It's time for some answers

The White Paper is all talk and no commitment, says John Redwood

PETER MANDELSON'S Competitiveness White Paper was a flop. Presenting it to the House of Commons, he added a new point to the carefully typed civil service script he was reading. He told us his White Paper was only 67 pages compared with Michael Heseltine's much longer publications. Had he even read his own paper, which comes in three volumes - almost double the length he thought it was? The slip summed up his lack of grasp and the paper's lack of answers.

There are a few important things he and I agree about. We would both like British competitiveness to improve. We both think that a strong competition policy helps. We both believe that the new electronic technologies are going to make an important contribution to our future prosperity. But when it comes for the time to move on from soundbites and truisms to policies that can liberate the British entrepreneur, the Government fails.

There is a huge opportunity to strengthen the British communications industry by freeing the Post Office. We should want to move from nationalised monopoly postal business to global communications company as quickly as possible. The Opposition has set out a policy to introduce private capital, offer shares to the employees, and give the Post Office the chance to acquire and enter joint ventures abroad so it can expand. Meanwhile the Secretary of State fails to give the Post Office a commercial lead, leaving it in the dark about whether it can buy businesses overseas and how it can pay for them while remaining in the public sector. No wonder we are falling years behind the privatised Dutch service and the soon to be privatised German one.

Or take the case of the water industry. There have been improvements in water quality and some service and productivity improvements since privatisation, but nothing to match the huge changes in telecommunications or energy. The water industry needs the stimulus of proper competition to match the stunning performance of the liberated former monopolies. The Opposition has set out a policy to do this. The Government will not say yes and will not say no. It is no good the Government claiming to believe in competition, but then failing to introduce it into the most obvious case.

Mr Mandelson has used October's report on productivity by the management consultants McKinsey as a smokescreen. He is reluctant to admit that the main reason why British business has a problem competing today is the policy followed by this Government. Big increases in employment costs through the Working Time regulations and the minimum wage, big increases in tax bills and now a big increase in pensions cost foreshadowed in last week's pensions Green Paper have and will damage our ability to compete on price. This Government has made it too dear to make things in Britain. Businesses are looking elsewhere for their new investment.

McKinsey argued that the main cause of Britain's poor productivity was government policy. It urged the abolition or expansion of milk quotas, a planning system free-for-all to build superstores and new hotels, and action to break protected franchise agreements as in car distribution. Yet when I ask what the Government intends to do about these ideas there are no answers. The Opposition would agree with some and not with others; we know our minds on the subject. Why does Mr Mandelson run scared of serious debate on how far we should go in unleashing competition and removing regulation in these and other areas?

Listening again yesterday, I heard a man who devotes all his time and talent to media links and general messages and none to the hard work of sorting out policies that could underpin the high-minded intentions of his statements. He does not seem to like the democratic process. He has not so far answered a single factual question that I have posed on two statements. In a debate I initiated on competitiveness, he failed to answer a series of factual questions that I sent to him in advance.

His recommendations in the White Paper were a combination of old hat, the banal and the insignificant. Britain is not going to be revolutionised by a publication called Creating a Great Place to Work or by a review of "Government-supported skills development schemes". Fortunately, the amounts of money his department are going to spend are, for the most part, tiny compared with the size of the enterprise economy. A few weeks ago he announced a Digital Envoy. Yesterday he announced an e-Envoy. He did not even answer whether the one replaces the other or whether we are to have competition in Envoys. Even Labour smiled at that muddle.

John Redwood is shadow Trade and Industry Secretary for the Conservative Party. Copyright: IOS & Bloomberg