Scrap VAT and launch a lower, simpler sales tax

When it comes to making Britain the best country in the world, I mean business. If I am prime minister of this country I want to ensure it’s the best place in the world to live, learn, raise a family, achieve your potential, and start and run a business.

I grew up knowing and admiring what enterprise can achieve. My dad was a small businessman, running the family fish processing firm in Aberdeen. His hard work didn’t just provide us with a loving home, he also created jobs, specifically giving young people who had grown up in care a chance to succeed. Business is a powerful force for good, generating the growth which pays for a civilised society and powering the innovations which make our lives better.

In government, I harnessed the power of business to make a difference. I used business know-how in education to cut the cost of new school buildings by a third, provide thousands of extra school places, introduce universal free school meals, and cut the cost of administration. As Justice Secretary I modernised our courts and

prisons with rigorous business methods. And as Environment Secretary I have worked with business to ensure we can build houses more sustainably, reduce plastic pollution, and lower water bills.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party sees business as “the real enemy”. I would take on its Marxist message with a smart pro-business economic plan driven by the need to increase investment, productivity and wages across the country. This would mean reducing the regulations which hold business back, cutting and reforming taxes – such as business rates – which put pressure on small businesses and undermine our high streets, using the opportunity of life outside the EU to look to replace VAT with a lower, simpler sales tax, ensuring our business tax structure is the most competitive in the G20 and reducing marginal tax rates for the poorest families to reward work.

I would be rigorously procompetition, innovation and new start-ups. I’d review competition law to tackle cartels and over-mighty monopolies, put curbs on the power of lobbyists to erect barriers to new business, and change the rules on digital provision to allow more new entrants into the market and ensure faster, wider 5G coverage.

We are moving from an Industrial Age economy to a Knowledge Economy – Government needs to catch up. I’d create new Institutes of Technology in cities beyond London, modelled on the brilliant engineering school Olin College in Massachusetts and Caltech in California. We should increase the amount we spend as a country on research and development, use international development money to support the invention of new medicines and technologies in British universities to help the developing world, and create a UK equivalent of the US technology innovator DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to pioneer breakthroughs in digital and life sciences.

To enable every individual to take their place in the new economy, I would expand degree apprenticeships and, crucially, create new opportunities for people to retrain. New technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, will change the world of work so we must start now to provide people in mid-career with the chance to develop new skills.

And a new world of work requires a new approach to smart spending. I’d ensure we invested more nimbly in infrastructure, properly prioritising spending on the basis of the new growth it would create. That would allow us to improve transport links – that means bus and rail services outside of the South East, in the North, the Midlands and beyond. I’d also use money we get back from the EU – through a Shared Prosperity Fund – to invest in those towns and communities that have suffered most from deindustrialisation.

As well as equipping every citizen and community to succeed, I’d also ensure Britain is the country in the world most open to talent. I’d introduce an Australian-style points-based immigration system to ensure the most innovative and gifted from across the globe can help us prosper. I’d make it easier for students from abroad to study at our great universities and set up businesses here. I’d also ensure that the skilled and caring people our agriculture sector, NHS and social care sector need are able to work here.

I led the Brexit campaign because I believe that Britain should not see its horizons limited by outdated bureaucracy and institutions that aren’t responsive to the people. While our next leader must be someone prepared to deliver Brexit, they must also be ready to lead one of the world’s greatest economies. I want to get all of Britain working again, every proud community vibrant and growing, every individual free to become the author of their own life story.