Support for Businesses

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Economy – in the Senedd at 3:10 pm on 19 October 2022.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:10, 19 October 2022

We are doing everything that we can with the levers that we have available to us to try to support businesses that find themselves in exactly this position. We know that there is a range of energy-intensive businesses, as I said earlier in response to your colleague Luke Fletcher, and our challenge is both wanting a settlement on UK Government support, but also what we can do to try to support those businesses as well. We don’t have the financial firepower to do everything that we’d want to with businesses that face a very difficult future.

We have got a number of resource efficiency advisers available through the Business Wales service, to try to help businesses to understand what their energy needs are and if there is help available. We are also, as I said, looking at what we can do in the near future, and I expect to be making a statement in the coming weeks about how we think that we can help more businesses to take advantage of the help that is available and expand that help, to try to make sure that we decarbonise and de-risk future energy supply.

But you can’t get away from the significant scale of the energy crisis and what it is doing to businesses. I’m sure that if every Member stood up, they could give, as you have done, a list of businesses—viable businesses that employ people on decent terms—that are facing the prospect of not being able to keep all of those people on board in the very near future, or indeed the potential of those businesses not existing at all. It sets out the scale of the crisis that we do face.

It’s why we’ll carry on doing what we can, in terms of wanting to make sure that viable businesses have a good future as well, but it’s also about reiterating our call for the UK Government to finally do something that will provide some stability in the market and will provide some stability for the future costs of people. And if that were to happen, we would be supportive of doing that. But, as I say, that is largely unfinished, and I look forward with some trepidation to the Halloween budget and what that will really deliver for businesses and households.