Thank you & Happy Christmas from the Business & Trade Committee

As we break for recess, I today wrote to all MPs to say a huge thank you for supporting the Business and Trade Committee’s work this year!

Thanks to their help and to our extremely hard-working Committee members and Committee team, we’ve been able to deliver thirteen reports and inquiries this year which I thought I’d share in case you’d like some recess reading!

We kicked off as promised with our stock-take on the Post Office Horizon Scandal; published on New Year’s Day this was widely covered. We will return to the issue in our first hearings in 2026 when witnesses will include Fujitsu.

Much of our work this year has been building good frameworks to help scrutinise government on the key planks of their growth plan.

Our Industrial Strategy inquiry was published in June complete with the ten tests we set. Alongside this we published our comprehensive advice on the requirements for a proper Defence Industrial Strategy. 

Our work on the Employment Rights Bill helped set the stage for the Parliamentary debate, published here. A number of high-profile hearings generated multi-million viewings from digital audiences, not least our hearings with Amazon and Evri, and indeed the Panorama investigation which aired this week.

Our cross-examination of Shein created headlines around the world and we hope contributed to the government’s ambition to modernise the Modern Slavery Act.

We are now finalising the Reports to two further baseline Inquiries on Small Business / High Streets and Access to Finance. These will be ready early in the new year.

Consumer affairs are a core interest for members and our one-off hearings into dynamic pricing at Ticketmaster, the nation’s supermarkets on two-tier pricing and the Competition & Market Authority have given us an important evidence base to build on next year as the cost of living remains a top issue for our constituents.

Trade 

As you’d expect, scrutiny of trade deals and the EU reset was a major part of our work, with four inquiries and reports. We published our vision for the 21 ways to reset with the EU in May, our stocktake of what was needed with the United States was published just ahead of the President’s State visit (Politico comment here) - and our analysis of what’s needed next in the Asia Pacific outside China was set out in our CPTTP Report in June.

Our Inquiry into the India free trade deal is complete and our Report will be ready in time for the Parliamentary scrutiny process in January.

Economic Security

Finally, this year we established our new Sub-Committee on Economic Security, Arms and Export Controls. We produced our first comprehensive baseline assessment on the UK’s economic security regime in November launched at RUSI, which built on our extensive work on both the nationalisation of British Steel and the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattacks (ITV coverage here). In addition, we delivered two important and high-profile hearings on arms exports to Israel to help ensure the House had the answers to questions it wanted.

2026

Following our recent national road-trip and House of Commons conference held in November we’ll be publishing our priorities for 2026 early in the New Year. This will be on the lines of our Priorities Report published at the beginning of the year.

So, a huge thank you from me – and my very best wishes for a happy Christmas and a peaceful new year.