The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 18 February 2004.

CIVIC RENEWAL IN BRITAIN

Let me start by thanking you and the organisations you represent – not just for your kind invitation to speak to you at this annual meeting of the National Council of Voluntary Organisations this morning, but to thank you for the work you do, the service you give, the dedication you show, the energy you bring and the extraordinarily breadth and depth of what you undertake. From mentoring to Sure Start, from preventing teenage suicide to helping a new generation of old people, from rehabilitating offenders to inspiring the New Deal – service which makes you uniquely both a safety net where others fail and a growing third sector of our economy valued for your ingenuity and independence.

And, as new figures show, with more voluntary organisations at work for our communities today than ever before – more than 150,000 registered charities, 200,000 non-charitable voluntary and community organisations, around 400,000 in total, one for every hundred of the adult population – Britain has an estimated 16 million people who do some kind of voluntary work – and in 2001 39 per cent of adults gave of their time to help others at least once in the year.

And over the last decade, from a time when you were much smaller, when there was no compact, when your professionalism was not properly recognised as it should be, we have witnessed what I believe – and what I hope the new Charity Bill will reflect – is your transformation as a third sector ready to rival market and state, with a quiet revolution in how voluntary action and charitable work serves the community:

• New ways of working – using I.T, the internet, digital television and mobile phone technology to gather information and communicate with the people who need help and support the most;
• New entrepreneurship – earning more money to support what you do from selling goods and services – as highlighted in your report published today;
• New partnerships – for the first time you have led in the design of a major new government programme – Futurebuilders – working with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Paul Boateng, to create a fund that I hope will prove far more challenging, more exciting and more fulfilling.

And I praise you for your new ways of achieving enduring aims – serving the people of our country.

And at the heart of all these changes has been the NCVO – and I thank you and your Chief Executive, office-bearers and staff.

You are a constant in a world of change.  And yet a force at all times for new ideas.

So my theme today is that of new challenges, new responses – civic renewal flourishing in a changing Britain.

I know that a recent survey suggested the amount of time spent in Britain on unpaid activities fell from 2.3 billion hours in 1995 to 1.6 billion hours five years later – a drop of more than 30 per cent.  So some suggested we have a caring deficit.

But in fact when a recent Mori poll showed that 59 per cent of 15 to 24 year olds want to know more about how to get involved in their communities. I believe we have a goodwill mountain just waiting to be tapped.

I want today to set out why I believe in the independence and strength of a thriving voluntary and community sector in Britain both now and in the future – a strength and independence that we all should and do value. And in setting out my views I want to discuss with you how for the future we can help strengthen that independence and vitality by complementing the measures we are taking and will continue to take to incentivise the giving of money with measures to incentivise the giving of time.

And I want to consult with you on proposals that both the Home Secretary – David Blunkett – and I feel strongly about:

• First, how we can do more to make possible the giving of time by volunteers – in particular, by consulting with you on national framework of community service for young people to deliver a step change in the participation of young people in volunteering activity;
• Second, how we can help young and older people fulfil their potential by expanding and extending the scope of mentoring – where there is both great need because we are a more atomised society and great potential because it is a relatively underdeveloped area – using modern means of communication to provide access to help, advice, information and guidance;
• And thirdly, we want to suggest how business as well as individuals can be more involved in volunteering and mentoring activity.

But before I set out these proposals I want to explain why David Blunkett and I place such importance on the existence of a thriving voluntary and community sector.

Now,  the community I grew up – even though it was one made famous as the birthplace of the theorist of the free market Adam Smith – revolved not around only around the home but the church, the youth club, the rugby team, the local tennis club, the scouts and boys brigades, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the St Johns and St Andrews Ambulance Society…community not in any sense as some forced coming together, some sentimental togetherness for the sake of appearances, but out of a largely unquestioned conviction that we could learn from each other and call on each other in times of need, that we owed obligations to each other because our neighbours were part also of what we all were:  the idea of neighbourliness woven into the way we led our lives.

And while some people say you have only yourself or your family, I saw every day how individuals were encouraged and strengthened, made to feel they belonged and in turn contributed as part of a intricate local network of trust, recognition and obligation encompassing family, friends, school, church, hundreds of local associations and voluntary organisations.

And while it is easy to romanticise about a Britain now gone, I believe that there is indeed a golden thread which runs through British history not just of the individual standing firm against tyranny but also of common endeavour in villages, towns and cities – men and women with shared needs and common purposes, united by a strong sense of duty and a stronger sense of fair play.

And their efforts together produced not just a rich tradition of voluntary organisations, local democracy and civic life but also a uniquely British settlement that, from generation to generation, has balanced the rights and responsibilities of individuals, communities and state.

The British way has always been much more than self interested individualism.  And this was always recognised, even by those philosophers associated with free market ideas like Adam Smith and Samuel Smiles.   They knew that prosperity and improvement must be founded on something more and something greater than harsh organised selfishness: instead a sense of social obligation – often infused with religious values – and a broad moral commitment to civic improvement.

And while it is true that voluntary organisations have risen and fallen over time, it is also true that, in our own time, new organisations from playgroups and mothers and toddlers groups to pensioners or third age groups and the hospice movement have grown to become vital threads in our national fabric.

And this is my idea of Britain today ….not the individual on his or her own living in isolation sufficient unto himself but the individual at home and at ease in society. And in this vision of society there is a sense of belonging that expands outwards as we grow from family to friends and neighbourhood; a sense of belonging that then ripples outwards again from work, school, church and community and eventually outwards to far beyond our home town and region to define our nation and country as a society.

Britain – because there is such a thing as society – as a community of communities. Tens of thousands of local neighbourhood civic associations, unions, charities, voluntary organisations.  Each one unique and each one very special, not inward looking or exclusive. A Britain energised by a million centres of neighbourliness and compassion that together embody that very British idea – civic society.

It is an idea that best defines a Britain that has always rejected absolutism and crude selfish individualism and always wanted to expand that space between state and markets.

But it is not a sentimental attempt to hark back to the past nor a rejection of modernity but its practical fulfilment – a Britain where social change redefines community but does not abolish community.

And it is an idea that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks captures best and most eloquently when he talks of British society, not in terms of a contract between people that defines our rights but a British covenant that sets out the shared values which can inspire us to neighbourliness and service to others.

And today civic society finds its greatest embodiment in the strength of your voluntary organisations – a genuine third sector established not for self or for profit but for mutual aid and, most often, to provide help and support for those in need.

We know from the theory and evidence on what is called “social capital” that societies with strong voluntary sectors and civic society institutions have lower crime, greater social cohesion and better performing economies than those without. But we in government should be honest and humble, recognising that even as you play a vital role in delivering services because you are better than anyone at doing so, it is your independence that is the source of your strength. And let me explain why not just you but I, from not just history but every day, on-the-ground experience of living in Britain, believe that to be the case.

For it is true that the uniqueness of voluntary and community organisations has not always been recognised by government.  In the past let us be honest that some on the left wrongly saw the voluntary sector as a threat to the things that they believed only government should be doing; while others on the right misused the goodwill of a caring voluntary sector as an excuse to relieve government of its proper responsibilities.

Both, failing to recognise the uniqueness and richness of the third sector, had it completely wrong. And yet unfortunately as the political battle swung back and forth, voluntary organisations were too often caught in the middle.

I hope the political establishment has learnt from these mistakes, from the conflicts and sterile battles for territory of the past.  The voluntary sector must never be seen as a cut-price alternative to statutory provision, never seen as a way of ducking the responsibilities of families or society.  Nor should it be seen as a second class alternative to state provision.  For it is now recognised that even when the public interest is established it is often better for it not to be guaranteed by a public sector organisation but by those, quite simply, who on the ground can advance the public interest better.  That is why today – with for example Sure Start – local voluntary organisations with their unique local knowledge not only provide the service but run many of the projects.

And governments should have the humility to recognise that voluntary organisations can provide solutions that governments cannot offer.  That instead of – if I might put it this way – the man from Whitehall always knowing best, it is the woman from the WRVS or sure start or community service volunteers or any of the NCVO organisations that knows better.  And it is because your independence as a voluntary sector is the essence of your existence, the reason you can serve, the explanation of why you can be so innovative, that you can make the difference that others cannot.

So I believe, with you, that the great strength of voluntary action – and why we should value your independence – is your capacity for the individual and unique rather than the impersonal or standardised approach.  Your emphasis on the individual need, aspiration and potential – and on a one to one, person to person approach, on being at the front line.  As has so often been said, you do not rebuild communities from the top down.  You can only rebuild one family, one street, one neighbourhood at a time.  Or as faith based organisations, who are so important, often put it  – one soul at a time. As one Jewish saying puts it:  “if you have saved one life, you are saving the world”.

And voluntary action, while often conducted through national organisations is, characteristically, local; volunteers and local community workers, working on the ground, at the coal face, at the heart of local communities, far better positioned than ever a government official could be, both to see a problem and to define effective action.  It is about being there.

John Dilulio – former head of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives – quotes a conversation between Eugene Rivers, a minister in Boston, worried about his hold on a new generation of young people and a local youth who has not only become a drug dealer but has a greater hold now over the young people.  “Why did we lose you?” asks the minister to the drug dealer.  “Why are we losing other kids now?” to which the drug dealer replies:    “I’m there, you’re not.  When the kids go to school, I’m there, you’re not.  When the boy goes for a loaf of bread … Or just someone older to talk to or feel safe and strong around, I’m there, you’re not.  I’m there, you’re not…”

In the face of drugs, crime, vandalism, social breakdown, voluntary and community organisations – there on the ground, one to one, person to person – really do matter and make the difference that others cannot.

And so too does the second great strength of voluntary action – and why David Blunkett and I are putting forward the proposals we do today – your freedom to innovate. Long before government took notice, voluntary organisations saw wrongs that had to be righted. Indeed, it is because you innovate that societies most often change. And – often more so than the state – voluntary organisations can be flexible, can pilot, can experiment, can try things out, and can more easily move on.

And just as you did in the past with, for example, the settlement movement or the new campaigning organisations which sprung up in the 1960s, today you are pioneering in new directions:  from the hospice movement to anti-AIDS campaigns, from environmental groups to the Playgroup movement, from advocates for disabled people to the global coalition against the debt burden of developing countries.

Volunteering

Now, since 1997 – and working with David Blunkett and others – I have tried to encourage the giving of money:

• The more simplified Gift Aid scheme which makes it easier to give;
• Improving Payroll Giving by removing the limit on donations, introducing and then extending the ten per cent Government supplement and promoting the scheme to employers – which has led to a near trebling of Payroll Giving in the last four years;
• Putting in place new tax incentives to encourage charitable foundations, which are common in the USA, to establish themselves here;
• And with the changes in what qualifies for tax relief for individual and corporate giving, incentives are now worth £2.2 billion a year — and I encourage any charity here today who does not ask its members to “Gift Aid” their donations to do so to get the additional benefits.

I will not ignore your representations on incentives for giving money – and indeed I know you will continue to make them to me – but now is the moment also to do more to encourage the giving of time – for we all know that we need, in this generation, to encourage young volunteers, new volunteers, new kinds of volunteers and in doing so to create new volunteering opportunities, and together encourage networks that match those who can give help to those who need help.

Again we have tried to work with you on key initiatives, not trying to set the direction but enabling you, often with seed-corn finance, to build the infrastructure of caring you need:

• The internet-based database – www.do-it.org.uk – providing individuals with free and direct access to volunteering opportunities throughout Britain;
• Timebank – which since its launch in 2000 has matched over 50,000 people to volunteering opportunities in their local communities;
• Community service volunteers – with more than 40 years experience in providing high quality volunteering opportunities;
• And Millennium Volunteers – which to date has signed up 120,000 young people.

So a lot has been done.

But we also know that many still don’t know how to volunteer, where to go, who to ask for help.

Many don’t understand that you can give some of your time without giving all of your time.

And many – particularly young people – find formal volunteering complicated and confusing.

And so I believe we must look at new and innovative ways of helping. In the US some firms give their employees a week off for voluntary work. In other places, the expenses of volunteers are paid, and in some places the tax system works to make things easier.  But often it is not about financial incentives to volunteer, but about making the connections so that those who need help can link up with those who want to help.

And I can tell you today that the Home Secretary, the Culture Secretary, the Education Secretary and I will report in the Budget on what more we can do to help all those prepared to undertake some sort of voluntary activity.

And we want to examine with you – as the Scottish Executive has been doing – how we can do more to encourage a call to service among young people.

In the 1960s in America, President Kennedy instigated the Peace Corps – asking young American men and women to volunteer overseas to, in the President’s words, further the cause of “world peace and human progress”.  And President Clinton and then President Bush have fostered sister programmes – Americorps and Freedom Corps – to enable young people to serve their country at home.   And I can tell you that such is the success of Americorps that more young people have joined it in just ten years than have joined the Peace Corps in its full 40-year history.

And, with Home Office Minister Fiona McTaggart, I met with the heads of Freedom Corps and young people involved in Americorps last week to hear how young people engaged in national community service in America are working across racial and regional lines to build a stronger national community: and they have constructed tens of thousands of homes, immunised hundreds of thousands of children against disease, and taught millions to read – finding the skills and experience they gain from their service invaluable for themselves and their future employability.

And I was struck not only by the enthusiasm shown by the young people for the whole range of volunteering opportunities they were involved in but by their belief that if it is to become the norm rather than the exception for all young people to give up their time to help in their communities or abroad. We have to make the volunteering opportunities on offer both interesting and exciting – and we need to make access to them easier.

David Blunkett and I believe that the same call to service should be issued to all young people in Britain.

In the Budget last year David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and I announced a pilot for England where, for school-leavers who cannot afford to do so from their own funds, we sponsor a Gap Year – a year of service in their own communities.   And the first 60 volunteers started on the programme in September.

Now we want to examine with you and with young people themselves whether we can, through making it a national priority, engage a new generation of young people in serving their communities – and provide nationally and locally the means by which they find it easy to participate. And I would like to invite all the organisations represented here today – individually and through the NCVO – to work with government on how best we can do more.

The advantages for young people are clear – to develop their personal skills, discover new communities, become more active citizens.  The benefits to our country are clear too: to expand volunteering, to create a culture of service and to support worthwhile community activity. And as in America there could be help with basic living expenses and help for university, college or business start ups to follow.

We know that the best way to do this is by working with the organisations – many of you here today – that are already doing this sort of work successfully and by listening to young people.  And building on our pilots – and learning from experiences in the us and elsewhere – the Government wants to explore, in direct partnership with the you, the voluntary and community sector and with young people themselves – how we can do more.

Mentoring

Second, I turn to initiatives to encourage mentoring.

The central element of mentoring is a long-term, personal, one-to-one relationship in which, over time, the experience and knowledge of one person helps another to learn and to grow.

It is an approach that is being adopted everywhere from schools to the career service to the workplace, and for everyone from looked-after children, to new entrepreneurs, to the long-term unemployed, and from gifted children to under-achievers.

You might say mentoring is about befriending; about people helping people and people needing people to make the most of themselves and be all they can be – bridging the gap between what they are and what they have it in themselves to become.  Giving advice and help on everything from school courses to careers in music or businesses to very personal advice on growing up. And while adult mentors are most common, a young person will often benefit from having another young person as a mentor, especially one who shares similar life experiences. And that young person often will go on to mentor someone else.  It is a rare form of volunteering – one that generates its own recruits.

In one programme for young people at risk in the United States, those befriended or mentored were 46 per cent less likely than others to use drugs and 27 per cent less likely to use alcohol.  They were also less likely to get into fights or to be truant from school. On a smaller scale, we are seeing similar encouraging results in Britain:  “chance UK” a child mentoring scheme, has found that three quarters of mothers interviewed saw positive changes in their child’s behaviour; four out of five regarded their child’s mentor as a good influence; and over two thirds reported benefits for their own relationship with their child.

For the one third of schools still with no mentoring, new programmes are being sponsored by both the Home Office and the Department for Education.

We have introduced mentoring fund grants to help mentoring organisations expand their activities into communities that are not yet being reached.

And mentoring is also an important component in the Connexions service – the new careers and guidance service for 13 to 19 year olds – with young people acting as peer mentors and role models for other young people.

But there is much room for growth, much more to be done.

I wonder, for instance, whether – whilst taking consideration of child safety issues – we could not explore more innovative ways of recruiting people to be mentors and of course helping people in need of help.

Just look at the success, for example, of the big websites such as ebay, Friends Reunited (with 8.5 million members alone), u.date – using the power of IT to create social networks, connections and affiliations.  Or the superb site www.mentoring.org in the US – a modern and accessible national infrastructure for local mentoring organisations.

With the voluntary sector’s well-deserved reputation for creative thinking and for innovation, I believe there are opportunities

– through involving business
– though better local organisation
– through national appeals including through TV and the Internet

to recruit and train mentors and to link those who need help and advice to those who can help and advise.

We as a Government stand ready to provide seed corn funds to do more to help build both a national and local infrastructure that offers mentoring opportunities and help in every area of the country. And i can tell you that David Blunkett and I will be calling a summit of organisations and businesses involved in mentoring to discuss how we can do this.

Business engagement

And this leads to the third area where I want to make new suggestions – how we work together to translate the widespread social concern that exists among employers and employees alike into effective action for the common good.

While there are already good examples here in the UK – Business in the Community, Pro-help, Business Action on Homelessness, Business Broker pilots, Right to Read, Business Bridge, Streetwatch, Business Cares – generally people in the UK think business does more than providing the 7 percent of volunteers and 5 percent of income to charities that it does. And we know that corporate giving of money and time has reached new heights in the US – and in new ways through organisations like ‘Business Strengthening America’.

There is indeed a goodwill mountain waiting to be tapped.  So building on the new Corporate Challenge that you have been involved in – where more than 60 companies have already nominated champions – David and I want to work with you and them to develop a national campaign to promote involvement by companies and employees in mentoring.  And I hope you will work with us in a group David and I propose to bring together to explore options and recommend next steps.

Public Service Delivery

I am conscious that when we talk of public service delivery we have a further responsibility – not just to ensure voluntary organisations can help – as they have done successfully with sure start – to shape the services they run, but to build upon what I felt was a ground breaking 2002 Cross Cutting Review on the role of the voluntary and community sector in service delivery – which, I can say, helped us in government – right across departments – understand much better the issues which voluntary sector organisations face in public service delivery.

And when you identified a fundamental problem – basic capacity needs in it, sustainable funding, financial management and skills, and the need for an ‘infrastructure map’, as Stewart puts it, we tried to respond.  And from this summer, grants and loans will be available through the Futurebuilders fund to help build capability and I can tell you that recognising that there are skill shortages in management and business planning, David Blunkett is also finalising work with you on a new capacity and infrastructure framework including funding to help improve skills, use of it, performance management and governance in the sector.  And I hope that as we discuss all the new challenges ahead, the same spirit and practice of partnership will flourish to the benefit of all.

Conclusion

My late father always said that each of us could make a difference.  We could all leave in his words, “our mark for good or for ill”.

He said that it was not IQ or intelligence or, for that matter, money that defined whether you made the best mark in your society.

He believed in Martin Luther King’s words, that everybody could be great because everyone can serve.

So I certainly grew up influenced by the idea that one individual, however young, small, poor or weak, could make a difference.

Robert Kennedy put it best: “Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man, one woman can do against the enormous army of the world’s ills…against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence” he said.  “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself but each of us can work to change a small portion of events and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation”.

Together, your organisations are ensuring not only that service remains an honourable tradition in Britain but that as

old person helps young person;
young helps old;
neighbour helps neighbour;
mentor helps mentored;
business helps community;
And voluntary organisations help, enable and empower individuals;
Service can make us a stronger, more caring, more resilient society.

A Britain with a strong and independent and forward looking voluntary and community sector…a Britain true to its values… a Britain ready to face the future.

The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 21 April 2004.

Can I say what a pleasure it is to be at this annual meeting of the Chambers of Commerce:

• to have the opportunity to thank all of you – representatives of, and speaking for, more than 135,000 businesses from every city, every town, every region of our country – for the work you do and the service you give championing the cause of business – and for what you achieve for British enterprise and for Britain;
• and to congratulate your President Isabella Moore and your Chief Executive and staff for the work you do regionally, nationally and internationally to make the voice of the British Chambers of Commerce count for Britain.

And let me say what I firmly believe: that the whole country owes you a debt of gratitude for the way, particularly throughout the world downturn of the last few years, you have been meeting the new challenges – demonstrating your resilience, your fresh thinking, your courage to respond and change – with Britain today, through your efforts and that of the British people, seeing 3,000 new businesses starting up each week and 25,000 men and women finding new jobs every day, with an additional 10,000 new vacancies being advertised.

Modern Britain was built by men and women of commerce and business; by men and women demonstrating entrepreneurial flair; men and women of commerce showing the best of practical skills committed to a vision of British manufacturing and commercial strength; men and women who were not cynics, who never talked our country down but were – and are – confident, forward looking optimists dedicated to the future well-being and economic destiny of Great Britain.

The nations that will succeed amidst ever more intensive global competition not least from a rising China and India, will be those that are sufficiently confident and forward looking to entrench stability, to celebrate enterprise, to make long term investments in science and skills and be outward looking rather than protectionist. And I want to suggest to you today that at this moment of opportunity when the world economy starts to grow again, Britain’s great strengths – as the country with traditions of stability deeper than almost any other industrial economy, with traditions of scientific inventiveness longer than any other, and with a global reach than has been wider than almost any other – make us well equipped, as long as we make the right long term decisions on stability, science, skills and enterprise, to be one of the great success stories of the global age.

Now Madam President: of all the economic duties of government the greatest and pre-eminent challenge is the creation and entrenchment of economic stability and taking the hard decisions to lock stability in, even in difficult times in the world economy.

Let us remind each other of Britain’s chronic post war history of stop-go, inflation, short-termism, under-investment and higher unemployment and the damage it did to good hard working businessmen and women. And only recently in the last world downturn in the early 1990s when – as a result of allowing the economy to run out of control – the British people and British business suffered 10 per cent inflation, 15 per cent interest rates, 1.5 million people in negative equity, 250,000 homes repossessed and 1 million more out of work

This was the old stop-go Britain: an instability that meant with 10 per cent interest rates or more for a whole four year period, businesses like yours could not invest with confidence; with interest rates charges so high and prospects so uncertain many with talent and initiative found it too costly and risky to start up businesses; even the most successful businesses could not make long term plans as everyone expected inflation to recur – and we must never repeat those mistakes again.

Now, by working together, we can see a Britain that has a new found and hard won stability with: the lowest inflation for thirty years; and the lowest interest rates for forty years; the lowest unemployment for a generation; and a Britain that is seen today as the most stable of all the major economies.

And it is important we understand how and why it is Britain – once the most stop go of economies – which has avoided the recessions that hit America, Germany, Japan, Italy and most other industrial economies during the world downturn of the last few years and has enjoyed sustained and sustainable growth.

So let me just explain the long term difficult decisions that had to be made and what I know we must also do to entrench that stability for the future.

When we came into power – and having understood the damage that stop go instability had done to your businesses and having talked widely with people like Alan Greenspan and others whom I respected round the world – I decided to break decisively with the old short termism that had brought stop go and so in our first day in office we removed the politicians’ power to make interest rate decisions.

But the changes we made were not just the right one – opposed by other parties – of making Bank of England independent.
Even more important we put in place a wholly new long term fiscal and monetary discipline and framework which some now refer to as the ‘British Model’ for monetary and fiscal stability:

• a symmetrical inflation target – now just 2 per cent – which is – important to how we responded to the world downturn – as worried about deflation as inflation;
• fiscal rules set not just for one year but for the whole economic cycle;
• and a new fiscal discipline founded on a radical reduction of the national debt;
• and having tightened fiscal policy radically by over 4 per cent of GDP and sold off assets including spectrum – paying off more debt in one year than all the debt paid off in the whole of the last fifty years taken together – we cut debt from 44 per cent of GDP to one third;
• and having cut debt dramatically, we reduced our debt interest payments – which with social security had taken up half of all additional public spending ten years before – to less than 2 per cent of GDP, lower than at any time since the first world war.

And in contrast with the experience of other economies hit by recession, the credibility that has come from independence for the Bank of England, the symmetric target, the reduction of debt and debt interest and the new fiscal rules – the British Model we have created – has enabled the Monetary Policy Committee to respond early and decisively – raising interest rates in 1997, cutting them sharply in 1998 and again with nine interest rate cuts during the global downturn, and now in the last six months acting pre-emptively with interest rate changes on two occasions – with the result that, even when more exposed than many other European economies to the IT shock, growth has continued and continues at a sustainable level.  And each year since 1997 low inflation – barely achieved by previous governments – has been achieved and our inflation target met each year and every year.

So instead of being – as in the old days – first in, worst hit and last out of any world downturn, Britain has not only avoided recession but has continued to grow in quarter after quarter, year after year, in all seven years of our government since 1997.

Indeed, Britain has now enjoyed the longest period of growth for over 200 years.

And now that the world economy is strengthening, growth is also becoming more balanced with business investment, manufacturing output and exports rising now – and expected to continue to rise this year and next.  And as a result and because the New Deal has, at your suggestion, insisted on the obligations of the unemployed as well as on the opportunities, the numbers of people in work have risen by 1.8 million since 1997. Indeed, this year there are for the first time actually more than 30 million workforce jobs – 30.3 million in December 2003 – a rise of 2.42 million since 1997.  And while – as you know – jobs have risen and fallen in a number of areas, you will be interested to know that jobs in construction are up by 345,000; jobs in finance and business services up by 965,000; transport and communications up by 187,000; and distribution and hotels up by 540,000.

So let me be clear: but for the new British Model which other countries are now examining, Britain would have run the same old recessionary risks.

And I can tell you that such is my determination to lock in that stability that looking forward, vigilant to the global economic cycle, we can and will take nothing for granted.

And it will be the same forward looking monetary action – backed by our sound fiscal policy – that can, if we continue to make the right decisions and stick to our resolve, lock in greater stability not just for a year, or for an economic cycle, but in this generation —– a prize of greater stability that has eluded successive governments of all parties in the post war era; a prize that – with resolve and prudence – is now within our grasp.

While we will always be vigilant to the risks, growth in 2004 which is expected to be – even after three years of flat growth – just over 1.5 per cent in France, Germany and the euro area, will be between three and three and a half per cent in Britain with, of the G7 countries, Britain and America again growing fastest.  And I am pleased that forecasting organisations which doubted us last year and then doubted us again this year are now accepting – as the IMF has done today –  that growth will be higher than last year, one of the highest of the main economies, and above 3 per cent this year.

And I can assure you that having had the strength to make the difficult long term decisions after 1997 we will continue to have the strength to take the long term decisions that put stability first now and in the future, supporting our monetary authorities in the difficult choices they have to make. And I can say categorically to investors everywhere that while no-one can ignore the reality of the economic cycle and the potential of global events to impact on the economy, we will entrench not relax our fiscal discipline.

For let us recall that at this stage in the economic and political cycle, past governments have resorted to short-termism in fiscal policy and gone on to raise the rate of spending in a pre election spree.  But I can tell you this morning that in exactly the same way that we had the strength since 1997 to take long term decisions on fiscal as well as monetary policy, we are equally resolved today to avoid at all times the short-termism and mistaken fiscal as well as monetary policies of the past.

So, as I have announced, we will, while meeting all our commitments and our fiscal rules, lower not raise the rate of spending growth in the next spending round.  I can tell you that while it was right – because we are tackling decades of under investment – that current spending rose in real terms by an average of 4 per cent between 2000 and 2004, it will grow by an average of 2.5 per cent in real terms between 2006 to 2008.

And I tell you we will not be tempted into making the mistakes of the past. And I would caution against policies – bad for Britain’s long term future – that would complacently assume that our stability is a given that any government could maintain without risking the return of the old stop go; and against policies that would:

• tamper with our fiscal rules vital to that stability, abolish the New Deal with its obligations on the unemployed, cut investments each of us know are vital for our local economies in infrastructure and in science and skills, as well as in security and law and order, the importance of which you have highlighted this morning;
• and retreat from our long term fiscal disciplines – from fiscal rules set over the cycle – to the old annual inflexibilities which would repeat in Britain the same mistakes of the stop go years of the early nineties and indeed repeat in Britain exactly the same rigidities seen in the Stability and Growth Pact in the euro area.

And let us also recall that in the past Britain usually fell into recession after two inflationary bursts – an initial burst of inflation when demand got out of control and then a second burst of inflation when wage negotiators sought to catch up with expected high inflation in their pay claims.

But I can tell everyone who depends on a wage or salary that under our new model of Bank of England independence, inflation – as we saw yesterday – is now less than 2 per cent, is likely to be less than 2 per cent this year and it is set to be just 2 per cent in the next and subsequent years.   And in this upturn when Britain must seize the opportunities by being fully competitive it is vital we complement this anti inflation discipline by both private sector and public sectors showing pay responsibility.

Our message on pay is clear: there must be no return to the bad old days of pay irresponsibility in the private sector and we will tolerate no irresponsibility in the public sector. Civil service unions should also know that not only will we proceed with the 40,500 job reductions in the Department for Work and Pensions and the Inland Revenue and Customs – reducing administration costs across Whitehall from the 4.6 per cent we inherited to 3.7 per cent by 2008 – but there will be no going back to the old days of inflationary pay deals that would put hard won economic gains in jobs, prosperity and stability at risk.

So once a stop-go economy, Britain is now one of the more stable.  And we are determined not to be diverted from keeping it that way. And it is time for us, facing new global economic challenges, to combine this new stability with a new resolve to make the right long term choices and reforms to achieve excellence in enterprise, in science and innovation, and in skills.

So in the same way that a British consensus has been forged across the country – across management and workforces, and across all parties – for low inflation and our British framework for stability, we can, I believe, aim higher to forge – again across all parties, all groups – a deeper British consensus for enterprise — an entrepreneurial renaissance that celebrates and develops the entrepreneurial spirit that made us the first industrial power of the world and opens up the opportunities of enterprise to all with the talent and drive.

Think back to the old days not just of stop go but of a sterile self-defeating corporatism that stifled enterprise and creativity and was Britain’s response to our nation’s relative economic decline

Hence what we called:
‘The productivity problem’
‘The short termism problem’
‘The union problem’
‘The management problem’
‘The investment problem’
The ‘What’s wrong with Britain problem’.

I am pleased to report that because of your efforts there are today 100,000 more businesses than in 1997.

Because for us a key priority was to send a message not just about stability but also about enterprise, a Labour Government, even with other priorities including investing in the NHS, education and transport and law and order, made the decision to cut capital gains tax for long term business assets dramatically – from 40 pence where it had been for years down to 10 pence.

And I can tell you that while in every country health care cures and technologies have meant rising costs – in America most dramatically to 15 per cent of national income – hence our decision which I explained to you last year that national insurance pay for new investment matched to managerial reform in the NHS – we have since 1997 cut corporation tax from 33 pence to 30 pence, cut small business corporation tax from 23 pence to 19 pence and we are determined to keep our tax rates low and competitive, one of the reasons why  Britain is the most attractive place to invest and do business.

You asked us to consider capital allowances and in particular special help for start up businesses, and support for venture capital. And not only have we made first year capital allowances permanent and in 2000 enterprise areas we have abolished stamp duty altogether but for this year as the economy moves forward we increased allowances for small firms to 50 pence and gave new support in the budget for the venture capital industry in all regions and nations of our country.

Now regulation, red tape and bureaucracy are challenges in every industrial country of the world and whenever I go to the USA businessmen and women there raise about the very same things about the USA economy –  red tape, bureaucracy and regulation.

You asked if together we could look at VAT. Instead of having to account for every transaction an automatic flat rate VAT calculation for small businesses which lifts the burden of VAT red tape off the shoulders of hundreds of thousand of companies. And we have more small companies taken out of VAT from a more generous threshold than any country in Europe.

You asked us if working together we could look at red tape in auditing and we have exempted more small businesses from the requirement to submit an independent audit.

You asked us if working together we could look at the system of inspections and enforcement and its costs – and we have set up a review – to which I know you are contributing – to minimise and reduce duplication in the inspection system and enforcement regimes.

You asked us if working together we could look at the administration of the working tax credit – and having accepted the case for the Inland Revenue paying the credit directly to employees, we are now consulting with you on detailed implementation.

You asked us if working together we could look at the cost of submitting statistical returns and the National Statistician is working with you through the Business Forum to look at what more can be done to minimise the burden on small business.

You asked us if working together we could look at the Information Commissioner’s requirements and we produced shortened and simplified guidance for companies about the Employment Practices Data Protection Code.

You asked us if working together we could look at the way new regulations were examined and from now on, the Regulatory Impact Unit will prevent the implementation of new policies if no proper assessment of the regulatory impact on business has been done.  For the chemicals, construction and retail industries we have established industry forums to give business early warning of new regulations and allow you to express your views on them.  And just as legislation can only be is only approved after a Cabinet process chaired by the Prime Minister so too from now on new regulations with a major impact on business will only be allowed to go ahead after being submitted to a cabinet route, with a strengthened Panel for Regulatory Accountability.

And because 40 per cent of new regulation comes from Europe we have resisted inflexible barriers being added into European Directives like the Working Time Directive and Agency Workers Directive, the Investment Services Directive and the Transparency Directive – showing that the best contribution we pro Europeans can make to Europe’s future is to lead the reforms that will make it more competitive. And Britain has agreed with Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg to put regulatory reform at the heart of our four EU Presidencies through to 2005, ensuring that any proposed regulation and every costly and wasteful existing regulation is put to a competitiveness test.

We also know that working together we can do more to enhance Britain’s great entrepreneurial culture.

And we have been considering what might be done to recognise that outstanding success.  So it is right to tell this conference which has been so prominent in promoting entrepreneurial talent in every region and every locality that building on the Queen’s Award for Enterprise the Government is in discussions with the Palace about new ways of recognising outstanding individual contributions to the development and promotion of enterprise nationally, regionally and locally.

We will hold the first ever national Enterprise Week – focused on inspiring the young to be enterprising – in November.

There will be an annual British competition for the British town or city of enterprise and just as we compete for a European City of Culture we propose a competition for the European City of Enterprise too.

All pupils before they leave school will have the opportunity to enjoy not just work experience but enterprise education too.

And we are launching a new national council for graduate entrepreneurship – and I’d like to thank you, and in particular your Director General David Frost, for your commitment to this initiative.

And we will devolve Small Business Services to where they should be – run locally, sensitive to the needs of local businesses.

And in budget after budget I want to do more making the right long term choices for Britain to encourage the risk takers and those with ambition to turn their ideas into reality and make the most of their talents.

And facing up to the global economic challenge – within 20 years potentially half the worlds manufactured exports produced in the developing economies, with up to 5 million jobs outsourced from Europe and America –  this government must also have the strength to make the hard long term choices in favour of free trade and an outward looking internationalism.

That is why our commitment as a Government is that we will make the case for our membership of the European Union – which accounts for 50 per cent of our trade – for the advantages it brings to Britain, and for being a leader in the enlarged Europe, the biggest single market in the world.

And we must also make the hard long term choices to build on Britain’s scientific and creative genius and make investment in science and skills a priority:

• offering the long term incentives that encourage new as well as established firms to invest in R and D;
• setting out a long term plan for science funding – all to encourage investment in the new technologies of the future

And as your report proposes this morning every one of you who runs a company knows that you must draw on the potential of everyone in your company to be successful – and its no different for a country.

Through Learn Direct, employer training pilots, union learning funds and then the return of apprenticeships, over 1 million more adults are gaining practical new skills than six years ago.  But I want us to be the best educated and best trained workforce and so I also commit us to taking, in this coming public spending round, the tough decisions necessary:

• demanding, in return for investment, the highest standards in our schools and further education colleges;
• reforming university finance to secure for Britain world class universities now and in the future;
• and because university financial reforms will help fund universities, a chance also to invest in consultation with you in the area you have highlighted today and to which I am committed to do far more in our review – the all too often neglected area of vocational education and the improvement of the numbers and quality of modern apprenticeships – once dying, now covering 250,000 young people and soon one third – giving young people the practical skills they and the economy needs.  Our aim, the aim you share – that Britain becomes the best educated, most skilled, most technically proficient workforce; all the time encouraging and incentivising a great historic British quality – a work-your-way-up ethos of self improvement and self reliance.
• So, in conclusion, no return ever to the old boom-bust policies of the past and no relaxation of our disciplines but a Britain – once the stop go economy of the world – that succeeds in the new global competition because as the country of great political stability it now also it maintains and entrenches its economic stability.

A Britain that succeeds in the new global competition because working together we reject the old rigidities of the past and win as a flexible, reforming, and ever more enterprising economy.

A Britain that succeeds globally because working together we build on our scientific genius and are outward looking, internationalist and European.

Government effective where it has to be effective – in economic stability, science, skills; businesses are able to be the wealth creators they are, and encouraged where it matters – with incentives and rewards to invest and grow.

And a Britain that succeeds globally because we share a long term economic purpose – that long term commitment not ever to take the easy way out or the short term course but resolute to get things right for the long term.

Making Britain a better place to do business – and, if we make the long term changes needed, better still years from now.

The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 28 April 2004.

Can I say what a pleasure it is to be able to address you – Britain’s top business leaders – at this, the annual conference of the Institute of Directors, today.

And to be able, on my return from the IMF and World Bank meetings in America in the last few days:

• to share with you my discussions with Alan Greenspan, Central Bank Governors and fellow Finance Ministers on the strengthening world economy;
• to discuss with you how, building on the foundation of greater stability, we can as a nation seize the opportunities the world upturn offers us, now and into the future – the theme of your conference today;
• and because it is British industry, British jobs and British prosperity that is our interest – and because it is by government and business working constructively and creatively together that Britain achieves its full potential – to discuss with you how out of our dialogue we can advance a shared economic purpose for Britain that starts with our commitment to stability; an economic purpose that recognises that wealth creation is even more important to the society we want to build; an economic purpose that encourages – as I will propose with specific measures today – a wider and deeper entrepreneurial culture; and an economic purpose that is driven forward by the shared view that if we, the people and businesses of Britain, have the strength to make the hard long term choices, Britain – the country that pioneered free trade, the Britain that has a history of scientific invention greater than almost any other, the Britain that now has an economic stability rivalled by few others – is uniquely well placed to become one of the strongest, most successful enterprise centres of the world.

It is indeed true that of all government’s economic responsibilities – to create a competitive environment, to ensure investment in infrastructure, science and skills – the first and most fundamental duty is economic stability. And it has been the objective of Tony Blair and I that Britain have the strength to take the long term decisions to ensure stability — yesterday, today and tomorrow.

That is why in Washington in the last few days, while confident about a strengthening world economy, I have insisted that – even as trade, investment and output grows – fellow Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors also be vigilant to global risks: current account imbalances, rising oil and commodity prices, the risks to emerging markets in the transition to higher interest rates, and the long term fiscal pressures of ageing and healthcare.

And at this time in the economic and political cycle, Britain has had its own special problems when past governments, of whatever political colour, have allowed either inflation to get out of control or spending to get out of control – or both as happened most recently in the early 90s with 10 per cent inflation, 15 per cent interest rates, an 8 per cent deficit and a doubling of the national debt.  And I do not need to remind you that our first duty in 1997 was to address Britain’s chronic post war history of stop-go, inflation, short-termism, under-investment and higher unemployment: the old stop-go Britain. An instability that meant many with talent and initiative found it too risky to start up businesses and even the most successful British businesses could not invest with confidence for the long term or make ambitious plans.

And it is because we recognised that – even more so in the global economy of the future – investment would move only to the countries that could demonstrate a long standing commitment to, and record of, monetary and fiscal stability, that in our first act in Government we broke from the old short-termism and removed from politicians the power to make interest rate decisions.

And the changes we made were not just making the Bank of England independent – but by:

• freezing spending, selling off assets and cutting the national debt dramatically;
• imposing new fiscal policies over the economic cycle which allowed us to invest through a world recession;
• and introducing a symmetrical inflation target that targeted deflation as much as inflation;

the Government under Tony Blair’s leadership also put in place a wholly new long term fiscal and monetary discipline and framework.

And I believe that it is because Britain imposed these rules, this ‘British Model’ for stability – which allowed the Bank to cut interest rates aggressively during the world downturn and allows the Bank to act proactively and pre-emptively in the upturn too – that while the USA, Germany, Italy and Japan suffered recessions, Britain for the first time in 50 years did not suffer a recession during the world downturn and instead has grown in quarter after quarter, year after year, in all seven years of our Government since 1997.  The number of people in work has grown by 1.8 million.  And Britain has now enjoyed the longest sustained period of growth for over 200 years.

And while we will always be vigilant to the risks, I am confident that monetary and fiscal policy will ensure that growth in 2004 – which is forecast to be just over 1.5 per cent in France, Germany and the euro area – will in Britain, be between three and three and a half per cent with, of the G7 countries, Britain and America again this year growing fastest.

And, looking forward, I can assure you that Tony Blair and I will put stability first, now and in the future — supporting our monetary authorities in the difficult choices they have to make and entrenching not relaxing our fiscal discipline.

Because in the past Britain usually fell into recession after two inflationary bursts – an initial burst of inflation when demand got out of control and then a second burst of inflation when wage negotiators sought to catch up with expected high inflation in their pay claims – I have made it clear to wage bargainers that it is vital we maintain our anti-inflation discipline and be fully competitive by both private sector and public sectors showing pay responsibility.

And in the public sector we will combine this anti inflation discipline with moving forward our plans for the relocation of 20,000 civil service jobs from the south east to the regions and the reduction of 40,500 civil service posts.

And I can also tell you this afternoon that – in contrast to past governments who have resorted to short-termism in fiscal policy and gone on to raise the rate of spending in a pre election spree – we are committed to holding current spending at or below the level of revenues over the cycle and investing only where debt remains at a prudent level.  The Japanese deficit is now 7 per cent of national income, the US deficit is 5 per cent, and the French and German 4 per cent.  Our deficit is and will remain lowest of all these.  And while debt is 55 per cent in Germany, 50 per cent in the USA, 45 per cent in France and 86 per cent in Japan, it is around just one third of GDP in Britain.
So our debt and deficits are – and this year will remain – the lowest of our major competitors and not only are our public spending plans fully financed and affordable but we will also continue to meet, as we have done for these last seven years, our fiscal rules and disciplines.

So once the stop go economy of the world, Britain is now one of the most stable. And because we will not fall for easy options or short term quick fixes, we will not be diverted from locking in that stability.

Britain must never complacently assume that our stability can be taken for granted and would be maintained by any government.  As I have said, it is not by accident but by the specific actions we have taken together that we have the lowest inflation for thirty years, the lowest interest rates for forty years and the lowest unemployment for a generation.  And policies that would tamper with our fiscal rules and fail to take long term stability and investment seriously would be bad for Britain and take us back to the old short termism and stop go.

And I can assure this conference that we will not ever make the mistakes either of the late eighties and earlier nineties when monetary disciplines were forgotten.  Nor will we make the mistake of applying a rigid interpretation of the European Stability and Growth Pact – or a British version of that – where – as again happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s – insufficient attention is paid to the long term, to the economic cycle as a whole, to the needs of investment and to the long term sustainability of debt as well as deficits.

And I now hope that in the same way that business and Government agree on the importance of our new won and hard won stability, we can now move forward to build an even deeper and more lasting consensus about the importance we all attach to a wider and deeper entrepreneurial culture in our country – a culture which rewards and values business and wealth creation; a culture which encourages the risk taker, the innovator and the investor; a culture which says to the young person with the will to succeed that enterprise is genuinely open to all who make the effort.

Let me explain what I have said not just to business but to the Labour Party and to the trade unions about why it is so important to build that stronger and deeper enterprise culture in all areas of Britain.

We all know that the new global economy means not just speed in innovation but also a shift in global production so great that while in 1980 less than a tenth of manufacturing exports came from developing countries, today it’s 25 per cent; in twenty years time 50 per cent. That’s not just cars and computers but half of all the world’s manufacturing goods produced for export in the developing countries.

Already China and India are becoming technological powers – China with 750,000 researchers and 750,000 graduates a year, India with nearly 700,000 graduates a year. And China’s significance to the global economy is that this year it is consuming more than twice the amount of steel than the USA, nearly half of the world’s cement and is adding as much output as the whole of the G7 put together.  So for Britain, as for Europe, there is no escape from uncompetitiveness by resorting to the old loss making subsidies, artificial barriers or protectionist shelters.

And while there are huge challenges, the opportunity for us is that as low cost, low value production comes under increasing pressure, we are well placed to meet and master the challenge of finding and exploiting the high valued added, high tech, high skilled, science-driven products and services that are the key to our wealth creation in the future.

The Britain that fails will be the Britain that relapses into the old short-termism and stop go, failing to take long term stability seriously; and fails to invest in science, technology, infrastructure, skills and enterprise.

But the Britain that succeeds will be the British economy that builds upon its foundation of stability; thrives on robust competition and on free trade not protectionism; and insists on making the long term investments needed in science, skills and enterprise – backing enterprising and knowledgeable people from the entrepreneur and cutting edge research scientist to the trained apprentice and skilled worker.

British inventiveness is not just a feature of our industrial revolution past.  I am proud to say that today we lead the world in areas from aerospace, pharmaceuticals and financial services to telecommunications, broadcast technologies and digital electronics.

And while it would always be easier to take the short term route – and fail to continue to make the necessary investments for the future – we propose to take the longer term view, to choose science and technology above many other spending priorities and building on the widely acclaimed one and a quarter billion pound renewal of Britain’s university and science base – and on the new research and development tax credits you have already welcomed – we propose to set out this summer a long term investment framework for British science, technology and innovation over the next decade. And I can tell you today that, as the next step toward our long term ambitions, we will raise the level of science funding as a share of national income in the next spending review period.

But there is something even more ambitious we propose for Britain.

Our aim must be to remove all the old barriers holding the enterprising back and create an environment in which businesses – whether companies starting up, investing, hiring, training, seeking equity, exporting – can grow and thrive.

Let me give a few examples.

Planning: Britain must make our planning laws quicker, more flexible and more responsive – and I can tell you that we will.

Pay: Britain must do more to encourage local and regional pay flexibility – and we will.

Transport: we must work with you – private and public sectors together – to tackle the massive backlog in infrastructure investment.  And with £180 billion of investment over ten years we will.

Company regulation: we have exempted 69,000 more small businesses – over 200,000 now in total – from the requirement to submit an independent audit. And we will do more.

Inspections: with our new review, we will seek to minimise and reduce duplication in the inspection system and enforcement regimes.

Small business regulation: we have introduced a simple flat rate VAT calculation for small businesses which lifts the burden of VAT red tape off the shoulders of hundreds of thousand of firms.  And we will do more.

Tax: just as we have cut long term capital gains tax from 40 pence to 10 pence, small business tax from 23 pence to 19 pence and corporation tax from 33 pence to 30 pence, I promise we will continue to look with you at the business tax regime so that we make and keep the UK as the most competitive place for international business.

As I was reminded when I heard business this weekend express their concerns about regulation in the USA, red tape, regulation and bureaucracy are challenges in every industrial country of the world.

In total over the last 2 years, 650 regulations have been identified in Britain for reform or removal and we now propose sector by sector, working with you, to look at how we can remove more wasteful regulations starting with the chemicals, construction and retail industries.

Because 40 per cent of new regulation comes from Europe we have resisted inflexible barriers being added into European directives like the Working Time Directive and Agency Workers Directive, the Investment Services Directive and the Transparency Directive. And I am pleased to report that Britain has agreed with Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg to put regulatory reform at the heart of our four EU presidencies through to 2005, ensuring that any proposed regulation and every costly and wasteful existing regulation is put to a competitiveness test.

And just as we remove regulation that is wasteful we must also encourage competition, enterprise and trade that is job creating.

In the new global economy a competitive environment abroad is as important as the one at home so we must also have the strength to make the hard long term choices in favour of free trade and an outward looking internationalism.  That is why our commitment as a Government is that we will not only lead calls for a resumption of world trade talks but will make the case for our membership of the European Union – which accounts for 50 per cent of our trade – for the advantages it brings to Britain – and for being a leader in the enlarged Europe, the biggest single market in the world.   And I believe that the best contribution pro-Europeans committed to Britain leading in Europe make to the cause of Europe is by ensuring that in Europe we face up to rather than duck the difficult decisions about economic reform.

But Europe and America should also do more to work together.

Having just returned from meetings in the United States with John Snow, the Treasury Secretary, and Alan Greenspan, the Head of The Federal Reserve, I want to announce a joint initiative of the US Administration and the US Government — the first USA-UK Enterprise and Productivity Forum which will be held in Philadelphia on 24 May. The purpose is to bring together businessmen and women from both countries to discuss how best we can advance enterprise and equip ourselves for the next challenges of the global economy. And not only is your Director General but young entrepreneurs from across the UK being invited.

In June, in a second enterprise initiative jointly with the United States, we will examine how together we can improve enterprise education in our schools.  And as we learn from America’s “can do”, “get up and go”, dynamic entrepreneurial culture, we will be asking why a third fewer people in the UK say they are considering starting up a business compared to the US.

These are just two of a number of initiatives, working with business, that we are taking this year to strengthen and deepen the enterprise culture in Britain and to learn from the USA’s stronger and deeper enterprise culture – remembering that if Britain had the same rate of entrepreneurial activity as the United States, we would have 1.8 million more people starting up or running new businesses every year.

I want also to inform you that to further USA and European cooperation, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue – which has just been relaunched – will, with our support, meet at the forthcoming EU-US Summit on 26 June and will focus on the regulatory, competition and other barriers which deny us the full benefits in jobs, growth, business activity, employment and prosperity from the interaction of the world’s two most successful economies.

And let me tell you something that matters for this Institute which has done so much to foster and encourage enterprise: that building on the Queen’s Award for Enterprise the Government is in discussions with the Palace about new ways of recognising outstanding individual contributions to the development and promotion of enterprise nationally, regionally and locally – and thus recognising the importance of the dynamic entrepreneur as a role model in our community.

Let me also tell you that in June we will be announcing the detailed plans for Britain’s first ever National Enterprise Week to be held in November 2004 and to be led by your Director General – whose sterling work in this area has rightly won wide acclaim.

Out of our Enterprise Week – focused on inspiring the young to be enterprising with events, competitions, master classes and other initiatives in every part of the country – I want to see literally thousands of young men and women in Britain challenged by the excitement of business and fired with the enthusiasm to start a business or to work in business….yet another example of a sea change in attitudes to enterprise I want to encourage for Britain.

I can tell you that we have set aside resources, starting in September next year, to give each school pupil at least 5 days of enterprise education and from today, enterprise advisers will be working in one thousand schools in our most deprived areas – together ensuring that before they leave school all pupils will have the opportunity to enjoy not just work experience but top quality enterprise education too.

More than in the past, our colleges and universities ought to be a training ground for businessmen and women of the future.  And this is the thinking behind the new National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship – to be launched shortly – which will provide advice and support for college and university students considering a career in business and will be championed by Karan Billimoria, the prominent graduate entrepreneur behind Cobra Beer.

I have always thought it right that if we have towns and cities recognised for their culture or environment or sports we should have towns and cities recognised for their contribution to enterprise and I will soon be announcing further details with the Deputy Prime Minister of an annual British competition for the British town or city of enterprise.

And just as European countries compete for a European City of Culture we have persuaded our fellow European partners that there should be a competition to identify the European city of enterprise too.

In the past, areas of high unemployment seemed to be no go areas for enterprise.  But in an era when enterprise is open to all no community should be left behind so I can tell you that the 2000 new enterprise areas – new zones for new business opportunities in areas traditionally associated with high unemployment, should enjoy a stamp duty holiday for property purchases, a special community investment tax relief, fast tracking planning for new business development and the prospect of enhanced capital allowances for renovating business premises.

In the past the work of science seemed remote from the work of business but I can inform you also today that – following Richard Lambert’s recommendations – we will make it one of our spending priorities to encourage business to draw on innovative work from our colleges, universities and research institutes, and to encourage universities to think of the needs of business — through funding grants for collaborative R&D; helping universities translate research effectively into commercial benefits; and encouraging more university-business link ups not just within the UK but between the UK and other countries.

Every one of you here who runs a company knows that you must draw upon, encourage and incentivise the potential of everyone in your company to be successful. And it’s no different for a country.   But each year too many 16 year olds leave school with no qualifications.  There are nearly 5 million adults still without basic skills. And only 300,000 of them are in training.

I believe this is a responsibility of all of us – employers, employees and governments – and not only do I want a partnership that raises the level of skills available to you in businesses but Charles Clarke and I have committed ourselves to making the tough resource decisions necessary to help make Britain the best educated, most skilled, most technically proficient workforce:

• demanding, in return for investment, the highest standards where training must start – in our schools and further education colleges;
• reforming university finance to secure for Britain world class universities now and in the future;
• focusing resources on the all too often neglected area of vocational education for young people and adults – including improving the quality of modern apprenticeships, once dying and now taken up by a quarter of a million young people;
• entrenching and expanding the rights and responsibilities of the New Deal – which has helped over 1 million people into jobs since 1997.

But it will only work if we work together:

• you taking an interest in schools, colleges and universities to ensure they are not remote from the needs of business;
• and, because it is a national priority where urgency is required, the Government ready to do more to be of assistance.  And I can say today that we are ready to do more, working with you, to expand the highly successful Employer Training Pilots that are now offering over 80,000 employees paid time off to train towards relevant skills.

So the modern role of government in the global era is to entrench stability, build a competitive environment, and to ensure the public investments necessary, in partnership with business, for a knowledge based economy — investments in science and technology, in enterprise and in skills.

Government doing what it needs to but only what it needs to do:

• determined to maintain stability and create a competitive environment in which businesses can thrive;
• resolved to invest in those areas where government can make a real difference – science, skills and infrastructure;
• committed to entrenching a wider and deeper enterprise culture;
• and building what is increasingly vital: a shared British economic purpose – hopefully a national consensus that stretches right across all parties and all sections of the community – that Britain, the first industrial nation, has the strength and the will to avoid the old short termism and mistakes of the past and think, act and work together for the long term.

Britain not only well placed to be the success story of the new global economy but determined that nothing will stand in the way of that achievement.

It is a global challenge we can meet by working together.

And a British achievement we can – in our generation together – celebrate.

The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 18 May 2004.

I am grateful to the Social Market Foundation not just for its contribution in forum after forum and publication after publication to a vibrant debate about the future of our country but for giving me the opportunity to speak on markets and social reform last year, now being so kind as to publish in pamphlet from the speech I made.

In the speech I argued for a new clarity on one of the oldest and most important issues in political economy: the role and limits of the state and markets.

I argued that markets are in the public interest, while not to be automatically equated with it, and that we should be advancing market disciplines across the economy – promoting greater competition, open trade, entrepreneurship and flexibility in labour and capital markets.

I said that where there are market failures we should work to make markets perform better – as in skills and training, in science and research and development, in financial markets, in regional policy and to tackle environmental damage.

And I suggested that where there are systemic problems with the operation of markets that cannot easily be corrected, such as in healthcare and other public services, the challenge is develop efficient and equitable but non centralist means of public provision.

Since that speech – and with your general support – we have already announced major changes in policy that were prefigured or anticipated by the arguments of the speech.

We have removed the last permanent industrial subsidies in coal, steel and shipbuilding.

We have announced the sale of UK Government privatised shareholdings.

From a platform of an increased national minimum wage and tax credits, we have promoted regional and local pay flexibility.

We have announced new deregulatory initiatives for the administration of small companies in for example VAT and audit.

We have agreed a four Presidency deregulation initiative for the EU, with the aim of putting every regulation to the competitiveness test.

We have proposed a further round of European economic reform – liberalising product, capital and labour markets.

We have proposed how the European Union can reform its state aid regime – abolishing wasteful state aids but also making sure the rules do not prevent measures which help make markets work better.

We have implemented our new competition and enterprise regime and the OFT and Competition Commission have a new work programme with investigations into market conditions in areas from pharmacies and doorstep selling to estate agents and the professions.

And we have invested substantially more in the areas where if Government does not act, voluntary, private or other agencies cannot be relied on to do so – in schools, adult learning, universities, colleges, health and infrastructure.

And in adult learning we are seeking a new partnership between government, employers and employees.

In health and the public services the programme of reform is proceeding faster than ever and that reform will go on and on.

Tony Blair and I are working closely on both our spending round and the five year departmental plans for the future:  radical plans for investment matched by reform which we and the Cabinet are also working through together, reform plans that we will outline in the next few weeks, reforms on the basis of which Tony Blair will map out the road ahead.

And working with John Reid in the field of health care, we are recognising just how much more progress on the reform agenda we can make.

Last year I argued for more devolution, more local accountability, more flexibility and more choice – more diversity of supply – in the delivery of services. But advances we are making now allow us to go even further.

Take information available to the patient. In my speech last year I pointed out that professional and care relationships suffer from information asymmetries — information asymmetries that made the typical market model of service provision difficult to work in every health care system including in America as well as Britain.    Whereas in a market there is always a temptation for the supplier to exploit information asymmetries, in public services we must attempt to face up to them in the interests of patient power.   So increasingly we will empower patients.

In addition to producing better information for patients through star ratings, putting waiting times and other information on the NHS.uk website, we are piloting expert support for patients in exercising choice over their care.  In our coronary and heart disease choice pilots, for example, specialist nurse ‘patient care advisors’ are being provided to help patients.  And we are now planning to roll out choice at referral, where PCTs and GPs will provide advice and support either directly to patients or with the help of voluntary organisations.  We are also providing more information particularly in primary care and for patients with chronic conditions where patients increasingly have considerable knowledge of their condition.

Addressing these asymmetries – putting patients and users of other public services at the heart of the delivery of those services – is a crucial aspect of the government’s desire to achieve a wider aim: to make public services more personal to the needs of the user.

Personalisation means opening up wherever possible a greater range of options to the service user and I believe it will serve us well to consider the future of the public services in this way: making public services responsive to the particular needs of their users so that his or her needs are better met:

• for the NHS patient, the opportunity to book an appointment time, to see their own electronic records, to choose a hospital
• for the school pupil, allowing the individual to learn at his or her own pace and style
• for the elderly or disabled person, the chance to design for themselves and then obtain the right package of care options for them
• for the young person on the New Deal, access to an adviser who can provide help tailored to the particular circumstances of the individual and the employment conditions of the area
• for the parent, a range of flexible childcare services and financial support to choose from
• for the local community, the opportunity to discuss and influence community safety strategies and environmental improvements.

And in this way the work of the doctor, the nurse, the teacher and the provider focus more on the individual needs of the patient, pupil and user than ever before; public services can be shown to be superior to privately provided services in these areas; and a new model of non centralised non market public service delivery can evolve – devolved, accountable, flexible, with the user in the driving seat.

For too long in the past chronic under-investment made many resigned to the poor performance of too many public services, standardised and uniform services starved as they were of resources and of long term direction and hope.  But today we can see a new vision ahead of us – where instead of standardised and uniform services, public services meet peoples diverse needs in ways personal to those who depended upon them

As Amartya Sen has famously argued, equality rooted in an equal respect and concern for our citizens demands not just greater equality of resources but also equal capability to function and develop their potential. Such capability can be developed through a new approach to public services – one that maximises responsiveness and flexibility to provide services that empower the individual to flourish and one that engages individuals themselves to be active partners in achieving these results.

Because achieving equality of opportunity is a fundamental goal in a progressive society, I believe each person has an equal entitlement not just to high standards of service, but to as equal a chance as another of developing themselves and their potential to the fullest. Because people begin from different starting places, in different circumstances and with different needs, public services need to be personalised in terms of their resources and range of provision.

Achieving this vision of personalised public services — meeting the individual needs of all our citizens — requires continuing reform in the way we deliver public services.  This is the process on which the government has embarked and on which we continue to push ahead, as we shall show in the spending review in the summer.

And this vision is not of personalised services just for the few, for those who can afford to buy them in the market.  It is for all.  For personalisation is not opposed to equity; it is at the very core of what equity means.  Achieving the goal of equality of opportunity – enabling each person to achieve their own potential to the fullest – requires a tailored approach that takes into account each person’s unique circumstances.

When I gave the speech to the SMF last year, some people said that the Government’s three goals for public services

– greater personalisation, higher efficiency, and increased equity – were mutually incompatible.  They said that we faced a dilemma:
– that if public services were to be efficient, they had to be inequitable, because only market mechanisms, which depend on ability to pay, can achieve efficiency
– and that if services are to be equitable and universally available to all, then they cannot be personalised, but must inevitably be uniform, inflexible and standardised

Yet, in my speech and now pamphlet, I showed how not just equity but efficiency is better served through a publicly-funded and publicly-provided NHS rather than a private market.

But now I believe we can go further than this. We can show that public funding and largely public provision cannot only be equitable and efficient but can provide personalised services as well.

I very much hope the SMF, along with other think tanks, will continue to contribute to the debates we are now engaged in on how we develop more personalised, equitable and efficient public services. I hope this pamphlet helps this process. I am very grateful to the SMF for publishing it.  And to all of you for attending this launch.

The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 28 June 2004.

I am delighted to be here today with Britain’s top entrepreneurs, businesses and education organisations to launch a new campaign aimed at inspiring young people to believe in their own entrepreneurial potential and “Make Their Mark”.

As you know, the campaign will culminate in November with the first ever British ‘National Enterprise Week’ designed to encourage young people to think entrepreneurially, to get them excited about the possibilities of starting up a business, and to mark a step change in the creation of a more dynamic enterprise culture in our country.

And I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you here who are working tirelessly to make Enterprise Week a success: Kevin Steele and George Cox from Enterprise Insight; and all the individual members of the Enterprise Insight campaign who are bringing together so many events into just one week this autumn.

During Enterprise Week Britain will showcase our entrepreneurial talent and inspire young people in every region of the country:

• over 2,000 young people from all over the world will compete in a 24 hour global enterprise challenge;
• Shell Livewire will showcase their 300 best young business start-ups;
• Britain’s 100 fastest growing inner city companies will be rewarded for their success;
• young people will attend mentoring classes, networking events and workshops with established entrepreneurs;
• there will be competitions for the most innovative business ideas; and
• there will be enterprise roadshows for school pupils all over Britain.

And as we launch this Enterprise Week campaign today, I can also tell you that there will be three other competitions to recognise and reward our brightest and best entrepreneurs – and the cities and towns that are doing most to encourage the entrepreneurs of the future.

The ‘Enterprising Britain’ competition will identify British cities or towns that have championed a culture of enterprise throughout the regions of the UK. Nominations from across the country will be unveiled during Enterprise Week, and Britain’s first national capital of enterprise will be chosen next spring.

I congratulate the Daily Mail and Enterprise Insight for setting up, in parallel, ‘Enterprising Britons’ – a competition to find the nation’s most outstanding enterprising individuals – with the winners crowned during Enterprise Week this autumn.

And when in a fortnight’s time the Queen and other members of the Royal family visit the most outstanding examples of enterprise in each region, we will be announcing a new Queen’s award for enterprise.

As we celebrate entrepreneurship I have set a goal for the Pre-Budget Report, which will be presented to the House of Commons at the same time as National Enterprise Week, to do more to remove all the old barriers holding the enterprising back.

For too long, in too many areas, for too much of our recent past, enterprise has been seen as something for someone else, for a small elite. People thought the opportunity to start a business, to become self-employed, to make their ideas happen, was, somehow, not for them.

So we must rebuild a truly enterprising culture in Britain and we must open up enterprise to all.  Encouragement for business start ups must be available in the highest unemployment area as well as the most prosperous areas, to the redundant worker as well as to the tycoon’s son.

I want us to create a Britain of ambition where what matters is not where you come from but what you aspire to – and where business creation is encouraged.

That is why in the last seven years we have put in place reforms to help business start up and grow.  We have cut capital gains tax from 40p to 10p. We have introduced the most open competition regime this country has seen. To cut the penalties of failure we have radically reformed the insolvency laws. We have cut small companies corporation tax from 23p to 19p, with a new zero rate for the smallest companies first £10,000 pounds of profit. And perhaps most importantly of all, we have created economic stability in which businesses can plan ahead with confidence.

As a result more people than ever want to start businesses. There are 100,000 more businesses than in 1997, 3000 new businesses are starting up each week, and last year saw the fastest rate of increase in self-employment for two decades.

55 per cent of people now believe they have the skills to start up a business, compared to 40 per cent in 2001.  Indeed 39 per cent believe there are good start up opportunities for them, compared to 18 per cent, only a few years ago.

It takes 24 days to set up a business in the rest of Europe but only 7 days in Britain – and I want that time to be even less.

So we have made progress but there is still much more to do.

It is because we want as strong and deep an enterprise culture as the United States, that Britain must now prepare for the next round of enterprise reforms: removing the barriers to enterprise; more devolution of business support to the regions; and enterprise brought into schools and universities –  as well as greater encouragement for entrepreneurs.

At every stage – whether for companies starting up, investing, hiring, training, seeking equity, exporting – our aim is to be on businesses’ side.  And, learning from flexibilities in the United States, we are working to remove all the old barriers holding the enterprising back:

• we are simplifying VAT, audit and regulatory regimes;
• instead of having to account for every transaction there is now a simple flat rate VAT calculation for small businesses which lifts the burden of VAT red tape off the shoulders of hundreds of thousand of companies;
• we have exempted more small businesses from the requirement to submit an independent audit;
• we have set up a review to minimise and reduce duplication in the inspection system and enforcement regimes;
• this year we will launch new funds for enterprise capital, to bridge the funding gap many new businesses face;
• and because run down inner city areas or derelict industrial estates should not be seen as no go areas for new business but as areas of business opportunity – offering new choices, new recruits, and new markets – we have put in place 2000 new Enterprise Areas with stamp duty exemptions, community investment tax relief, fast track planning, and enhanced capital allowances for the renovation of business premises.  And I want to look at how we can go even further to encourage enterprise in disadvantaged communities in particular.

And I believe that the announcements we make in the forthcoming Spending Review will reflect these priorities.

Indeed I have studied the submissions of the Spending Review and what is remarkable is the consensus from unions to management; from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to the regions of England south and north that enterprise, along with science, innovation and skills, must be an investment priority for government.

And in each case we should commit ourselves to the long term – resisting the old stop-go in spending that has done so much damage in the past.

To make business support services more responsive to local people and local businesses, we will confirm in the Spending Review that the Business Links service – which helped half a million businesses last year – will be devolved out of Whitehall to the regions and we will do more to give RDAs the freedom and flexibility to be the driving force behind enterprise and business growth in every region of the country.

Creating an enterprise culture starts not in the boardroom but in the classroom. Yet when I was at school no business ever came near the doors of our classroom.

I can tell you today that there are funds set aside in the forthcoming Spending Review so that each school will be able to offer every pupil not just work experience but 5 days of enterprise education too.  1000 new enterprise advisors are already working in schools in deprived areas. And a week ago experts from Britain and the US met in Boston to share experience on inspiring young people in schools about enterprise.

British universities, once slow to respond, are now fixed on working with businesses, expanding university spin offs, licensing technologies and teaching students about enterprise.  The spending round will offer more incentives for university and graduate enterprise.  We will encourage existing firms to use the entrepreneurial skills of Britain’s universities and colleges.  And this autumn we will launch a new National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship – which, working with the Kauffman foundation, will hold an international conference on how we can do more to put enterprise at the centre of the university curriculum.

All our proposals on enterprise for this year each add up to something bigger than their individual parts – initiatives that taken together can make a difference, and contribute to a change in culture and attitudes by valuing and celebrating the spirit of enterprise throughout Britain.

We know how much stronger our economy and our society will be if we see released all the dynamism, creativity and potential of all our people.  But too often, young people do not believe that enterprise is for them.

That is why this campaign and Enterprise Week are so important – inspiring young people to be enterprising, mobilising people to aim high and to achieve success, and giving those with ideas and ambition the confidence and know-how to start up their own businesses and make a success of their ideas.

So I urge you all to get involved and play your part in making Enterprise Week a success:

• setting up and taking part in enterprise events;
• telling the world about Enterprise Week – helping to get the enterprise message to young people where they spend their time – in  schools, universities, pubs and coffee shops, and online; and
• sharing your stories about how ideas can become successful businesses.

Because with business, government and the voluntary sector working together, I believe we can foster a British enterprise renaissance – and begin to tap the immense skill and entrepreneurial talent that exists in Britain to the benefit of the whole community.

The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 2 December 2003.

Can I say first of all what a pleasure it is to be present at these awards for Inner City 100 – these “Oscars for Business”; to thank not only the New Economics Foundation, for their work in developing and running IC100, but the lead sponsors, Royal Bank of Scotland and Natwest; to be able to congratulate all of you who are finalists for the contribution you make both to your community and to the British economy; and to say that Inner City 100 is not just a competition between new high growth firms in our inner cities but a celebration of the dynamism of new enterprise in our inner cities.

This competition – Inner City 100 – which I was proud to be present at the start of two years ago with only a few entries, now has – with over 400 nominations from across the country this year and over a thousand since the awards began – become the premier showcase for the initiative, innovation and renewal that is a feature of so many of our inner cities today.

From fashion to food, construction to computer software, recruitment to property renovation, Inner City 100 firms are leading the way:

• providing services like community transport, basic skills training and care services which are benefiting your local area;
• taking innovative approaches to staff recruitment and training;
• utilising environmentally friendly products and processes;
• and developing hi tech solutions to problems.

And as a result of the work you – and others like you – are doing across the country, small business creation rates remain strong and survival rates continue to improve, despite the global downturn.

There are 133,000 more VAT registered companies today than in 1997.

And there are more people starting businesses in our highest unemployment areas; and more people from different backgrounds realising that a career in business can be for them.

And in thanking all of you for what you have achieved – and will achieve – I want, in the minute or two I have, to show how your achievements, your ingenuity and your creativity are building a new Britain of enterprise and initiative.

Your successes show that the British economy will do best when enterprise is open not just to a privileged elite but where men and women from all social backgrounds are encouraged to know that with the banks on their side, with local authorities backing their efforts, with community support for them as role models for the young, they can transform their ideas and hopes into business start up and growing firms.

A Britain where people know what matters is not where you come from but what you do, not where you were born but what you aspire to; a Britain where we break down the old barriers to opportunity and everyone has the chance to move ahead.

And I can assure you that, on your side, the Government intends to play its part removing the barriers to start ups, to growing businesses, to the development of enterprise in all areas especially the inner cities:

• building a competitive environment;
• investing in skills and science;
• and enthusing young people with the spirit of enterprise.

And with 5,000 new jobs created across the country as a result of your successes – and average growth in your companies of nearly 600 per cent over the last five years – all of you here today have proved that inner cities and established industrial areas should be seen as new markets with competitive advantages – their strategic locations, their often untapped retail markets, and the potential of their workforce.   But there are still too many areas in Britain where businesses face special problems in obtaining access to support, advice and finance.

So to stimulate business-led growth in our inner cities and estates, we have created enterprise areas in the 2000 most deprived wards in the country – where with the abolition of stamp duty, fast track planning permission, community investment tax relief, financial incentives to do payroll on line and the possibility of enhance capital allowances for renovating business premises – we will give special help with starting up, employing, training and investment.

You have sent me your Entrepreneurs’ Manifesto and building on our capital gains, small business and corporation tax cuts, I promise you that the Pre Budget Report will make it easier to start up a business, help bridge the equity gap and cut red tape for small firms by further simplifying VAT administration and reducing your audit burden.

We know that the key to your success has been getting the best people and the best out of your people, so with

the return of apprenticeships – once dying now taken up by one quarter of a million young people;
the new University for Industry – Learn Direct – which has already given nearly 1 million adults the chance to take courses from literacy to language to IT;
and the employer training pilots that offer paid time off to train towards relevant skill

we are investing more today in education and workplace skills than at any time in our history.  So that we can continue to do so, and do more, it is right to move ahead with the reforms in the structure and funding of higher education.  It is right that once students become graduates they make a greater contribution.  That is why as Tony Blair has said today it is essential that our reforms proceed through the House of Commons.  In this way we can both get more money into ensuring excellence in our universities and extend opportunities to more young people who would otherwise be denied the higher education chances that would benefit them.

Later this week the Lambert Review will propose that universities receive greater encouragement to commercialise their research and already we are investing an extra one and a quarter billion pounds a year to expand the science research infrastructure and train more skilled scientists and engineers.

But if we are to truly have the deeper and wider entrepreneurial culture we need we must start in our schools and colleges. I want every young person to be enthused with the spirit of enterprise; every teacher willing to extol the virtues of a career in commerce.  And we will work more closely with the United States to encourage young entrepreneurs — including giving young business men and women in disadvantaged areas of Britain the chance to spend a semester at an American business school and setting up a forum to bring together some of the brightest young UK and US entrepreneurs to learn from each other.

Let me conclude by telling you what you are achieving here engages a worldwide interest.

Last month with winners of past Inner City 100 competitions, the US Treasury Secretary John Snow and I took some of Britain’s foremost business leaders, including Richard Branson and Stellios Haji-Ioannou from Easygroup, to meet successful entrepreneurs from the West Midlands – including some of you here tonight.

The men and women we met – and indeed all of you here this evening – truly are local heroes, role models for others in your communities.  And I urge each and everyone of you to continue to spread your expertise and experience to others – working in your communities, with young people, with schools and colleges, becoming business mentors – encouraging and nurturing Britain’s next generation of entrepreneurs.

And working together in this way I believe we can not only change perceptions of the inner city as a business location but build a wider, deeper enterprise culture where from the poorest to the richest community, from left to right of the political spectrum, starting a business or becoming self employed is seen as open to all with the talent, ideas and will to do it.  Building a strong, dynamic, economic culture not just in prosperous areas but right across Britain.

Congratulations again on your success – and enjoy the rest of your evening.

The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 7 February 2003.

It is a great pleasure to be back here at Wolverhampton University today to celebrate the completion of the first phase of your multi million pound modernisation programme – this Millennium City Building which will expand your teaching, learning and research facilities and signals a dynamic new era for the university.

And I want to congratulate this university which I have seen advance confidently from technical college to polytechnic, to university, to leading regional university on its quality, diversity and its growing importance as a centre of knowledge, ideas and technological expertise for the developing economy of the West Midlands.

And I want to pay particular tribute to your Vice Chancellor, Professor John Brooks, and – if I might add a personal note – to the work and international achievements of Lord Paul whose quiet dignity, business acumen, renowned philanthropy and social engagement is respected and admired not just in one continent of the world but in every continent.

And it is also a pleasure for me to be back in the city of Wolverhampton – to congratulate the people of Wolverhampton on your long deserved and now rightly achieved city status, and to congratulate this city with a proud manufacturing heritage now diversifying into new hi-tech and service industries – and able to do so, in large part, because of the first class facilities provided by the rapidly expanding local Science Park.

And it is a privilege to be here in the West Midlands at a time when, despite a downturn in the world economy, the region – the heartland of British manufacturing – is again leading Britain, with nearly 60,000 new businesses created and over 70,000 more people in jobs since 1997 — clearly demonstrating the importance of this heartland region to the whole of the British economy.

With low inflation and domestic stability, Britain remains better placed than in the past to cope with the world economic downturn and yesterday, because inflation is low, the Bank of England was able to respond to lower world economic growth and its potential impact on the British economy with lower interest rates.

And here in Britain we will continue to have the strength to maintain and lock in our tough and disciplined approach to inflation and take the right long term decisions for Britain. And that is why just as we must have discipline on pay in the private sector it is right that there be continued and long term discipline in the decisions we make, as today, on public sector pay — and as we look forward to the conclusion of other pay negotiations, let us remind ourselves that every pay settlement must be linked to productivity so that investment in our public services is matched by reform.

It is by holding fast to our economic disciplines that Britain, despite the world wide slowdown, has managed to combine low inflation with high levels of employment.

And when world trade begins to move forward, there is a real opportunity, building on that stability, for British business and the British economy generally.

On Monday I said our economic task was to strengthen markets and help markets work better.

This will inform this spring’s Budget decisions.

I want business, workforces and Government to work together so that, building on Britain’s platform of stability, we can ensure a more flexible, adaptable and productive economy in the time ahead as we meet the challenges of globalisation and in particular the restructuring of both low value added and high value added industries and services across the world.

And it is our new approach to regional policy, so relevant to this university and this city and this region, that I want to emphasise in the few minutes I have today: how together we can build in the West Midlands and all our regions indigenous economic strength – by investing in skills, infrastructure and innovation – and help our regions become centres of energy, dynamism and economic strength in the United Kingdom as a whole.

And how the universities – with their unique knowledge base – can contribute through teaching, technology transfer and new services to business to the development of jobs, wealth and the quality of life regionally and nationally – making a university like this absolutely central to the development of the new Britain.

Let me forecast that the next decade will see the biggest ever shift of power from Whitehall and Westminster to regions, localities and communities — moving Britain from the “old Whitehall knows best” culture to a Britain of not one but many centres of initiative and decision-making power.

Already there has been more devolution to English regions in the last few years than in the preceding one hundred years. This new regional policy, backed by the Regional Development Agencies, with its emphasis on indigenous sources of economic strength is based on a genuine devolution of power in economic policymaking from the centre – and indeed the Spending Review announced that Regional Development Agencies will have budgets worth in total £2 billion a year; the flexibility to spend as they determine regional needs; and strengthened responsibility for economic development, tourism, skills, planning and – from April in the West Midlands – the management of business support.

And with further devolution just announced in the provision of housing – and greater regional involvement in transport as our long term aim – this major decentralisation is transforming relationships between the centre and localities.

Soon 90 per cent of the £7 billion a year learning and skills budget, 50 per cent of the Small Business Services budget and the vast majority of housing capital investment will be devolved to the freedom and flexibility of local decision-making as we pioneer non-centralist means of delivering these services.

And these financial freedoms and flexibilities are being matched by greater accountability through the role of regional chambers and, for those who in time choose to have them, elected regional assemblies. And having, in the NHS, already devolved 75 per cent of health budgets to Primary Care Trusts, we have also established regional Strategic Health Authorities. And there is discussion of democratic arrangements in these areas too.

Freedom and flexibility matter just as much in local government. And in return for reform and results, and as an incentive to all the rest, the best performing localities will soon have even more freedoms and flexibilities including:

The removal of both revenue and capital ring fencing;
The withdrawal of reserve powers over capping;
Sixty plans reduced to just two required – the Best Value Performance Plan and a Community Plan;
And a three year holiday from inspection.
In other words – government enabling and empowering rather than directing and controlling.

And there is greater freedom and flexibility, too, for charities, voluntary and community organisations as they take a bigger role in the delivery of services. At the heart of many of the new services we have played a part in developing – Sure Start nurseries, the Children’s Fund, IT Learning Centres, Healthy Living Centres, the New Deal for Communities, the Safer Communities Initiative, Communities Against Drugs, the Futurebuilders Programme – is a genuine break with the recent past: services not only involving voluntary and charitable organisations but being run through and by them – not implementing a standardised central plan but reflecting the needs of local communities and families.

So instead of people looking to Whitehall for solutions in locality after locality, more and more people are themselves taking more control of the decisions that most affect them – a devolution of power, an empowerment of local centres of initiative that is now ready to spread across regions, local government and communities, large and small.

Our long term objective has always been to match the attainment of ambitious national standards with the promotion of local autonomy so we can achieve efficiency, equity and choice. In education, health and other services our first priority was to end the post code lotteries and through national targets establish national standards below which our public services should never fall. The next step in service delivery is empowering local communities with the freedom to agree for their own public services their own local performance standards – choosing their own performance indicators on top of national targets and the local community expecting their local managers to continuously monitor and learn from their performance.

This new direction – this new localism — moves us forward from an old Britain weakened by centuries of centralisation towards a new Britain strengthened by local centres of initiative, energy and dynamism.

And in this way, I believe that a new era – an age of active citizenship and an enabling state – is now within our grasp —- at its core, a renewal of civic society where the rights to decent services and the responsibilities of citizenship go hand in hand.

And as power devolves and decentralises away from London, here in the midlands there are huge new opportunities – at this university, in this city and in this region.

So, once again, I would like to thank you for inviting me here today and for awarding me an honorary degree.

Over the last few years, Wolverhampton University has gone from strength to strength – providing high quality teaching and research, and generating ever-increasing benefits for the businesses in the surrounding community — and this energy, combined with our new regional policy, will ensure it continues to thrive for years to come.

Thank you.

The speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, at Church House in London on 10 March 2003.

If the last decade of the 20th century will go down as the decade that ended the cold war, the first decade of the 21st century will be remembered as the time when nations had to adjust to both the opportunities and insecurities of globalisation.

A generation that has grown up free of the horror and pain of world wars, survived the uneasy truce of the Cold War, dared to hope that the fall of the Berlin Wall would mean a halt to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, is now having to confront the proliferation of chemical, biological and, often, nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists and failed states.

And this is why at our first global test of resolve in the post cold war world, and after repeated demands by the international community for Saddam Hussein to disarm, the world should stand firm.

We know that the only way he has considered disarming without war is the threat of being disarmed through war.

And just as the Treasury stands ready to fund necessary defence and security commitments, the whole country should support Tony Blair in his determination to secure international agreement for a second United Nations resolution and for the disarmament of Saddam Hussein.

Just as in foreign policy this new era of globalisation brings insecurities as well as opportunities, so too in economic policy insecurities and opportunities arise together and challenge us to devise modern ways of achieving our traditional economic objective: high and stable levels of growth and employment.

Globalisation means that there is hardly a good we produce here in Britain that is not subject to intense competition from at home and abroad, competition not just from traditional competitors in the advanced industrial economies but competition from emerging market economies not least in Asia and the east of Europe — competition which is itself a spur to growth and prosperity.

Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, it was just about possible – if costly and wrong – for countries to shelter their industries and sectors, protecting them from global competition.

But today there is no safe haven, no easy escape from global competition without putting at risk long term stability, growth and employment.

Some say governments are powerless facing these new global forces, that they cannot any longer play their part in achieving the old objectives: high and stable levels of growth and employment.

I believe the opposite to be true.

Globalisation has rightly limited the scope of government and in the modern, open, more fiercely competitive global economy governments cannot use the old levers to achieve their objectives.

They cannot easily impose exchange controls, trade off inflation for growth, resort to old style protectionism, competitive devaluations or costly state aids – the policy of subsidies in one country – without undermining their long term goal of high and stable levels of growth and employment.

But it is because in a more open global economy countries pay such a heavy price, not least in long term investment, for getting the big decisions wrong that I believe governments are even more important today to the attainment of high levels of growth and employment.

Because investment will flow most to those countries that are the most stable, and ever more rapidly away from those that risk stability, there is an even greater premium than before on governments running a stable and successful monetary and fiscal regime to achieve high and stable levels of growth and employment. That is why we attached so much importance to the first decision our Government made – to make the Bank of England independent – and why, with low inflation, low interest rates and low debt, our stability makes us a far stronger economy today.

Globalisation also describes a world whose very mobility of capital and openness to competition is ushering in a restructuring of industry and services across continents.

And while emerging market countries are ready to attract low value added, low investment and low skilled work, we have to compete on ever higher levels of skill and technology rather than ever lower levels of poverty pay.

So countries that make the right forward looking decisions to create the best environment for high quality investment – through policies for education, research and development, and infrastructure – will be better placed to achieve high and stable levels of growth and employment. It is for this reason that in our recent spending review we decided to match new resources to major reforms in education, science and innovation.

But because high levels of productivity growth are essential to high levels of growth and employment, there is a third essential element that distinguishes the successful high employment, high growth economies from the least successful – and it is also one where governments can also make a difference. And it is this I want to talk about today both for Britain and for the euro area: how enhancing productivity and competitiveness in a more open economy demands a new flexibility in labour, capital and product markets.

A few weeks ago I urged Labour to reverse traditional, often hostile attitudes to markets and recognise the need to strengthen markets in important areas. And today I want to set out how Britain proposes to lead the way in labour, product and capital market reform and how in this process of market liberalisation we can make progress with European economic reform.

Some still argue that when global competition is challenging every industry and almost every service, the state should replace markets or, as difficult, seek to second guess them through a corporatist policy of supporting national champions.

But competition at home is not only essential for competitiveness at home and abroad, but if we are to make the most of the potential of open trade and the European single market, we will need greater flexibility as we respond to new technologies, and adjust to changes in consumer demand.

Indeed in a single currency area where the old flexibilities to adjust exchange rates and interest rates are no longer available at a national level, labour, product and capital market flexibilities are even more essential.

Adjusting to shocks without putting at risk high and stable levels of growth and employment demands even greater market flexibility.

America’s experience as a large and mature monetary union demonstrates the importance of sufficient flexibility to ensure that monetary union works well.

In monetary unions, whatever their size, local economies need to respond to shocks and there is a premium on effective internal market adjustment mechanisms.

In the USA competitive pressures are strong ensuring that prices respond quickly and efficiently. With risk sharing diversified across a broad and deep capital market they can limit the impact of shocks. And a high level of product and capital market flexibility complimented by a high level of labour flexibility has helped sustain high levels of employment and growth.

In the past, supporters of full employment have not been in the habit of thinking of flexibility as a route to full employment. And supporters of greater flexibility in our economy have seldom described its benefits as the attainment of full employment.

Yet today flexible economies are also the economies with higher employment.

And I want to demonstrate how in the new world of global competition it is by creating a more flexible and dynamic economy in which firms and individuals respond to the challenges of change that we will best achieve our historic goals for full employment.

Britain and Europe have, of course, long since moved from the old assumption that there is a long term trade off between inflation and growth and employment.

But, in a world where business must respond quickly and people must adapt to change, Europe has too often been unwilling to go beyond old assumptions that the labour, capital and product market flexibility necessary for productivity is the enemy of social justice.

Yet the road to full employment starts with monetary and fiscal stability, is built on investing in skills and responsibility in the workplace, and demands attention to enterprise, competition and employability as necessary means of achieving high productivity.

And this road to full employment in Britain depends not just on achieving economic reform in Britain but in Europe too.

In the past the Labour Party – like the rest of Europe – has not been very good at facing up to issues relating to flexibility.

Indeed flexibility has often been a term of abuse, derided as the antithesis of fairness, as the race to the bottom, as poverty pay – and it is often suggested that flexibility is a synonym for exploitation.

Yet flexibility is, in reality, the ability to respond to change with speed.

Changes in a marketplace include the impact of innovation and changing technology, changing consumer preferences and the changing need for particular skills.

Failure to respond to these changes by companies and by individuals leads to an unproductive use and wasteful allocation of resources in the economy and thus huge costs in lost output, jobs and prosperity.

So in an open and far more rapidly changing global trading economy, flexibility – the ability to respond quickly – is not an option. It is a necessary precondition of success.

Without firms prepared to innovate and adjust, economies become sclerotic. Without the capacity to develop the new skills needed, countries will simply be left behind.

Indeed there are just two modern routes to achieving high levels of growth and employment — flexibility without fairness, which leaves people helpless in face of change, or flexibility with fairness, where governments and firms equip people to cope with change and tackle the insecurities that surround it. The issue of the best modern policies for fairness is one I will address in detail in a later speech.

But it is right both to create flexible markets and to equip people to master change – through investment in skills and training, through the best transitional help for people moving between jobs, and – as I hope to demonstrate – through the operation of a minimum wage and a tax credit system.

And flexible markets and active labour market policies are not incompatible opposites but can be essential allies of each other as we seek high levels of growth and employment. So the issue is not one of abandoning fairness but of achieving the right kind of flexibility. And what people should oppose is not governments that insist on flexibility but governments that fail to insist on matching that flexibility with fairness.

In other words, we should recognise that, with the right kind of flexibility in British and European labour, capital and product markets, economic efficiency and employment opportunity for all can advance together.

So our goal – enterprise and fairness in a dynamic, flexible economy that delivers full employment and prosperity for all – demands that we match policies for stability, employment and fairness with flexible capital, labour and product markets.

Since 1997 we have, in pursuit of this:

made our competition authorities independent and opened up product markets;
revamped the physical planning system;
encouraged our capital markets by cutting capital gains tax and introducing new incentives for venture capital;
encouraged enterprise with lower tax rates for small businesses;
offered new incentives and resources to encourage greater investment, skills, and innovation;
and we have devoted time and energy to promoting economic liberalisation in Europe.

At the same time as we have created a more flexible economy we have advanced fairness with the introduction of the National Minimum Wage, the Working Families Tax Credit and Jobcentre Plus – an employment service that offers personal help to people moving into and between jobs —- not reforms at the expense of greater flexibility but consistent with greater flexibility.

But we can still go much further in product, capital and labour market reform in Britain and in Europe to make our economy more flexible.

Product and capital markets

First, product and capital markets.

When I argue for flexible capital and product markets I want open well informed markets that ensure capital flows to productive uses so that the price mechanism works to balance demand and supply and labour and capital are used efficiently.

So flexibility in product and capital markets means that instead of being suspicious of competition, we should embrace it, recognising that without it vested interests accumulate. Instead of tolerating monopoly or cartels which were never in the public interest, or appeasing special interests, we should systematically extend competition – forcing producers to be efficient, extending the choices available to consumers and opening up opportunity for the ambitious and the risk-takers.

To back up independence for the Competition Commission and the new proactive role of the OFT, we will take action where investigations reveal challenges that have to be met and demand that the same rigorous pro competition policies are applied to the public sector as well as the private sector.

As the DTI Secretary of State, Patricia Hewitt, is showing: the old days of the ‘sponsorship’ department are over, freeing up resources to enhance the DTI’s role in promoting competition and enabling markets to work better.

And it is right to demand the same liberalisation throughout Europe to make the single market work. Britain has learned much from the steps taken in the European Union, before and after the Lisbon agenda, that promote liberalisation and economic reform. And we have supported wholeheartedly the attempt to restrict the wasteful use of state aids that prevents markets functioning well.

Yet while in 1988 Cecchini estimated that single market liberalisation would add 4.5 per cent to Europe’s GDP, cut prices by 6 per cent and increase employment by 1.75 million, many of the gains have yet to materialise. The way forward is mutual recognition of national practises not harmonised regulations; and tax competition not tax harmonisation.

So we support:

A more proactive EU competition regime furthering a strong and independent competition policy for Europe;
Investigations into particular European markets and sectors to drive up competition and prevent British firms from being excluded from European markets from energy and telecommunications to agriculture;
Faster progress on the reform of airport slot allocation and liberalisation of postal services;
And support for private finance initiatives in Europe.

And Britain remains at the forefront of countries supporting the European Commission’s demands for tougher state aid rules to prevent unwarranted subsidies for loss making industries and at the European Economic Reform Summit we will continue to push for a more aggressive approach to tackling unfair competition and state failure.

In the UK we are removing the last of the permanent, ongoing subsidies — thus removing aids which have no market justification.

But while it is right to remove state aids which distort the single market, it is also right to reform state aids to target market failures which need correction.

It took Britain more than a year to secure European permission to create regional venture capital funds for localities desperately in need of strong local capital markets that work for small businesses. And it has taken months more for permission to abolish stamp duty for business property purchases in areas urgently in need of local property markets that work and the new businesses and jobs that can ensue.

Here again, as I said in a speech on markets a few weeks ago, the case for state intervention is not to extend the role of the state but, by tackling market failure, to help make markets work better: instead of thinking the state must take over responsibility where markets deliver insufficient investment and short termism in innovation, skills and environmental protection, we must enable markets to work better and for the long term.

An effective competition policy helps new and small businesses enter markets and prevents them being held back or penalised by large vested interests. And instead of being suspicious of enterprise and entrepreneurs, Labour should celebrate them – encouraging, incentivising and rewarding them, hence our capital gains tax (from 40 pence to 10 pence) and our small business tax reforms (from 23 pence to 19 pence and the lower rate from 10 pence to zero).

With their recommendations on small business banking, the competition authorities have tried to cut the cost of investing for small businesses. The next stage is to help small and medium sized businesses get fair access to public sector procurement. Opening up markets to new suppliers intensifies competition as well as encouraging innovation. That is why we have asked the Office of Government Commerce to identify what more can be done to increase competition in markets where government has substantial purchasing power and to enable small businesses to compete for government contracts and deliver value for money.

I have said that instead of maximising regulation to restrict the scope of markets, we should systematically pinpoint regulation that does not serve the public interest and can be reduced.

So as I examine measures for the budget we will continue the process of cutting the cost and burden to small business of starting up, investing and growing, especially in areas of high unemployment. And as the Government strengthens our assessments of the impact of regulation on small firms which have included examinations of the retail and chemical sectors we will also look at transport, pesticides, food and drink processing, and the collection of statistical data.

Because 40 per cent of new regulations originate in the EU, the European Economic Reform Summit this month should call for the same rigorous assault on unnecessary regulation throughout the European Union: an agreement to examine all new directives for their impact as well as taking stock of existing EU directives.

Achieving greater flexibility not just in product markets but in capital markets is essential for high levels of growth and as we press ahead with the Cruickshank, Myners, Sandler and Higgs reforms and build on our cuts in capital gains tax we should continue to examine where local capital markets have had least success, and continue to cut the barriers to entry faced by small businesses and to open up venture capital markets in our regions.

State aid rules – and thus the treatment of early stage research – should be reformed to help Europe bridge the gap between our research and development performance and that of Japan and the USA. With the R and D tax credit we are trying to cut the cost of investing in innovative research, but state aid rules should make it easier to address the market failures that obstruct research and innovation in its early and pre commercial stages.

Capital markets can and must help us manage risk more efficiently, between sectors, over time and across national boundaries. While America has achieved a high degree of diversification across state borders, investment in Europe remains fragmented on national lines and there is a need to remove barriers to diversification of investments across borders, for example in pension and mutual funds.

So we will support the European Financial Services Action Plan as it improves mutual recognition of financial services providers in insurance, banking and capital markets.

It is also true that competition between trading systems in capital markets is vital to improve efficiency and reduce dealing spreads, and so cut the cost of capital and raise the returns from investment. And where EU regulation such as the proposed new Investment Services Directive threatens to weaken rather than strengthen competition we will fight to change it.

And instead of the old protectionism we must embrace open markets and thus free trade. Efforts to improve the flexibility of product and capital markets should not stop at the EU’s borders. Greater openness to global trade and investment creates new opportunities for European producers and consumers, and strengthens the incentives for reform. A more flexible and dynamic Europe would, in turn, play a leading role in breaking down barriers to trade and investment in the rest of the world – a virtuous circle of reform and openness, leading to a stronger and more resilient economy from which the EU, and the global economy, would benefit.

So we must drive forward the Doha agenda and also do more to strengthen the trading links between the EU and USA. Deepening what is already the world’s largest trade and investment relationship would do much to stimulate flexibility and reform in Europe.

Regional and local flexibilities

By looking for market solutions to market failures, we move beyond the old centrally imposed industrial policies – the corporatist policy of picking winners – in favour of a new regionally driven focus on local enterprise, local skills and local innovation.

For it is not just how national economies adjust that matters but how local and regional economies and their markets adjust and respond that will determine whether full employment can be achieved in each region and on a sustainable basis.

And that requires us to move beyond not only the first generation of regional policy that was centrally delivered first aid but the second generation of regional policy which was London and then Brussels imposing centrally set rules focusing on incentives for incoming investors.

Today, in the third generation of regional policy, the focus is, rightly, moving from centrally administered subsidies to locally–led incentives that encourage local skills, innovation and investment and boost the indigenous sources of regional economic growth.

And to achieve this we also move from the old idea that regional policy is just the work of one or two departments. In the new regional policy for a more flexible economy each department must step up the pace of reform and devolution:
from centrally administered R and D policies to the encouragement of local technology transfer between universities and companies and the development of regional clusters of specialisms;
from a national one size fits all approach to skills to devolving 90 per cent of the learning and skills budget, so that we can promote regional excellence;
from centrally run housing and transport policies to greater regional coordination…offering greater flexibility in response;
and from centrally administered small business polices to more local discretion starting with, in the East and West Midlands and the North West, the small business budget locally administered with the Regional Development Agencies.

Because small business creation is so important to the success of local economies it makes sense to examine why the rates of small business creation vary so much between localities and regions and what we can do about it.

In the UK just 5 per cent of adults think of starting a business, in the United States it is 11 per cent – so we have a long way to go. And there are also large variations in the rates of business creation between areas of the UK with ten times the number of firm start-ups in the best performing areas of the UK than in the worst performing.

So to remove the barriers preventing firms from starting up and growing in our most deprived communities, we have designated 2000 new Enterprise Areas — where we encourage economic activity by cutting the cost of starting up, investing, employing, training, managing the payroll. Here we are bringing together industry, planning, employment and social security policies to tackle local property market, capital market and labour market failures — hence the new community investment tax relief, the relaxation of planning regulations, the abolition of stamp duty, the engagement of the New Deal — government and business working together to bring investment, jobs and prosperity to areas that prosperity has still by passed.

It makes sense for Europe to help this process forward. And while, as I argued last week, Structural Funds will inevitably be concentrated on the poorer regions of central and eastern Europe, more prosperous countries with large regional inequalities should be given the freedom to tackle capital, labour and product market failures through a reform of state aid legislation.

Labour markets

And we need to extend our approach of encouraging regional and local initiatives from R and D, skills, small business, transport and housing policies to the critical area of employment and welfare policy.

Because we seek local and regional labour markets that match labour demand and supply efficiently and help us meet our aim of full employment, Andrew Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is focusing on how regional and local employment and social security policies can help our labour markets get people back to work more quickly and help people move more easily from the old jobs that are becoming redundant to the new jobs that can give them greater security.

So while the preconditions for full employment are national stability, employability and an environment for investment and high productivity, the achievement of full employment and high levels of growth and prosperity depends upon regions and localities becoming better equipped to adapt to change.

In particular, when there are negative economic shocks, it is all the more important that the economy can adjust and ensure that temporary output and job losses are minimised and do not become more permanent.

And while it is true that in recent years in the United Kingdom earnings growth has been consistent with the inflation target, and what is called the NAIRU (non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) has fallen, it is still the case that UK labour market flexibility – while greater than much of Europe – is lower than in the USA.

A dynamic economy needs adaptable and flexible labour markets where there is

· first, mobility – a willingness to be more mobile, and firms and a labour market that supports the ability to do so;
· second, what economists call functional flexibility – the skills to meet new and different challenges;
· third, employment flexibility – the ability of firms and individuals to adjust working patterns to new challenges;
· and fourth, at a local level the ability of our employment and wage systems to respond more quickly to shocks and imbalances between supply and demand.

And to meet the challenges of a global economy we have, in each of these areas, much further to go.

While the rate of job turnover in Britain is higher than the 7 years per job in the euro area but lower than in America – 5 years against 4 years – it is also true that there is far less geographical mobility in response to change in Britain and in Europe than in the USA.

While around 25 per cent of the UK’s workforce have degree level skills, the UK, with 8 million men and women with low or no skills, 20 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds, has a long way to go.

While nearly 25 per cent of British employees work part-time compared with less than 15 per cent in the euro area, and while working outside the five days a week is common in Britain – 13 per cent working on a Sunday compared to 11 per cent in the EU and as low as 4 per cent in some countries – adjusting to the global economic challenge will require firms and individuals to be more flexible.

Indeed it is because our aim is not just achieving but sustaining full employment in our regions that we need not only stability but this flexibility to respond to shocks.

And this is more important than ever in a single currency area, with the US experience demonstrating labour mobility and wage flexibility to be critical to the success of their single currency.

Labour mobility

In the American single currency area geographical mobility, which can help tackle skill shortages and help people find new opportunities, is twice the level of Britain and Europe today.

It is often argued that mobility will be greater:

the more flexible the housing market;
the easier it is to commute; and
the easier it is to attract economic migrants to high demand areas.

Britain has a smaller privately rented sector than most countries. And John Prescott is examining how we can encourage more flexibility for those in social housing through initiatives such as Choice-based Letting and the new Housing and Mobility Scheme to help tenants relocate to access employment.

And because we also need to ensure we are building sufficient housing in areas of high employment, the Deputy Prime Minister has also set out ambitious plans to deliver a step change in housing provision and expand assistance for key workers to enable them to rent as well as buy in high demand housing areas.

Around 3.8 million tenants currently rely on housing benefit for help with their rent, but delays in processing new applications after a claimant returns to employment can lead to rent arrears and debt, dissuading some people from moving into work. So because housing benefit can constrain mobility, affecting an individual’s ability to move into jobs and move between localities, Andrew Smith is piloting major reforms in housing benefit administration and incentives that make it easier for the unemployed to return to work.

The current Housing Benefit Pathfinders Scheme offers a flat rate in the private rented sector and it makes sense to pursue the pilot of a flat rate payment based on household circumstances and location.

International migration can help tackle skill shortages and aid adjustment to shocks,

Migration into the UK through the Work Permits System has risen from 50,000 in 1997 to 170,000 this year and is projected to rise to 200,000 by 2004. And while tackling illegal immigration, David Blunkett and I have been considering further extensions to the successful Work Permit System for legal migration.

Functional flexibility

The more skilled men and women there are. And the more they are willing to develop new skills, the more flexible and productive the economy is likely to be. And the more globalisation opens up the world economy to fierce competition across continents the more competitive advantage countries like Britain will gain from a higher level of skills.

Yet despite our successes at university and college level, skills – particularly in basic and intermediate qualifications – are Britain’s Achilles heel, the most worrying inflexibility of all within our labour market. And we are learning a great deal from successful industrial training policies in other parts of Europe.

So Charles Clarke the Education Secretary is right to forge a new partnership between government, employee and employer with a view to expanding our skills and making labour markets work more flexibly.

Here, as elsewhere, a partnership between employers and workforces is the best means of combining flexibility with fairness. Building on the Union Learning Fund and other innovative partnerships, I believe we can do more to encourage and help trades unions expand their role in training and education.

The increased registration for the University for Industry, (providing courses for over 700,000 people already), the high levels of young people undertaking Modern Apprenticeships (now over 220,000 a year) and the success of the new Employer Training Pilots prove that the issue is not an unwillingness to get new qualifications and skills but the availability of training at the right time, price and standards.

So we are expanding the Employer Training Pilots now operating in six areas to around a quarter of the country — offering incentives for firms to give their staff paid time off to train towards basic skills and NVQ Level 2 qualifications. And a major shake-up in skills training will be announced this summer.

From April, we are piloting devolved pooled budgets for adult learning in four areas of the country — providing greater incentives to employers and individuals to develop their skills, reducing bureaucracy and strengthening the regional and local dimension in skills development

Looking to the workforce of the future we are not only investing heavily to raise standards in schools but, from September next year, rolling out Educational Maintenance Allowances in England — providing young people from poorer families with up to £1,500 a year to encourage them to stay on at school and get the qualifications they need.

And we have set up the National Modern Apprenticeship Taskforce which will look at how to increase the opportunities for young people to participate in Modern Apprenticeships and how to engage employers more fully in the programme.

Employment flexibility

More flexible patterns of employment can remove unnecessary inflexibilities and enable more men and women to balance work and family and other responsibilities.

And it is important to look at new ways of ensuring that firms have the flexible working patterns they need and families have the flexible arrangements they need.

So the Government is not only looking carefully at employment regulation, but also at how we can empower mothers in particular to secure the benefits of more flexible working arrangements.

So we will resist inflexible barriers being introduced into directives like the European Working Time Directive and we will support flexible interpretations of existing rules and remove unnecessary regulations and restrictions.

In recent years attitudes to part time work have changed. Companies have found flexible working patterns help them be more productive. Families have found that flexible working arrangements help them balance work and family responsibilities.

So most people who work part time today do so not because there are no full time jobs available but out of choice. So while temporary employment is half the European Union average, 6 per cent compared with 13 per cent in the EU, 25 per cent of our total employment is part-time and employees already work far more flexible hours than most EU countries.

One reason is our tax credit system and the child care tax credit. And we continue to seek ways of making it easier and less costly for employees to balance their work and family responsibilities and for businesses to recruit.

That is why building on:
our rise, from April, in maternity pay to £100 a week the extension in paid maternity leave to 26 weeks;
the first ever paternity and adoption pay;
a new right for parents of young or disabled children to request flexible working;
and the first ever National Childcare Strategy…

…we will consider further reforms: new tax and national insurance incentives to expand employer supported child care; paying the child care credit for approved home child care by carers who are not already childminders; and increased flexibility in parental time off including giving fathers time off to attend ante-natal appointments.

Lone parents genuinely worry that without flexible working patterns they will end up neglecting their children and fear that the price of employment may make it difficult to discharge family responsibilities. To ensure the balance is better, the child care and child tax credits are not only making work pay for the single parent – £10 an hour for a part time job – but ensuring that a decent income does not require them to work excessive hours damaging to their family life.

And because employers recognise these anxieties, a new Employer Taskforce is now examining how, among other measures, working patterns can be more flexible and child care provision better to suit the needs of lone parents.

With a national discussion of how we help lone parents balance work and family responsibilities, we can offer companies a smart solution to their employment needs, help thousands of lone parents move out of poverty from welfare into work, and reach our target of 70 per cent of lone parents in employment. And similar initiatives will also be forthcoming for men and women who have previously lost out in the old economy – such as the ethnic minorities – but who, by more flexible recruitment patterns, could gain in a new economy where we should see diversity as a source of strength.

While there are more 900,000 men and women over 50 now in work compared with 1997, more flexible recruitment patterns could make it easier for older workers to move between jobs and tomorrow Andrew Smith will host a summit of employers aimed at more flexible recruitment incentives for firms to take on the 1 million disabled men and women who want to work to find suitable employment.

Local labour market flexibility

To reduce unemployment and to achieve full employment we must not only focus on the needs of particular groups of the unemployed but also focus on regional and local flexibilities and so tackle the regional and local variations in unemployment rates, in skills, in the ability to create new jobs and generate new businesses. And here we are able to learn from the success of active labour market policies especially in the Nordic countries and the low unemployment countries of the European Union.

Without the New Deal, youth long term unemployment would be twice as high and today inflows to Jobseekers Allowance are at their lowest since records began in 1967. Unemployment in the UK is 5.1 per cent, compared to 6 per cent in the US and 8.5 per cent in the euro area.

But after six years of a national programme I am more convinced than ever that if we are to get more of the long term unemployed back to work, and more successfully match vacancies to jobs, a full employment strategy now demands regional and local flexibility as well as a national framework of incentives and sanctions. And this is needed too to increase the New Deal’s ability both to respond in the event of a local or regional shock and to help the unemployed move into work more rapidly.

Today vacancies – 2.5 million notified at Jobcentres every year, 5 million overall – are still at historically high levels in almost every region and nation of the UK. And in relatively low skilled trades like in hotels and catering 350,000 vacancies were reported last year.

Often large numbers of vacancies exist side by side with large numbers of unemployed in adjacent communities.

Tottenham, for example, has some of Britain’s worst long term male unemployment among its 5,000 unemployed while neighbouring districts have seen nearly 90,000 vacancies in the last nine months, with many more in the wider London economy.

So it makes sense for Jobcentres to develop programmes more sensitive to, and tailor made for, local and regional conditions and to have greater flexibility and discretion to move people quickly into work, to stop too many long term unemployed falling through net, and to tackle shocks when they arise.

So we should consider extending the areas of job search for the newly unemployed and as we combine flexibility with help for people coping with change we are prepared to help with initial transport costs where appropriate.

And while in France nearly 40 per cent of unemployed have been unemployed for more than a year, in Germany more than 50 per cent, in Italy more than 60 per cent, Britain’s 27 per cent compares unfavourably with 6 per cent in the USA so, with our step up and other programmes that require the long term unemployed to take jobs on offer, we will consider an even greater emphasis on responsibilities as well as opportunities in moving the long term unemployed back to work.

In the global economy it has been easier in the past for nations to respond to shocks when wages are either highly centralised at a national level or highly decentralised at a local level.

In Britain only 5 per cent of private sector workplaces are covered by multi-employer collective bargaining arrangements – and many have profit related pay schemes, helping to make pay more responsive to the economic cycle. Wage setting tends to be local, annual and normally at a plant or workplace level.

But a willingness to be flexible in both the private and the public sectors can be matched with a guarantee of fairness.

Indeed as the government has implemented its reforms to the tax and benefit system, two of the critical guarantees that have been put in place for people in work are the minimum wage and the working and child tax credits.

Critics of the minimum wage have argued that it reduces the flexibility of the labour market by inhibiting the workings of the price mechanism, with the potential to create stronger wage growth throughout the economy and reduce employment.

But research suggests that the minimum wage has not led to increased unemployment or inflationary earnings growth across the economy. Adjusted through regular reviews by the Low Pay Commission who consider the effect on pay, employment and competitiveness, wages can still respond effectively to labour market changes and there is no reason why the minimum wage cannot continue to be uprated and rise this year.

But an even stronger guarantee of fairness at work are the tax credits which provide not only an even more generous floor but work to sustain incomes up the earnings scale.

While the minimum wage today is £147 for a 35 hour week, the minimum for a family with two children – through tax credits – is a net £275, almost twice as much

The minimum for a couple in work without children is £183

And for a single adult over 25 is £154

A single parent working sixteen hours is guaranteed £179, the equivalent of £10.10 an hour after taxes

Compared with a minimum wage of £4.20 an hour.

It is the guarantee provided by tax credits on top of the minimum wage – not just a minimal safety net but support right up the income scale – which makes it possible for regional and local wage flexibility to operate without undermining basic fairness.

And this guarantee would matter even more in circumstances where, as happens in the United States single currency area, real wages may have to adjust in response to a shock. Because of the tax credits, a fall in wages of £1 impacts to the tune of 30p on the earner – just one third – with the generous child tax credit making the same true for incomes extended up the income scale.

So what are the next steps?

First, we need to do more to do more to help the newly unemployed and the long term unemployed back into work and help our labour market work better and more rapidly.

Second, we need to take forward our tax credit reforms which match flexibility with fairness.

Thirdly, all key public sector workers in London receive some form of London premium. There are London arrangements for teachers, nurses and policemen with officers in the metropolitan police receiving free travel in the London area. And there are attempts at special housing cost arrangements for public sector workers with 10,000 key workers helped through the Starter Homes Initiative.

Yet while professionals have benefited from London weighting and other arrangements it is clear that many lower paid workers have been at risk of losing out.

A more considered approach to local and regional conditions that pays attention to the needs of recruitment and retention makes sense. Reliable, timely regional prices and cost of living data can help inform the debate. So the review of regional information and the wider examination of statistics by Mr Chris Allsop will help us address some of these issues, providing greater impetus to our objective of promoting economic growth in all regions and reducing the persistent gap in growth rates between the richest and poorest areas of our country.

But evidence so far suggests that the tax and benefit reforms introduced since 1997 have already improved the flexibility of the UK labour market. The unemployment trap – the trap that made it not worthwhile for unemployed men and women to take a job – has been addressed, work now pays more than benefits, and the reforms have extended support for families with children up the income scale, ensuring not only that work pays but that more people are protected from the impact of economic shocks.

Conclusion

So by examining the challenges ahead, we open up a rich reform and modernisation agenda for our product, capital and labour markets, an agenda of economic reform not just for the future of Britain but for the future of Europe.

And policies for flexibility need not be implemented at the expense of fairness but can move forward together, indeed in support of each other, in ways that ensure that genuine concerns in Britain and in Europe about the importance of social cohesion are not swept aside or forgotten but rather recognised and addressed in ways consistent with the realities of today’s global economy and tomorrow’s.

And we have shown today that greater flexibility in both Britain and Europe is good for Britain and Europe.

We have learnt from Europe’s emphasis on skills, on the social foundations of markets, and on social cohesion. And through the Luxembourg employment initiative and then the Lisbon economic reform agenda we continue to learn from each other.

But we also learnt – and this is important message especially for trade unionists committed to full employment – that to achieve full employment in Europe we have to learn from the best of American flexibilities and sweep aside the worst of European inflexibilities. Indeed, in the future, achieving a full employment economy will need much of the flexibility of America applied to much of Europe. And I have suggested a programme of economic reform not just in Britain but in Europe – a programme upon which I will elaborate in greater detail in my budget and beyond.

In its history – from our industrial revolution through empire – Britain has stood out: a beacon to the rest of the world as a land of enterprise — of invention, of commerce of creativity – and of fairness.

As we prepare for the world upturn and to meet the long term challenges of globalisation, Britain has a unique opportunity to be, once again, a beacon to the world advancing enterprise and fairness together — a dynamic vibrant economy that is the first economy in the new era of globalisation to match flexibility with fairness and, in doing so, attain the high levels of growth and employment that are the best route to prosperity for all.