May 2026

I welcome many of the measures in the Gracious Speech, including legislation to strengthen our relationship with the European Union. Brexit has been the unmitigated disaster that the evidence always suggested it would be, and it is the Government’s responsibility both to act in the national interest by seeking to build closer alliances with the EU, and to continue to work to build a national consensus that it is in the UK’s economic, security and cultural interests to do so. We are focused on ec

King’s Speeches are partly about what a Government do, and partly about what a Government do not do. The omission in this King’s Speech is exactly as my hon. Friend suggests: a macroeconomic approach, particularly to productivity. This is a huge drag on our economy, and one might have expected further measures to be announced dealing with that macroeconomic problem, for it relates closely to the problems that he has set out in his speech already.

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point, which relates closely to an intervention that I made a few moments ago. If we are really to address the productivity gap, two things are essential: R&D, which breeds innovation to make our economy more efficient and effective, and investment in skills—particularly high-level skills, but skills across the board. Neither of those elements is emphasised in the King’s Speech. The hon. Gentleman clearly thinks they should be, and so do I.

My hon. Friend is right about young people, and he will be as shocked as I am that over a million of them are not in education, employment or training. Much has been said about growth, but what matters is per capita growth—making all our people better off—and yet, to go back to my earlier point, there is nothing in the King’s Speech about investment in skills, which allows people to get their foot on the ladder, businesses to thrive and the economy to boom.

I am delighted to hear what my constituency neighbour is saying, because she is right; these careless corporates who have little interest in energy—and even less in the environment—are riding roughshod over the will of local people in order to impose huge plants on the best and most versatile land. As I said to the Prime Minister recently, this compromises our food security at the very time that we should be building greater economic resilience.

As you might know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I try to read a lot of fiction—I read two novels a month—but I sometimes think I do not need to, because what we are hearing now is a fiction about the European Union. In every Department in which I served as a Minister, I tried to encourage the procurement of British products and services, including vehicles. Every time I did so I was told that it was impossible because of EU regulations and rules, particularly state aid rules. That disadvantaged British

The hon. Member is right that the pubs, clubs, small shops and associations—the things that Edmund Burke called the “little platoons”—are what constitute civil society. Yet successive Governments, including this one, have capitulated to huge, corporate, multinational, globalist businesses. Nothing in the King’s Speech casts us in a separate, distinctive direction, and the hon. Member is right to champion those little platoons in a Burkean fashion.

For that to happen, Governments and Parliament must take back control, and successive Governments have divested themselves of that control by, as Simon Case said when he left office, giving more power to unelected and unaccountable bodies of all kinds and types. For the Government to act, they need levers to pull to make the kind of difference that my hon. Friend described, and Governments have less and less ability to do that, yet the King’s Speech does not address that fundamental need for a c

I might press my hon. Friend a little further. The other way of dealing with that is to improve productivity, as I said earlier. He is right, of course, that the cost burden is fundamentally important, but it can be made better through greater efficiency. Indeed, the Government themselves have said that, as successive Governments have, but we must put in place measures—very often, tough measures—to deliver that kind of productivity.

I met residents of Georgian Court in Spalding a day or two ago. They live in a McCarthy & Stone home, and their freeholder has put up their ground rent by around 100%. That is exactly the kind of thing to which the hon. Lady is drawing the House’s attention, and it must be dealt with in the Bill set out in the King’s Speech.

Parliamentary appearance by Kirsty Blackman

Parliamentary appearance by Kirsty Blackman

The Secretary of State talks about deregulation, but we have seen what that has led to in the finance sector, the banking sector and the water industry: consumers end up paying the price. The Secretary of State also talks about AI; speaking way back in 2014, Stephen Hawking cautioned: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Why do the Government believe that deregulating AI is going to assist their growth mission? It will put consumers’ lives and

I wish to speak about rural regeneration and the need to back business and create economic growth in rural areas. Around a fifth of the British population live in rural areas, which have great untapped potential, but we do not see the infrastructure in those areas to allow them to reach that potential and provide the economic growth we need. To illustrate the point, I have picked five areas, the first of which is digital connectivity. The previous Government’s Project Gigabit seemed like a reall

I agree entirely. I question the perception that people’s objection to masts is holding us back. In Shropshire, passive infrastructure masts have planning permission and are ready to go; what cannot be achieved is a mobile phone operator willing to put its equipment on those masts. We need to work with mobile network operators to get the connectivity we need. I will move on to public transport. Shropshire has lost 63% of its bus miles since 2015, compared with 19% on average across England. Plac

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention; it speaks to the point that rural areas have been looked past by the current Government and the previous Government. They have been neglected for many, many years, and if we are to unleash the potential of those rural areas, we need the political will to invest in them. Shropshire has lost more bus service miles than pretty much anywhere else in the country, but in the funding round in early 2025, Shropshire had the 53rd lowest of 73 allocations, desp

I wonder whether it has occurred to the hon. Gentleman that the Liberal Democrats’ whole point is that local government should be able to decide on its own policies, because they will be appropriate in some cases and not in others.

Parliamentary appearance by Andrew Western

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate on backing business to create economic growth. I also welcome the Government’s commitment to removing the barriers to growth in all corners of Britain. With all the hubbub of the last week, it may have escaped the attention of many that GDP grew by 0.6% in the first quarter of 2026—the highest level of growth across the G7. Although that is positive, it needs to mean more than a percentage point on a graph for communities like the one I repr

Parliamentary appearance by Neil Duncan-Jordan