Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jayawardena]

I always welcome my hon. Friend’s support for our agenda. The Department has already launched interventions to support international investment into all corners of the country. Those interventions include the high potential opportunities programme and the trade and investment hubs. The hub in Darlington assists more than 1,000 foreign direct investment projects throughout the country which will drive the technology forward.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

5. What recent assessment the Government has made of the effect of the UK's departure from the EU on UK global exports.

[The Secretary of State for International Trade (Anne-Marie Trevelyan)]

For the first time in decades, the UK has an independent trade policy. We have secured FTAs with 70 countries plus the EU, covering nearly £800 billion-worth of bilateral trade in 2020, creating new opportunities for our UK exporters. To take these and more—building on an over £56 billion increase in nominal exports between 2016 and 2021—our export strategy is focusing on the needs of exporters, including a new export support service for exporters to Europe.

[Mr Sheerman]

I can never be nasty to this Secretary of State as we are old friends. The fact is though that, as I trained at the London School of Economics as an economist and I like looking at the data, I can see that we have lost £20 billion in exports since we left the European Union. The Office for Budget Responsibility and everyone else says what great damage has been done to small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises, which Mr Speaker has in his constituency and I have in Huddersfield, the heart of SME manufacturing. Those businesses are hurting. The Secretary of State’s website says for them to get in touch with her if they need help. What help can she now give to small businesses in this country to enable them to cope?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

Although there was indeed a drop in exports during covid, we have seen a 10% increase in the last quarter, which is very welcome. I am always happy to meet the hon. Gentleman, as he knows, to discuss any particular businesses, but the export support service, which has now been running for a number of months, is there to support SMEs in particular if they have issues with a country in Europe with which they want to trade. The team has also been focusing on supporting businesses with Russian and Belarusian activities in the past month, especially on supporting them to find alternative supply chains. The export strategy, which we published in October last year, is bringing together a whole series of tools to help those SMEs to discover new markets, and, indeed, to use the ones that now have more prospects thanks to the FTAs that we have.