Liz Truss:
For the country to prosper outside the EU, we must embrace risk-taking instead of strangling it
Britain has a unique opportunity to take control of its future. After rebuilding from the ruins of Labour’s financial crisis, we’ve turned the economy around, reaching the point where debt will soon start to fall. We have record jobs, we’re building the homes Britain needs, raising living standards and boosting the NHS. After Brexit, we will be free to determine our economic future, with control over our money, laws and borders.
It’s the type of change the British people have always embraced. We’re trendsetters, first to welcome brilliant inventions into our lives, from the microwave meal to Instagram. Britain is a nation of Uber-riding, Deliverooeating, Airbnb-ing freedom fighters. And to turbocharge our future we need to champion these values, and let people off the leash by liberating every corner of the economy.
Instead of talking about banning things like wood-burning stoves, we need to appeal to young people who are enjoying unprecedented freedom – and want even more. We have a great opportunity to drive growth. We can do this by embracing the sort of disruption that makes firms more competitive and delivers better public services.
As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I aim to be the disrupter in chief; I want to challenge those who aim to block change, stop development and restrict success. I want to challenge the caution that strangles risk-takers and go-getters. Like the suffocating professional regulations that create glass ceilings in careers, which only the socially advantaged can bypass.
That’s why today I can announce I’ll explore taking forward a crossgovernment review of over-regulated professions and occupations. We have a higher proportion of licensed professions than France, Italy or Belgium. In the 1980s, it was unions that were holding people back from getting jobs – now over-regulated occupations are making it difficult to earn more and move up the ladder. Too many British people are pressing their faces against the glass, without the funds or connections to crash through.
The same goes for the pettifogging bureaucracy many firms face. Around the country, I see great companies with new ideas and a can-do attitude. But too often they are in hand-to-hand and pen-to-paper combat with officialdom. In my constituency, a local football team put up advertising hoardings around the ground that brought in thousands to the club but the council ordered it to take them down. If Frances Mcdormand can put up three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, why can’t we do the same outside King’s Lynn, Norfolk?
Part of giving people more power is keeping control of the size of the state. Government has a responsibility to balance the books, keep taxes as low as we can and ensure every pound pulls its weight. Fiscal discipline, economic liberalisation and a permissive culture are three parts of the same story: the desire to give people power over their own money and their own lives.
As I approach the Spending Review – when the Chancellor and I set limits on what departments can spend – I will think of us as a start-up state: sleek, streamlined and adapted to the modern world. We spend £29,000 per household on our high quality public services. This helps educate our children, keep us healthy, build infrastructure and maintain our defences. And we recognised the need for extra funding for a long-term plan for the NHS, focused on the front line and improving patient care. But my instinct is we can get better value for money for that spending, rather than just upping the budget of every department. I will make it clear to my Cabinet colleagues that it’s not macho to demand more money. It’s much tougher – and fairer to people – to demand better value for money.
Because the more government spends, the higher taxes have to be. And that means businesses and people have less freedom to spend on their priorities. And that in turn will hamper the success of post-brexit Britain.
Tonight at the London School of Economics I’ll be setting out how we’re working to be Europe’s start-up nation, how we can modernise the state, and prioritise the freedom fighters who want to grasp the opportunities available to them. If we get this right we can set Britain on course for a turbocharged future.