With an inherited deficit larger than that of Spain or even Greece, together with an increasingly competitive and demanding global market where old powers are declining away and emerging nations are powering ahead, this Government’s motivation (and mine as Crawley’s elected representative) is to plan and gear up a programme for growth.
The Prime Minister delivered a rally cry to British business at the recent CBI conference highlighting the need for an enthusiastic attitude towards enterprise. The deficit has been reduced by a quarter; interest rates are at record lows; taxes on business and entrepreneurs have been cut; the corporation tax rate is almost the lowest in the G7; nearly 200 quangos have been axed; wasteful Whitehall spending has been slashed with almost £8 billion savings; bureaucratic red tape has been hacked back; and the civil service is smaller than at any time since the Second World War.
I recently reported that, since coming to power, the Government has seen over one million new private sector jobs created across the UK and has seen more than a £50 billion increase in exports. The expansion of trade is an essential national priority – UK exports have been boosted over the past two years to Brazil by 25 percent; China by 40 percent; Russia by 80 percent; and India by 34 percent. This summer, for the first time in decades, Great Britain exported more outside Europe than inside Europe. In addition, I noted that the strengthening economies are those that are lean, fit, enterprise friendly and invest in the future - on education, infrastructure and technology. Our nation’s problem in the past has been that by the time the machinery of government has finally acted, the opportune moment has all-too-frequently passed. To quote the Prime Minister, “government has been like someone endlessly writing a ‘pros and cons’ list as an excuse not to do anything at all.”
Put simply: we need a leaner, faster government and the Prime Minister has explained the crux of the problem: “consultations, impact assessments, audits, reviews, stakeholder management, securing professional buy-in, complying with EU procurement rules, assessing sector feedback this is not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on earth.” Over the past few years this Government has set out towards tackling these business hindrances and yesterday announced as part of that the abolition of the Equality Impact Assessments; a process which has no meaningful impact and involves businesses grappling with reams of bureaucratic paperwork.
For a more far-sighted, sustainable approach to ensuring our future prosperity, the Government is over-hauling our education system whereby there are three key problems: failing schools; coasting schools; and a long-running failure on technical and vocational education.
I was horrified to learn that the education system of the past decade has delivered only 15 per cent of pupils with good GCCEs in English, Maths, Science, a language and a humanity. In the Twenty First Century these are the fundamental ingredients to maximising your cutting edge competitiveness in a demanding global market. Educational priorities are, therefore, being re-balanced to cater for our nation’s future needs: re-industrialising Great Britain towards hi-tech industry and high-value manufacturing.
The Government has protected the science budget, funded record numbers of apprenticeships, introduced free schools and created over 2000 Academies ensuring that our educational facilities are free to innovate and teach how they want. That is how we grow our economy, today and in to the future.