doing all they can to maximise income and minimise their costs. Almost 30,000 businesses have benefited from the business health check since it was made available. We have also provided new help to allow businesses in temporary financial difficulty to pay their tax bills on a timetable that they can afford. Some 72,000 companies have taken advantage of that new flexibility and reached agreement with Customs, and more than £1 billion in tax payments has been deferred as a result, providing businesses with real help with their cash flow.

I should also point out that we first prevented British banks from going under, with all the horrendous consequences for the British economy and, in particular, the British business community that that would have caused. First, we prevented Northern Rock from going under—I remind the House that the Conservative party opposed that move and then, in a perfect example of the constantly shifting sands on which their economic policies are made, they changed their minds—and we have since recapitalised a series of banks that were experiencing real difficulties. We are working hard, as the statement by my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury made clear, to get the banks to increase their lending activities directly. The asset protection scheme has led to agreement with banks on lending levels; an agreement on lending levels has been put in place not only with Northern Rock, but now with the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds bank, as Members who were in the House at the time will have recognised. Lending levels will be increased to help viable businesses get access to the credit that they need.

A number of hon. Members mentioned the enterprise finance guarantee scheme, which could offer up to £1.3 billion-worth of lending by banks to businesses. It is up and running and it includes all the main high street lenders. More than 400 loans—worth some £40 million—have already been guaranteed. Given the amount of interest in the scheme, I have no doubt that there will be more on offer.

Will the Minister explain what the £20 billion supplementary estimate is that stands in the name of the Treasury to promote greater economic growth?

I shall come to the estimates shortly. I also wish to discuss the automotive assistance package, which will help car manufacturers and their suppliers. It is up and running, having got European Commission approval. There is a mix of loan guarantees and, potentially, loans to support some £2.3 billion-worth of lending from the European Investment Bank and other sources. A number of hon. Members raised other issues that are potentially of considerable interest to those in the car industry. A further meeting with car manufacturers and their suppliers will take place on Wednesday—it will be chaired by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—to go through what further help the Government can offer in that sector.

I have alluded to the fact that we are also helping families who have run into financial difficulties as a direct result of the economic situation. A further £10 million has been provided to increase the number of face-to-face advisers in local citizens advice bureaux, and further help has been given to the national debtline so that telephone advice and support can be offered to people, some of whom are in very desperate circumstances. Again, that measure provides direct support and is making a real difference to families who are in trouble as a result of the recession.

I should also remind the House that I met representatives of the credit card industry to agree new ways of handling the risks facing that industry—risks that have led them, on occasion, to cause real difficulties for people who have substantial loans to repay. Such ways include a new set of principles for handling how they manage the debts and an agreement to provide a breathing space of up to 60 days for people in financial difficulties, to allow them to sort themselves out and be able to move on with their repayments.

The single biggest measure that we have initiated to help businesses and families through the recession is the fiscal stimulus, which was unveiled by the Chancellor at the pre-Budget report and opposed by the Conservative party. The fiscal stimulus package includes a cut in VAT—the largest tax cut since 1988—putting money back into the pockets of shoppers and shopkeepers; an income tax cut of £1.4 billion; a £60 payment for pensioners; new help on child benefit; and £3 billion of capital investment. That provides real help to businesses now.

I say gently to the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare that it is a little rich to be lectured on providing support to businesses during a recession by the Conservative party, given that it was responsible for two devastating recessions in the 1980s and 1990s that cost thousands of jobs. Those recessions were directly attributable to the economic policies of the then Government. The striking thing about the Conservative party's approach, which includes opposing the fiscal stimulus, is that it is completely out of synch with the rest of the world. Doing nothing to help—indeed, it is now advocating significant cuts in public expenditure—is a reckless approach at best; it is certainly extremely dangerous. That approach is advocated by no major country.

The return to the Front Bench of Mr. Clarke was trumpeted as bringing new economic literacy to the Conservative Front-Bench team. Given that he disagrees with his leader on VAT, on whether International Monetary Fund help will be needed and on the need for a fiscal stimulus package, and that the only thing on which he seems to agree with his leader is the need for the shadow Chancellor to have some help, I gently say to the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare and his party that now is the time to rethink their approach.

Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54(4)).