Philip Hammond has criticised Labour’s announcement that Lord Alan Sugar will lead a new government task force designed to fight the corner of small businesses against the banks.

“Only Labour could announce on April Fool’s day that it had appointed the man who called credit-starved small businesses ‘moaners’ who lived in ‘Disney World’ to be the adjudicator on their applications for bank loans”, he said.

Lord Mandelson has selected Lord Sugar to sit on the task force which will set up the Small Business Credit Adjudicator. Lord Mandelson believes the people he has chosen “… understand the critical importance of new finance and credit flow to the growth of small, innovative companies”.

But Lord Sugar said last year: “The moaners are bust… they don’t need the bank, they need an insolvency practitioner”.

This comes on the same day that the Federation of Small Businesses, the British Retail Consortium and 23 business leaders attacked Labour’s planned tax on jobs.

“No wonder no-one believes Lord Mandelson’s claims to be the champion of small business when Labour would rather tax jobs and the recovery than cut government waste”, Hammond added.

Well this is news that small business can do without. Clearly Lord Alan Sugar has nothing in common with small business and is merely another puppet of Labour.

Jim Ferguson

Mark Prisk, the Shadow Business Minister, has announced that a Conservative Government would undertake a full and fundamental review of small business taxation, including IR35.

The aim will be to provide a simpler, clearer and lasting tax regime, so businesses can plan with confidence.

“For the last 13 years, Labour have constantly meddled with the tax rules for freelancers and self-employed, Prisk said. “IR35 has especially proved to over-complex, uncertain and often unfair”.

IR35 has cost business £73 million over 10 years but it has barely raised revenue for the Treasury. Prisk criticised Gordon Brown for making it harder to be self-employed at a time when Britain should be open for business.

“This is why a Conservative Government would mandate the independent Office of Tax Simplification to undertake a fundamental review of current arrangements with the aim of providing a clearer, lasting and fairer tax regime”.

This announcement is in addition to previous plesges to simplify the tax system, cut Corporation Tax for small firms, and make small business rate relief automatic.

“Small businesses cannot afford 5 more years of Gordon Brown”, Prisk added. “Only the Conservatives have the energy and the ideas to get Britain working by boosting enterprise”.

David Cameron has responded in the House of Commons to the Chancellor’s presentation of the last Budget before the general election.

He said Labour “have made a complete mess of the British economy and they are totally failing to clean it up”.

Cameron set out the big argument in British politics: Labour say “don’t do anything before the election, let’s just sit tight and keep our fingers crossed”, and the Conservatives say “we need real action to get our economy moving – and urgently”.

Highlighting new policies that copied existing Conservative proposals, such as the stamp duty cut and new university places, he said the “only new ideas in British politics are coming from this side of the House” and that “the only thing Labour bring are debt, waste and taxes”.

The figures that stands out above any other, he said, was that Labour have “doubled the national debt, and they’re going to double it again”.

Outlining the Government’s failure Cameron criticised “all those schemes that they launched with great fanfare” for failing to help enough people. He also drew comparisons on the state of the economy when Labour came to power to the present – including the huge increase in the debt and deficit, and a falling down the global league tables in terms of competitiveness, tax and regulation.

We need a credible plan to deal with Britain’s record debts”, he said, criticising the Chancellor’s repeated hope to halve the deficit by 2014 as giving us a deficit “almost as big as when Denis Healey went to the IMF in the 1970s”.

Moving on to the delay in dealing with the deficit, he said “the risk to recovery is not in dealing with the deficit now, it’s in not dealing with the deficit now”. Cameron said that “every family knows that when your debts mount up, you need to start paying them off or things will only get worse”, and that it is time for the Government to learn the same lessons”.

“The Prime Minister and Chancellor faced a choice – between bold action in an election year or playing politics. Once again, they chose politics.”

Cameron also emphasised the need “to show the world that we are back open for business”, saying that because Labour “flunked the difficult decisions on spending, they are raising tax after tax after tax – all after the election”. “These are the ticking tax bombshells timed to go off the day after the election and that will destroy our recovery.”

He said that the greatest risk to Britain’s economic recovery was another Labour government. “No one has yet thought of a question to which the answer is five more years of this Prime Minister”, he said.

“We need a credible plan to cut the deficit. We need an unleashing of enterprise across the nation. We need a plan to boost employment through radical welfare and school reform. If ever there was a time when this country needed a radical change of direction it is now.”

He concluded that Britain needs a Conservative government “to clean up the mess made by this Labour Government”.

“Britain needs new energy, leadership and values to get this country moving again. That’s the argument we’ll take to the country the moment the Prime Minister has been forced by the law of the land to call the election he has avoided for so long.”

Read David’s speech in full.

Shadow Housing Minister Grant Shapps has warned of a ‘tax bombshell’ faced by community pubs this April.

New research by the Conservatives reveals that Gordon Brown’s tax inspectors are hiking up business rates for local pubs across country. Friendly community pubs with darts and pool tables face the biggest threat.

This comes as figures show that a net 3,690 local pubs have closed under Labour, according to official records held by tax inspectors.

“Gordon Brown has pushed local community pubs to the wall”, Shapps said, pointing out that at the same time Labour has ignored “the binge-drinking dens that have wrecked our town centres and fuelled violent crime”.

The three key elements of the tax bombshell are:

• New tax hikes on local pubs: New analysis of Government figures slipped out before Christmas has revealed that pubs, pub restaurants, wine bars, wineries and coaching inns face above-inflation hikes in their Rateable Values – and thus their tax bills. This will be top of Brown’s above-inflation rises in alcohol duty imposed in the Budget.
• Stealth tax on pub sports: According to the tax inspectors’ guidance, features such as a pool room, skittles alley, bowling green, children’s play area and darts have been targeted. The clipboard-wielding inspectors have secretly toured pubs, recording “pool, darts or football teams playing in leagues”. Pubs showing sport will not escape, as Sky Sports will be taxed extra, Ministers have admitted.
• Stealth tax on nice pubs: The tax manuals tell the state snoopers to take photographs inside and outside the pub, and record “Does the pub appear friendly and popular?”. Factors being logged include good beer cellars/stores (thus taxing real ale), “rare and unspoilt pubs”, and beer gardens (taxing those which have ducked the smoking ban).

“Not content with a council tax revaluation to tax people’s home improvements and scenic views, Gordon Brown also wants to hammer the nice local pub with higher local taxes”, Shapps said. “Only Conservatives will stand up for the local community pub”.

Delivering the annual Mais lecture, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne set out the Conservative vision for a new economic model.

He argued that the debt-fuelled model of growth that the Government pursued over the last decade was fundamentally unsustainable, and that we need to move from an economy built on debt to an economy where we save and invest for the future. We have to deal with our debts to get the economy back on its feet.

He pointed to research which shows that the root cause of the economic crisis was an explosion of private sector debt, and that the biggest risk to the recovery is an explosion of public sector debt. High levels of public sector debt risk undermining growth.

He argued that the existing policy framework failed to prevent the crisis, is unable to deal with the current weakness of the economy, and won’t be able to stop it happening again. He set out a new economic model for growth based on saving and investment, and a new policy framework that can ensure that private and public debt are sustainable in the future, including:

· A new system of financial regulation, with the Bank of England back in charge of controlling the overall level of debt in the economy.

· A new fiscal policy framework, with an independent Office for Budget Responsibility to ensure that public debt is sustainable.

· A supply side revolution that releases the pent up enterprise and wealth creation of our country, encourages a nation of savers, and addresses long term structural weaknesses like poor education and a welfare system that traps people in workless poverty.

He also explained why the Government’s argument that we can afford to wait until 2011 before dealing with the deficit is complacent and puts the recovery at risk, and explained why we need to start dealing with the deficit in 2010:

· Confidence: a lack of confidence in the sustainability of the public finances is already undermining the recovery.

· The realities of markets: those who argue we should ignore financial markets are siren voices. If Britain loses the confidence of international markets the result would be emergency cuts that would indeed be swingeing and savage.

· The realities of Government: real public sector reform takes time so starting early on the deficit creates space for more targeted cuts that protect the poorest and front line services.

For the first time he also set out in detail how the budget process would work following the election in the event of a Conservative victory:

· Phase One: the independent Office for Budget Responsibility will set out an independent audit of the nation’s finances, based on independent growth forecasts. Only then will anyone know the true scale of the fiscal challenge that faces whoever forms the next government.

· Phase Two: an emergency budget within 50 days will set out the overall fiscal path and spending totals that we will stick to over the years ahead, as well as some of the cross-cutting measures on pay, the cost of Whitehall, the review of the pension age, and the largest public sector pensions, that will help to put our public finances on a sustainable footing. It will take targeted steps to reduce some budgets in-year in order to build credibility and make a start on reducing the deficit. Crucially, the first Budget will also contain measures to boost enterprise, encourage new jobs and show that Britain is open for business.

· Phase Three: over the Summer we will work flat out to conduct the detailed departmental Spending Review for the years after 2011 that the current government has simply refused to carry out, and publish that results of that review in the Autumn.

Read George’s Mais lecture in full

As part of our plans to Get Britain Growing, the Conservatives have unveiled plans to help make the UK the first major European country that has superfast broadband in the majority of homes by 2017.

Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport said “we are currently one of the slowest countries in the developed world for broadband”, but with the Conservatives “we’ll become one of the fastest”.

He said Britain’s digital and creative industries “must have a proper communications infrastructure” if they are to become “world beaters”.

The Conservative approach to achieving this has three key components:

• We will create a regulatory framework to ensure the roll-out of superfast broadband at speeds of up to 100mbps to the majority of homes across the UK by 2017. This could involve either mobile or fixed line solutions and will be significantly faster than the Government’s proposed target. Our objective is to make the UK the first major European country to achieve this aim, securing its place as a European and global hub for the creative industries.
• We will end BT’s local loop monopoly by allowing other operators to use their ducts and poles thereby encouraging competition in the superfast broadband market. This approach has proved successful in other countries such as Singapore and South Korea: these countries are global leaders in superfast broadband infrastructure.
• We are committed to universal access to superfast broadband speeds. If the market does not deliver this in certain areas we will consider using the proportion of the licence fee dedicated to digital switchover to finance superfast broadband roll out under the new BBC licence fee settlement, starting in 2012. This amount would be leveraged to maximise the investment made, either by making it available as loans or on a matched funding basis.

Under these plans, Hunt said that “high speeds will be available not just in our cities but across the rural areas that have been left behind for too long”.

“These regulatory changes will create the right conditions for sustainable growth and ensure that the digital sector plays a leading role in a competitive, balanced economy”, he added.