UK Trade & Investment

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Nick de Bois]

My hon. Friend is right to force me to highlight that the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), is here unsupported by any Labour Back Benchers.

It is a pleasure to welcome the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) and the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) to the debate.

I cannot resist commenting that I am surprised that our coalition partners are not yet here. Perhaps it was the late night and we shall see them later. Let us be generous.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that small and medium-sized enterprises in the many constituencies represented by Labour Members will clearly be disappointed that their Members of Parliament have not turned up to this debate to find out how such companies can work with UK Trade & Investment to help them to export?

[Nick de Bois]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s well-timed intervention. The fact is that trade and investment affects every single constituency. It is the one thing that unites us and the one thing that serves all our constituents, wherever they may work or whatever they may do, because without trade and without business we have no taxes, no hospitals and no infrastructure. Frankly, it is at the heart of our jobs, growth and prosperity.

As a nation, we import some $640 billion—I used dollars deliberately and hon. Members will see why as I refer to other figures—but we export approximately $480 billion only. This is a timely debate. The UK’s share of global exports has declined sharply over the past decade from just over 5% in 2000 to a fraction over 4% in 2010—a 20% drop. We should not pretend that this country is alone in seeing such a drop, but some of our near neighbours have fared much better. Germany, to which I will be making further references during my contribution, managed to grow its share of global exports. Are UK companies slow to react to opportunities? Are there inherent uncompetitive disadvantages? Perhaps more pertinently, have we been tapping into the wrong markets? I will suggest later that that has been the case. Have we failed to reach the high-growth markets as a result, perhaps, of over-dependence on our European neighbours and the US? If one looks beneath the figures, one wonders whether there is a mismatch between the goods and services we currently sell and those demanded by high-growth economies. After all, we are not supplying high-capital goods to the booming markets in the BRIC countries for machinery, tools and equipment. Whatever the diagnosis, the treatment is the same. We have no choice but to increase exports and inward investment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

There is nothing more important than exports. The House constantly debates and argues over how to slice the cake—there are huge areas of difference between Opposition and Government Members—to provide for all the public services that we want to support, yet exports are about increasing revenue as a whole for the country and making that cake bigger. I am extremely disappointed that no Labour Back Benchers are present for the debate, but that is typical of debates on exports. They also table few written questions on this critical subject, so they clearly are not interested in engaging with it. I hope that the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), will take a message to his parliamentary party about the importance of engaging in such debates so that we can work constructively together, across parties, on this critical issue.

My office and I have spent the previous few months interviewing people from hundreds of SMEs from all over the UK, who have come to the House of Commons to give us their experiences—good and bad—of UKTI. We presented our preliminary results at a meeting with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I have repeatedly lobbied the Chancellor on the issue, and I very much hope that some movement, or some additional support for UKTI, will be spoken about on Wednesday.

During my interviews, I have got to know Mr Nick Baird, the chief executive of UKTI, who I think is doing a very good job, and I want to put on record my thanks to him for his professional leadership of the organisation. I am, however, disappointed that a number of companies that I have met have failed to get the support that they require from UKTI, so I have started to take them to Mr Baird to allow him to engage directly with them and provide support. Some of the companies are talking about hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into the United Kingdom, so that is very important.

I shall mention briefly, as I have to be very brief, three key recommendations that I would like the Minister to take on board, with which, by the way, Mr Baird agrees. The first is about the structure of UKTI. At the moment, personnel report into different Departments, including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and sometimes to local ambassadors. What we want in the United Kingdom is one organisation that is fit for purpose, with reporting taking place directly to UKTI’s board and its chief executive. We want an organisation that can hire, fire and reward on the grounds of performance and on a commercial basis. We want to encourage people in UKTI to go the extra mile and strive to do everything possible to help British businesses to export. Regrettably, the support is rather patchy; in some parts of the world it is superb, but in others it is poor. We therefore want a common theme across the world and a common reporting structure.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

No, I will not. I am sorry, but I do not have time.

My second point is about funding. Only 0.005% of Government spend goes to UKTI, and I am concerned that we will fall behind Scottish Development International, for example. That body receives far more pro rata, given the number of companies in Scotland, so it is able better to support its companies.

There is only a 49% awareness of UKTI among SMEs, and it is important that the body gets more funding from the Chancellor so that the message about what it can do for those companies throughout the world is better understood. My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) made the superb point that for every £1 spent, UKTI generates £22 of revenue. If I was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, my No. 1 priority would be to give UKTI more money.

My third point is that we need greater parliamentary scrutiny of UKTI. I am having to condense a 25-minute speech into five minutes, and this is only the second debate that has been held on UKTI in the past 12 months. This is a ridiculous way of scrutinising one of our country’s most important bodies. I want ongoing parliamentary scrutiny, and even—dare I say it—a Select Committee that can interact with Ministers and the UKTI chief executive on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis, and hold them to account about specific countries and projects so that we are always scrutinising how taxpayers’ money is spent. When that parliamentary scrutiny takes place, we will be able to say to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, “Look at what UKTI is doing. Look how things are improving. Give it more money,” and I cannot overemphasise the importance of that. I desperately want to work with colleagues to convince the Chancellor and the Prime Minister to give us a Select Committee of the House of Commons to allow those of us who are passionate about exports to work together constructively to hold UKTI to account.

Some 45 UKTI staff work in Brazil, but 52 opportunities are listed on the website. The website is not properly maintained, and no opportunities are listed for a huge number of countries. We might not be surprised that that is the case for some obscure, small countries, such as Cape Verde and Mauritania, but there are many larger countries that have no opportunities listed against them. If we are going to have a website and to communicate with SMEs up and down the country, we need always to be harvesting opportunities across the world and putting them on that site. We must ensure that information is disseminated daily to all nine regions in England, and that those regions then interact with their SMEs to find out which can best be tailored to each opportunity.

Whenever I have travelled abroad, I have noted that the most important thing to remember, as my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North mentioned, is branding. The British brand is the gold standard. It is the best in the world, so many people across the middle east, and in the rest of the world, yearn to buy British. Give us an opportunity here in the Commons to scrutinise UKTI on an ongoing basis, and give us a Select Committee.