Downing Street Says » Prime Minister’s Speech to the Institute of Directors

» Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Prime Minister’s Speech to the Institute of Directors

Put that the Prime Minister had mentioned a President Sarkozy letter in his speech, the PMS said that we hoped to be able to release, if not the actual letter itself, the main content of that letter later today. The main issue that we had been working on with the French had been to put forward suggestions for the Small Business Act that the European Commission was due to bring forward in June and which would be taken forward in the French Presidency in the second half of this year. The French had already said that taking action to help small businesses operate on a competitive basis in Europe was an important issue for them. Obviously that complemented the Prime Minister’s long-standing agenda on economic reform.

Asked what that meant in practise, the PMS said that it meant looking at what more could be done to improve small enterprises’ access to the single market. It also meant looking again at the impact of European regulation on small enterprises; looking at the way small enterprises competed for public contracts in Europe and what more could be done generally to promote entrepreneurial activity and small business creation at a pan-European level.

Asked how much the Prime Minister would cut corporation tax by and when it would happen, the PMS said that he would let the Prime Minister’s words speak for themselves. We had said in the Budget last year that it was our ambition to continue to see what more we could do to keep corporation tax rates competitive. When we were in a position to make specific commitments then it would be something for the Chancellor and future Budgets.

Asked if the Prime Minister had been pre-empting the Chancellor’s recently announced review of business taxation, the PMS said that the Prime Minister had simply been restating the position that had been taken in the Budget last year.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.