03/11/2006

For many years Peter Luff has been my local M.P., indeed he is the first M.P. that I ever voted for in a general election.

Since my selection Peter, you have been a great inspiration and source of wise advice to me. I hugely appreciate the opportunity you have offered me today to engage with the Worcestershire business community.

I would also like to thank our hosts today, Worcester Bosch.

I have many happy memories of visiting the old Worcester Engineering factory as a child. Some of you may have seen the picture that was published in the Worcester Standard, of a very young Robin Walker enjoying a ride on a forklift truck at the old Diglis factory of Worcester Engineering.

Worcester Engineering was also the first share I ever invested in, with perhaps a little parental encouragement, so I was one of the many people who welcomed the investment by Bosch in 1992 that kept this great British manufacturer growing and rewarded its long-term investors.

Worcester Bosch is a great example of British manufacturing at its best, innovative, environmentally conscious, internationally successful.

This is a company that has taken the name of Worcester out to the world, has brought inward investment to out City and our country and one, that as someone aspiring to represent this City in parliament, I can honestly say I am proud to have on my patch.

I think we are all well aware of Cecil's contribution to this triumph and I must add my congratulations to him on the huge commercial success he has made out of the rugby club. As a keen fan I am eager to see this matched by success on the field as I am sure it will be by the end of the season!

We have all heard a great deal over the last few months about the government's new age discrimination laws. I am sure all the businesses represented here today are fully compliant and none of you would ever think about discriminating in employment on the basis of age. But even such a sensitive audience might balk at being addressed by a mere 28 year old on what is right for business.

You'll be relieved to hear that I have no intention of telling you what is right for business.

I hope I might persuade you that my lack of years is not entirely matched by a lack of experience but most of all I want to make clear that it is the politicians who need to listen to businesses, not the other way around.

I have come to politics from a background in business. For those who know me simply as my father's son, this may seem surprising, but I can assure you that I would not be standing here today had I not made my own career and succeeded in that career. Politics does not pay nearly well enough to attract those who have not made their money elsewhere.

My business career has not always followed a predictable path but it has always been an independent one. My first business card on leaving university read Chief Executive, I have also been a self employed consultant, an advisor and a manager.

Small businesses are founded on ideas and politicians should be very wary of any action which stunts the growth of ideas or slows their progress into creating wealth. When I left university in 2000 it was during that glorious and outrageous period in which young people were taking ideas, and seemingly without effort, turning them into fortunes.

Yes, I have to admit it I was a dotcom entrepreneur. I had an idea, I had a computer and, unlike most of my competitors, I even had a plan for generating cash-flow. For many reasons my first venture did not succeed but I did learn a few things from the experience.

I taught myself to sell - a valuable skill for both business and politics

I learned the importance of taking responsibility in business - nobody lost money from my venture other than me.

I also learned first hand of the hideous complexity that the bureaucracy and the complexities of the tax system can bring to business.

My next step was to work as a consultant for a small firm of city headhunters. I saw, at one remove, alas, the fortunes being made at the front line of the financial services boom. Unfortunately the firm for which I worked was run on such a trader mentality that they sought to avoid all unnecessary costs, including those of employment.

Sailing close to the dreaded winds of IR35 I once again felt the dead hand of government stifling my ability to generate wealth and complicating life to an unbearable degree.

It was a relief therefore to be headhunted into a real business in a real industry - albeit one that I had never heard of before I joined it.

I could be absolutely sure that nobody could accuse me of depending on my father for my career in the City by his reaction to my decision to go into financial PR. The combination of horror and bemusement that greeted this move left me feeling thoroughly independent and a little concerned.

Had I only paid more attention to the illustrious early career of my local M.P. in Worcestershire I would have had a much better idea of the serious end of the PR business and would have been better placed to defend my decision.

As it was I entered the field with a decent knowledge of finance, a general interest in business, my ability to sell and very little else. Somehow or other though it seems to have worked.

I remember being shocked in my first week in the job at being asked to pitch for the business of an engineering company with impeccable Worcestershire connections. I was introduced to the CEO of Morgan Crucible as "Finsbury's resident engineering expert" when at the time nothing could have been further from the truth.

Now, just three and a half years later I have handled three of the largest transactions in the engineering sector with the takeovers of Kidde, Novar and Pilkington and I run the accounts of both Tomkins and Morgan Crucible. I have become Finsbury's resident engineering expert.

Finsbury, one the leading financial PR companies, has been a great place for me to work, giving me an opportunity to meet and advise some of the most senior figures in British business.

We have over 100 clients in the FTSE 350 and we advise them on their dealings with the business press, City analysts and the investment banks.

It is a fascinating place to be involved with as we get involved in so many different businesses in so many different situations.

I have handled takeovers, listings, rights issues and even bankruptcies for companies as diverse as hotel groups and construction companies. media empires and mines.

A particular highlight was taking a call from the Sun at half past midnight one night to be asked to confirm whether or not it was true that the grand piano of the Grosvenor House hotel had been removed by bailiffs. Unfortunately it was. But I managed to give the journalist such a long and boring answer that he decided not to write the story - a triumph of PR.

In the last couple of years I have built from scratch our mining and metals practice, travelling as far a field as India, Kazakhstan and South America to find the companies benefiting from the transformation of the world economy and the industrial take-offs of China and India. My first two metals clients, neither of which anyone had hear of before 2003, are now FTSE 100 companies. Our success in this area also led to my involvement in the biggest M&A transaction of 2006. The hostile takeover of Arcelor by Mittal Steel. On Monday I will be flying to Moscow, for a total of 18 hours, to pitch for another potential IPO.

This success, like any success in business has been partly the result of hard work and partly of luck. I have been fortunate to be left in charge of two hostile takeovers of two of my firms key clients at moments when senior colleagues went on maternity leave - a chance that brings a whole new meaning the phrase left holding the baby. I was also very fortunate to pick metals and mining as my key area of focus at the start of the biggest boom in that sector within living memory.

I was delighted to see, shortly after my selection, that a Worcester firm, Joy Mining, has been able to take advantage of that boom and maintain jobs and growth in this city as a result of what is going on in the wider world.

It is a key part of the success of British business that we are a trading nation and Worcestershire business as much as business anywhere else in the country benefits from our openness to foreign trade.

We need a government that will push the interests of our trade around the world and stand up for British interests overseas, ensuring that our companies have the best start they can in an increasingly global economy.

In my father's generation that meant signing up to a European Economic Community that wanted to free trade in Europe and gave us a bigger market in which to play. For my generation however the bounds of Europe look constraining and its tendency to try to act as a protectionist trade block looks old fashioned.

Like the modern conservative party I am a little more sceptical of some aspects of the EU and focused on how best we can trade with the world at large and its fastest growing areas in particular.

One thing that all conservatives can agree on and which any good businessman knows is that businesses are a hell of a lot better at running things than politicians or governments.

Unfortunately we seem to have a government in Westminster that is insisting on testing this theory to breaking point.

In his handling of the economy Gordon Brown has made one great decision and a series of disastrous ones.

By giving up control of interest rates, Brown acknowledged the essential sense of politicians not pretending they can run the economy. This decision has been the basis of much of our economic stability and, along with the strong fiscal legacy left by a Tory government, of an economic track record not nearly as disastrous as any previous labour administration.

Alas that was not Brown's only decision.

This same Chancellor has increased spending and taxation at a rate unparalleled since the worst periods of state socialism. According to the CBI, British business is paying an extra £50bn of taxes under Labour.

He has raided the pension system causing an estimated £100bn reduction in the value of our pension funds.

Worse still, his constant interference and needless complication of the tax and benefit system have increased exponentially the cost of creating and sharing wealth through the private sector.

A telling and terrible statistic on this Labour government is the fact that in large parts of the country over 50% of the economy is now made up of the public sector.

The government's great experiment with creating full employment through the public sector is turning into a costly mess. In areas such as the NHS we now see stringent cut backs where months ago there was a furious pressure to spend. Such an approach to people management would simply not be tolerated in a business.

If Brown were the finance director of a FTSE 100 company I would be advising his Chairman to look for a new one. The papers would be writing that, having shown early promise, he had made a series of decisions that squandered the legacy of the previous management team, over-leveraged the company and increased its cost base to an extent that threatens long-term disaster.

But what can Conservatives do? Many people I have spoken to both in Worcester and in London are sceptical of our ability to make a difference.

Some would like to see the party clearly committed to tax cuts, to rolling back the frontiers of the state in the way that Margaret Thatcher did in the 80s. Some are frustrated at the lack of detail to have emerged from the Cameron and Osborne camps since they assumed the leadership.

To those people I would say be patient. Good policy, like good products, takes time to develop. We need discussion and we need the engagement of the business community to get things right.

Would we prefer a Conservative Party that loses the election by coming out with half-baked policies today, which will be shot down or stolen tomorrow?

Or would we prefer a party that is reaching out to the whole country, engaging in a dialogue with all interest groups, particularly business, to ensure that the policies we go forward with are the right ones.

We are listening. We do want to reduce the overall burden of taxation and we will ensure that the direction of travel, under a Conservative government is away from the stifling interference of the state. Towards a more effective and more businesslike approach to government.

Some people are still not happy. Some want us to be stauncher in our opinions and disapprove of the modernising agenda taken by Cameron. To those I can offer no shift. We need to change to win. We need to embrace the concept of social responsibility, which good businesses in my experience, understand very well.

Issues such as climate change are no longer the spectres of the left and of the eco-warriors. These are real economic issues that businesses are responding to. We must too.

I am glad that the Conservative Party has chosen climate change as an issue on which it can work together with businesses of all sorts to deliver a solution that is sustainable and contributes to economic growth while Labour's approach in contrast is based in tax and compulsion.

The Conservative Party may have changed some of its rhetoric but we are still the party of opportunity. We are the party that listens to business and in my case as with many others in the party that is because we come from business.

Now you have done plenty of listening. It is time for me to practice what I have preached and listen to business for a bit. I would like to hear from you. The businessmen of Worcestershire about what I can do for you and how the Conservatives in this part of the world can get on with delivering for business.