I wanted to first of all congratulate Peter Liddell and his energetic and ambitious colleagues in the Burgess Hill Business Parks Association for putting on this exhibition.

None of this happens by magic; it involves an enormous amount of work and effort and everyone here owes them and everyone else involved with this festival of enterprise and endeavour the greatest possible thanks.

It is a measure of the success of this event that it is so very well attended and for very good reason.

We are really lucky in Mid Sussex, and in particular in Burgess Hill, to have a variety of businesses across a number of sectors. If we only look more carefully, we would see that Burgess Hill is a town of entrepreneurs and small businessmen which stands it in very good stead. We have some truly excellent businesses and some passionate advocates of business enterprise, opportunity and endeavour. They vary in size from one man operations and family businesses to companies employing many hundreds of people who have multi-million pound turnovers.

But just as important and essential to the local community are the small businessmen and women, who day in and day out open shops at the crack of dawn, struggle to make ends meet, and provide essential goods and services and very importantly, local jobs.

I would hazard a guess that 80% of jobs in the Mid Sussex constituency have been created by small and medium size businesses. Many of these businesses have shown tremendous tenacity and resolve, cutting through the downturn with very little help from the previous Government, and keeping many thousands of local people in work.

I am well aware of how tough it is and the difficulties that lie ahead for us all but I pay tribute to them and salute their efforts for which I have the greatest admiration and respect.

I think the Government have three areas where action is urgently needed: tax, regulation and access to credit for small, indeed for all, businesses.

I welcome the cut in the Small Profits Rate introduced by the Chancellor, and the cut in the main rate on Corporation Tax, but, as I remind the Government constantly, not least in Treasury Questions on Tuesday to the Chancellor himself, that we need to give businesses the freedom to succeed and take away the shackles of bureaucracy and taxes that eat away at enterprise and stifle creativity. Businesses have felt squeezed for a long time, particularly given rising costs in materials, fuel and energy, and of course taxation.

There is an urgent and defining need for HMRC to greatly improve its attitude towards businesses and to use greater common sense, develop better understanding and start a better dialogue with businesses. They really do need to stop persecuting the people who create the nation’s wealth.

I applaud the Government’s announcement on the moratorium exempting businesses employing less than 10 people from additional red tape for a three year period, but there is a long way to go in getting on with deregulation: indeed the Government must do more to free up bureaucracy at all levels which can so easily stifle enterprise.

I don’t in the least wish to be Party-Political, but it is impossible for us to divorce economics from politics. The scale of the mismanagement of the economy by the last Government has left us with a national debt more than doubled to record levels, leaving us with the largest deficit in the G20, currently £146 billion. The Chancellor was therefore obliged immediately on coming to office, to take steps across Government to secure our financial position. This was certainly the right thing to do but its consequences will inevitably be painful and I am well aware that people are anxious about the future.

But the great test is that today, two days after the first anniversary of this Coalition Government coming to power, it is worth reflecting that in its first year 400,000 extra jobs have been created in the private sector, 89,000 fewer people are on the unemployed count, manufacturing out-put is up by 5%, business investment is up by 11%, exports are up by 12%, indeed we are participating in the global visible trade bonanza, our credit rating has come off negative watch, our market interest rates are amazingly the same as Germany, and economic stability has been restored.

It is clearly not plain sailing - so like you and your business, the Government has resolved on two core principles – firstly, to spend only that which is absolutely necessary and spend it well; and secondly to borrow sparingly.

And the same will apply to our District Council, fortified by an amazing result last week and under the leadership of Councillor Garry Wall, a successful Haywards Heath businessman, with Councillor John de Mierre as his Economic Affairs Cabinet Member – they are wholly committed to the success of local business - so do get in touch with them.

It is my firm hope that you will see in the next couple of years that this will be genuinely the most pro-business and pro-growth Government in living memory. I want you to know that I personally, and all my colleagues in the Government, are irrevocably on the side of enterprising business and enterprising people, and all those who try to make a go of it in businesses of whatever size.

Ladies and Gentlemen - Britain is a trading nation. Every one of you business people here contribute to that endeavour. Our language, our time zone and our open economy put us in a very strong position to benefit from an expanding global economy about whose future I am incredibly optimistic. We are much better at specialised niche manufacturing than people think: indeed we are still the 6th largest manufacturing nation in the world and we rate as world class in services such as law, asset management, accounting and biotechnology and the creative industries, for which the growing economies, such as India and China, have huge appetites. The truth is that the world is our oyster: but we do have to be serious about embracing change in this country and locally: indeed we have to welcome it if we are to ride this huge wave of opportunity, which we really must.

There are of course some monster challenges: the U.K. has too big a public sector with relatively low productivity and higher than average wages and pensions than the private sector. The rebalancing of that particular equation is absolutely central and essential to our future prosperity.

But be under no delusion that from where we stand in Burgess Hill today, in a very favoured and mainly economically successful powerhouse in the South East of England, it is still the reality of the global economy, and its profound impact which all of us must daily live and breathe, and which will give Great Britain its best chance of balancing the books and securing the economic prosperity for you and your families and our country for the future.

To conclude, with all Britain’s problems today; too low growth, a giant deficit, huge public debt and far too high public spending, we are still one of the most open economies in the world. We still have so much of the best in the world, be it advanced engineering, higher education, science, the creative industries or indeed ordinary every day commerce. I meet every day young, talented men and women who do not just want to build new businesses and create new enterprises, but they want to feel that the embrace of the new ideas and the new technologies are absolutely central to our national purposes. Innovation has to be embedded in our culture both locally and nationally – it needs to be central to our national culture and story.

So good luck to all of you in what I know is a very difficult, challenging, competitive, and difficult commercial world – but we see here around us in Burgess Hill how economic growth is built on a tapestry of skills, finance, enterprise and science and regulation and good old fashioned graft and grit, all working in tandem. Lets make the best of it.