Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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“So will the Prime Minister now follow up his meetings last week and publish a strategy, co-ordinated with our allies, so we can take out the guesswork and put in place the guardrails for this important relationship?”
“I want to welcome the Prime Minister’s serious engagement with serious power: it is essential to safeguarding our national interest. The complexities of China require from Britain a whole-of-society approach, which is completely impossible until the Government publish a clear China strategy to explain what is off limits and how we are going to rebalance competition with Chinese industry that is six times over-subsidised compared with our firms. Last week in Europe, I heard very clearly from our partners that they are worried that the lackadaisical approach to policing Chinese competition risks deeper integration with Europe. The EU has 143 trade measures in place against China; we have none.”
“The £4 billion package in the Budget is very welcome, but the manifesto commitment was to replace the business rates system, not tinker with it or subsidise it. Pubs alone will see bill increases of 4% this year. Alongside that, VAT thresholds are strangling hospitality businesses on the high street, and that is on top of a tax compliance bill of £25 billion for small business, not least because His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs does not answer 4 million phone calls a year. I repeat the question posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), the Chair of the Treasury Committee: when will the Government table comprehensive, radical reform that meets the test of the manifesto commitment?”
“May I welcome the deal with the United States to set zero tariffs on pharmaceutical exports? Together with the British Business Bank’s investment of £100 million in biotech, that is a real boost. However, the US offer was for just three years, whereas the price adjustment we have promised for the NHS is permanent. When the Secretary of State met the Secretary of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative in America last night, what assurance did he get that the Americans will not come back and reimpose tariffs on UK pharmaceuticals in three years’ time?”
“I am afraid that it is vital that we begin opening talks with our closest neighbours in the European Union about the kind of economic security union that could draw our countries closer together, and help provide the economic support and growth that rearmament will require.”
“The language of the US national security strategy is deeply regrettable. Frankly, it is not hard to see the rhymes with some extreme right-wing tropes that date back to the 1930s. The publication of this document came at the same time as the collapse of talks about the UK joining the European Union Security Action for Europe programme to help boost rearmament, so it is now essential that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) said, the Government specify the sovereign capabilities that we have decided to adopt in this country. It is essential that we now implement the recommendations of the Business and Trade Committee’s report on economic security.”
“The steps that we have heard from the Minister go some distance towards helping us deliver on the spirit of new clause 17. I am very grateful to him for his announcement today, which could unlock billions of pounds for affordable homes, clean energy and comfort in retirement for millions of the people we came to this House to serve.”
“That clarity, if we get it right, could avoid the need to resort to the mandating powers that some Members of this House have objected to. It could unlock investment by giving schemes confidence to act, rather than making them fearful and hesitant. We in this House have a profound duty to ensure that the maximum amount of pension savings in this country not only yield a return to give comfort to savers in their golden years, but do a double duty: they should help to provide the productive investment that we need to build a bigger and richer country. After all, a nation that invests is a nation that builds, and a nation that builds is a nation that will grow its pension pots to help ensure that pension savers enjoy their golden years in comfort.”
“I hope that if he gets his skates on, he can table an amendment in the other place once the Bill moves from our precious hands, but mere guidance is not enough, because sometimes it can be ignored. Guidance does not eliminate liability risk and does not give trustees a solid statutory floor, so I urge the Minister to ensure that the legislation he brings forward delivers guidance that is statutory in its bite. I urge him to go big, by pairing guidance with underpinning regulation that gives trustees legal clarity; to go broad, by ensuring that every single kind of scheme falls within the ambit of the legislation; and to be specific, by explaining precisely what those powers can be used for and the way in which they can be allowed to ensure productive investment.”
“I am afraid that these cases simply cannot answer the questions that trustees must answer today, and they cannot help with the challenges that trustees face today: globalised portfolios, system-wide risks, intergenerational impacts, and the real-world living standards of their members. That is why the spirit of new clause 17 is so important, modest though it is. It does not alter the statutory purpose of pension schemes, and it does not ask a single saver to accept lower returns. What it does is cut through the confusion and allow the Government to produce regulations and guidance that spell out clearly and consistently what trustees must consider, and what they may consider, when making investment decisions. I warmly welcome the Minister’s commitment to introduce new legislation.”
“At a recent conference, fewer than one in five practitioners said that fiduciary duty was “completely clear”. I believe that 31 industry leaders have now written to the Minister for Pensions to request that legal clarification, including a dozen chief executives. Publicly, the chief executive of Nest, the provider of the UK’s largest defined-contribution scheme, has said much the same. Fiduciary duty dates back to case law that is centuries old, back to a 19th-century brick factory in Pontefract and, before that, the inheritance of a market lease at some point in 1726.”
“It is a paradox that I think we can no longer ignore. We ask trustees to act in members’ best interests, yet the law today is so unclear that many of them feel unable to invest in the very things that could secure the long-term interests of their members: growth, productivity, and the living standards on which those members will one day rely. Today’s rules were built to ensure prudence, but what they are doing is creating paralysis. A framework that was meant to safeguard the future is, in practice, preventing pension savers from shaping that future. Scheme providers want to do more, members expect them to do more and our country needs them to do more, but all that can only happen if Parliament now provides the clarity that the courts have not provided. This is not an academic matter.”
“We want those trustees to have the freedom to invest in good things here, not out of some patriotic flourish but because it is plainly in members’ best interests. When national investment grows, our national productivity rises, and when pension pots get bigger, they will get bigger faster if we have a country that is more productive and growing faster than it is today. When a country grows, the returns that shape retirement grow with it. Many scheme providers today simply do not feel that they have the permission to make those investments. They are unsure of the law. They fear litigation. They worry about the possibility that looking at system-level risks, from low productivity or high housing costs or climate stress, might fall outside their legal remit. This is where the problem lies.”
“For all its virtues, however, as it is drafted today we are still left with the core problem, and unless we solve that core problem, the Bill’s noble ambitions will be defeated by its notable omissions. We risk creating bigger and better-managed funds that still fail to invest in our country, and still fail to invest in our country’s future. The Bill will fail to channel the investment that we need in affordable homes, in net-zero investments, in cleaner power systems, in affordable transport systems, in the social care that we all need for the future, in regeneration, and in the national infrastructure of growth. It will fail because it fails, as currently drafted, to clarify exactly what it is that pension fund trustees can consider.”
“What we have instead is confusion, and from that confusion comes a caution, and from that caution comes a world in which pension scheme providers are simply not investing what they could and what they should in the productive assets of our country. The flight of British savings from investment here has long bedevilled the country. It is a sight to behold. We are not short of savings, but we are desperately short of investment. We have somehow magicked a situation in which we have £3 trillion-worth of long-term savings, but we have the lowest investment rate in the G7. I think the Bill will help to turn that around. I think it will help to break that curse. There is much in it that is welcome: the consolidation of funds, the consolidation of pots, the simplification of structures, and a stronger framework for long-term investment.”
“That depth of cross-party support tells us something important: that here in this House is broad and deep support for the principles enshrined in the new clause. There is a shared belief across this House that working people should be able to use their savings to build a richer and stronger country in which to retire. My new clause calls for something very simple. It calls for something that has been missing for far too long. As we know, pension fund trustees have fiduciary duties to the people they represent and the people they serve, but those duties need clarity, and for too long that clarity has been missing.”
“I begin by congratulating the Minister on bringing the Bill forward to this stage. He has been one of the country’s practical idealists since I first began working with him in 2008, and he is demonstrating those credentials once again in stewarding this Bill through the House today with such expertise and intelligence. He, like me, has long been concerned not only by the endemically low investment rates in this country—now languishing at the lowest in the G7—but that we should build up a system of universal basic capital, so that the wealth we create in this country is more fairly shared. I rise to speak to clause 17, which is in my name, and I give enormous thanks to the 33 Members from all parts of the House who have added their names to it.”
“The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Many members would say that they wanted their investments to help to create a more equal country—a less unequal country—not least because we now know from the work of the OECD and the International Monetary Fund that more unequal countries grow more slowly.”
“That is why we call for a cross-Government Minister and an office of economic security to bring everything together, the restoration of the sub-committee on economic security in the National Security Council, and parliamentary oversight through the reform of section 54 of the National Security and investment Act 2021. We think that much of that should be enshrined in a Bill. We have done this before. After world war one, we comprehensively modernised the state to combat the world of economic warfare. That is a wise lesson and a wise experience to guide us in new times.”
“We also need to dovetail what we are doing with what our allies are doing: we call for an alliance of free-trading democracies to work together, like the work of the UK and the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership—the Minister has just returned from a CPTPP meeting. The work that we are pioneering in the South Korean trade deal is a good example of the kind of thing that we should be doing more generally. We need almost to be driving forward an economic security union with our closest neighbour, and of course our allies in the United States need to be drawn into this work too. We need to make sure that the blueprint has a backbone.”
“Crucially, we need to make sure we have the right skills in both Companies House and the National Crime Agency. It is ridiculous that there is something like a £28,000 gap between the pay that someone in the National Crime Agency can get and the pay that someone in an equivalent police force can get. That is not the way to ensure that we have the right people on the frontline. We note with concern that Companies House has a 20% vacancy rate in its digital workforce. That is a real risk. Finally, we need to dovetail what the Government are doing with what the private sector is doing. That is why we need new spaces in which they can work together.”
“That is why we think that the mandatory reporting of ransomware attacks is a good idea, and why we think we should be radically expanding the work of Pool Re so there is a backstop to the cyber insurance market, which there currently is not. We need capital allowances to be modernised, so there are real incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises to invest in cyber-security. Critical SMEs should probably enjoy access to Government support too. In the field of deterrence, we need to ensure that we can fast-track investment into our country from trusted sources. That is why a trusted investor scheme would make a lot of sense. We need to explore anti-coercion instruments in the way that the European Union has. We need to name and shame those involved in sanction breaches much more aggressively than we are today.”
“We also need to modernise the “Managing Public Money” framework so that Ministers, like the excellent Minister in his place today, are not hidebound and forced to issue ministerial directions every time a strategic investment is needed, as was the case with Jaguar Land Rover and the nationalisation of British Steel. Our third D is diversify, which is well understood. We need to diversify supplies of critical minerals and diversify our critical supply chains, too. The targets for critical minerals published on Monday were important, but there was no investment plan to go with them. We cannot do this alone; we can only do it by acting with allies. We then need to better defend our infrastructure, including our critical national infrastructure and our cyber-infrastructure, in both the public and private sectors.”
“We need to build on the work of the National Cyber Security Centre to create a proper platform where public and private sectors can work together in new ways to understand the risks that the country confronts. We need to specify the sovereign capabilities that we need to develop as a country. Two or three are defined in the strategic defence review, but that is about it, and the defence industrial policy promised some further definitions. We cannot understand what we are going to decouple from allies—or in some cases from enemies—unless we have a more sophisticated understanding of the sovereign capabilities that we need as a country. We then need to line up the national wealth fund and other resources behind this understanding.”
“We conclude that it does not make a great deal of sense for policy to be guided by a hard definition of economic security, because things are going to change: this is a dynamic environment, and a hard definition might entail more risks than it solves. However, we believe that this doctrine should be shaped by a set of strategic principles in the years to come. Colleagues across the House will have many ideas about what should go into that. We conclude that our approach should be guided by six Ds: diagnose, develop, diversify, defend, deter and dovetail. On diagnosis, we think there should be a long-term technology forecasting centre in Government that supplies not just Government but the private sector with, if not intelligence, then certainly insight, to shape their understanding of risk in the future.”
“There have been welcome advances, not least the critical mineral strategy that was published this week, but the risk is that ad hoc papers become strategy by stapler, where we have policy papers published that are not durable for the long term. That is a problem, because only the public sector and the private sector working together can mobilise the kind of investment that is needed to transform the country’s resilience for the threats we will face in the future. We argue therefore that, just as we comprehensively overhauled the doctrine to tackle counter-terrorism after 7/7 with the publication of CONTEST, we now need a new doctrine of economic security in order to ensure that there is a whole-of-Government and whole-of-society approach, all pointing in a similar direction.”
“What that basically revealed is that many of our allies, such as Japan, but also in a way the European Union, have legislative backing for many of the regimes that they have in place. Our allies in Japan in particular, who have had to think about this for a lot longer than we have, have a very sophisticated set of defences and state machinery. Equally, we could find very durable institutions in the United States and real policy innovation in the European Union today. In this country, we have a number of strategies, which are growing in number, but frankly do not really add up to a comprehensive regime for economic security.”
“This is all at a time when our country is going to seek to entice around £100 billion extra in inward investment, much of it from abroad and much of it in our energy infrastructure. What Ciaran Martin calls the private ownership of public risk is about to expand exponentially. Yet, right now, we simply do not have the defences in place that we need. The core argument of our report is that just as we need a whole-of-society approach to defence, so we now need a whole-of-society approach to our economic security, but we do not have the systems in place to deliver that today. That is why change is needed over the years to come. In order to help understand precisely the gaps, we worked together with experts at the Royal United Services Institute, gathered lots of evidence, took lots of witness testimony and heard from Ministers.”
“If we think about the risks we faced this summer, with the Jaguar Land Rover cyber-attack, which ended up costing a £1.5 billion state guarantee; the struggles that our Dutch allies went through with Nexperia; and the struggles that our American allies went through in the spat with China over rare earth technology exports, we can now see that the question of economic security is front and centre for businesses and policymakers, each and every day. The warning that we sound is that the risks are going to multiply significantly over the years to come. The threat surface that most businesses now operate is much bigger than in the past. Artificial intelligence is going to transform cyber-aggression. We now have states and state-backed actors operating in this space.”
“It is a privilege to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. Let me record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this debate; to a brilliant team of Select Committee members—it is a privilege to serve alongside them—and to a first-class team who help to ensure that the Select Committee does its work so expertly. The report we present today sounds a note of agreement, but is also designed to sound a warning. The note of agreement is this: we agree that national security is economic security. But the note of warning is stark: we do not find that our economic security regime is fit for the future.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Member for the question and for his sterling work on the Committee as our inquiry has been driven forward over the last seven or eight months. I have not. It was striking to compare the evidence we took with history lessons from the 1920s and 1930s. As a country, we have developed infrastructure to tackle these kinds of threats in the past. Indeed, the forces that we assembled in the 1920s and 1930s were so important that they became known as the fourth fighting service. It was certainly crucial in helping us to stand up the Ministry of Economic Warfare in world war two with the speed that we did. We are now in a world of chokepoints, coercion and weaponised interdependence, and today’s cyber-attacks will be nothing compared with those in future. Frankly, the country is simply not ready.”
“That is why the proposals for a much bigger and better-equipped Pool Re are so important. Pool Re, as many will know, was set up to backstop terrorism insurance during the height of the IRA attacks. It now needs modernising for new times. The tax regime that we have in place today simply does not incentivise small and medium-sized enterprises in the way that we could, to draw down on subscription-based cyber-security policies. Making sure that there are the right incentives, powers and insights available are just some of the tasks that we think an economic security Minister needs to be fully empowered to perform.”
“We have a very good Minister in place, but in a way, the report is designed to ensure that that Minister is empowered in his work and across Government. But first we must understand, and help the Minister have the powers to understand, the full breadth of the UK supply chains and where the risks are. The Jaguar Land Rover case was striking because the supply chain information was kept on the computers that went down. When the computers went down, they had to generate, I think, almost paper lists of tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers to work out who needed cashflow and who could survive without direct help. We must ensure that we have a full picture of supply chains and where the critical dependencies are, as the Japanese have been doing for many years. Making sure that there is a proper backstop to the cyber-insurance market is important.”
“I was very grateful to receive the hon. Member’s email. He is absolutely right. The shutdown of branches all over our country is a really serious problem that creates real risks. One answer is to ensure that we lean in behind the Post Office plans to create banking hubs, not just in a couple of hundred high streets, which is the proposal of the main banks, but in thousands of locations across the country. The Post Office has in place an agreement with the banks until about 2030, but the future thereafter is not clear, so I hope that Ministers can take up this point in the Department for Business and Trade to ensure that we lean into the plans that the Post Office has developed to transform the availability of banking services on thousands of high streets up and down the country.”
“This is a very good point. We want to ensure that there is an enshrinement of the principles of the Bill, so that the private sector has clarity, certainty and confidence in the durability of the economic security regime that we operate in this country. In the inquiry, we heard overwhelming evidence that businesses frankly do not know whom to ring when there is a problem. They did not know whether there were particular spaces where they could work together, certainly with agencies but also with economic security services more generally. Providing clarity, certainty and durability is the only way in which we will be able to mobilise the scale of long-term finance that we will need in order to upgrade the resilience of this country for new times.”
“Again, if we are upgrading our economic security defences, I do not think we can do that, in the world in which we live, without comprehensively upgrading our arms control systems too.”
“I think there is a real opportunity in the course of the next year to modernise the way we export arms, and we will need to do that because of the simple reality that the definition of an arm in new times is very different. Many of our allies talk to us, as members of the Committee, about the need to strengthen in particular intellectual property export controls in the future. In a world where ideas can be weapons if they are, for example, novel artificial intelligence programmes, we have to take a much broader approach to this in the future. It is not clear to us that the way we license weapons and control adherence to licence conditions is strong enough, so it is an area to which the Select Committee will need to return.”
“Alongside that, we have to step up the mobilisation of capital on a completely different scale.”
“The Conservatives saddled this country with an extraordinary £1 trillion of debt more than the situation we left. That is why we are paying £1 in every £10 in interest rates today—it is because they more than doubled the national debt.”
“I have sat on both Front Benches and on both sets of Back Benches, and over the years I have seen the selective amnesia that bedevils debate in this place, and the problem of unreliable narrators, but I have to say that I have never seen amnesia on as epic a scale as I did from the Leader of the Opposition today. It is quite well established that back in 2010, I thought the numbers were a little bit tight. I thought difficult decisions were going to be needed, which is why we left a judiciously balanced Budget—two thirds spending cuts, one third taxes rises—that would have halved the deficit in four years and brought debt borrowing down by 2016. That, of course, was not the strategy pursued by the last Government, and what difference did that make?”
“I do not know what Budget the right hon. Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) was reading, but it was not the Budget that was put on the table this afternoon. I think the Chancellor got the judgment exactly right today. She had a difficult inheritance, a difficult hand and difficult decisions to take, but she got the calls absolutely right. Under the Budget, growth this year and business investment over the course of this Parliament are forecast to rise, and inflation is coming down. Forecast interest rates are coming down, energy bills for our constituents are coming down, and child poverty is set to collapse. That means that 8,900 people in my constituency will be better off because of this Budget—a Labour Budget delivered by a Labour Chancellor this afternoon. I have been in this House for 21 years.”
“Before we hear any nonsense about covid, let us remember that 80% to 90% of the increase in debt that the Conservatives saddled us with came before the covid lockdowns began.”
“This is an extraordinary and inventive country; we have been since the industrial revolution started in Birmingham back in 1761, but that will be nothing compared to what is about to unfold in this country. We are at the front of the grid in the race for the 21st century, but we need to mobilise capital on a completely new scale. That is why certainty, certainty, certainty for business was so important. I welcome the fact that the headroom has been put up to £22 billion today. I welcome the fact that the Chancellor is ending the biannual circus of fiscal speculation by having one forecast a year. I have to say to the House that I seriously think that Mr Hughes needs to consider his position. The fact that we had a leak of the OBR forecast before this House got to debate the Budget is appalling, and this uncertainty has bedevilled us.”
“I will never forget the children at Adderley school who were literally helping restock our food banks by taking Penguin bars out of their lunch boxes to put them in food collection crates so their classmates did not go hungry at lunch time. That is the reality of the child poverty legacy the Conservatives left us with, and that is the legacy that the Chancellor got to grips with today. The Business and Trade Committee looks forward to scrutinising the proposals that have been laid out today. We have been travelling the country over the last couple of weeks talking to businesses about what they wanted out of this Budget, and three things were clear. These are isles of wonder. We now stand on the threshold of an extraordinary new era of innovation.”
“Our productivity growth has been half that of the United States, and the OBR is clear today that the downgrade on growth that it has baked into its numbers is entirely due to the productivity collapse because the Conservatives wasted the money during their 14 years in office. I should just say, by the bye, that because the Conservatives are the Conservatives, they managed to put £1 trillion on the debt and to collapse the productivity numbers, and still to put inequality through the roof. That is why we have all had food bank queues in our constituencies that we will never forget. I will never forget for as long as I live the phenomenon of collecting food in inner-city Birmingham because our food banks had run out of food.”
“I can tell the hon. Member. I do not know what his facility with maths is like, or if he realises that a trillion has 12 noughts, but we left the national debt £1 trillion lower than it is today—£2.7 trillion. That is how much this country is now borrowing. The great tragedy is that if the previous Government had borrowed money at low interest costs and invested it in something that enhanced productivity, we would be in a better position today and the Chancellor would not have had to deliver the Budget she had to deliver today. Don’t take my word for it; the International Monetary Fund was clear in its report on 25 July that our productivity growth under the Conservatives collapsed by a third compared with the good old new Labour years. Our productivity divergence with the United States is so serious.”
“This is one of the best places in the world to be an inventor or build a start-up business. We now need to ensure that we are one of the best places in the world to scale up a business. That will be the nature of the questions that the Committee will put to Ministers over the weeks to come. One thing above all shone through in the Chancellor’s statement: ambition for, and confidence in, the future of this country. That is why one of the most important numbers we will read in the OBR forecast is that business investment is not flat or falling but is set to soar by £6 billion over the forecast period. That ambition for this country stands in stark contrast to the amnesia of the Conservative party. That is because we on the Labour Benches know how futures are really built.”
“From looking at the policy decisions in the scorecard, it looks like there is a £4.2 billion subsidy to help bring business rates down. That should mean that we have the lowest business rates this country has seen, which is a good thing, but I urge the Chancellor to go further by cutting the cost of red tape in a bold and radical way. As the Committee travelled around the country, business after business told us that they want not just less red tape but better regulation. Crucially, they want Departments and regulators to co-ordinate with each other, so that we do not have one Department over here making one decision and another over there making a different one. Ensuring that the Whitehall machine moves at the speed of business in this new age of AI will be more and more important as a competitive advantage.”
“The third thing we have to do is to improve the return on investments made in this country. That means a couple of things. It means bringing down energy costs radically. We did not have a business energy cost scheme scored in the Budget today, but that is because I know the Government are out to consultation on it. Every single member of the Committee would implore the Government to do whatever it takes to ensure that business energy costs in this country are internationally competitive. It is wrong that firms like Nissan say to us that their energy costs up in Sunderland are the most expensive of any Nissan plant in the world. We must bring business energy costs down. Alongside that, the message that we hear from small businesses in particular is that we must bring down business rates.”
“I will in a moment. That is why I absolutely welcome the package that the Chancellor has set out today to mobilise investment capital in a radical new way: the expanding of enterprise management incentives, the boosting of the venture capital trusts, and UK listing relief. That is almost £3 billion of extra incentives for entrepreneurs in this country. That is a game changer not just for start-ups, but for scale-ups, so we can end the craziness of brilliant inventors in this country starting new businesses, growing them nicely and then them having snapped up and shifted out to the United States. We have to ensure that we are growing and fostering more big, global dominating companies here in this country, so I welcome the way the Chancellor leant in behind those firms today.”