UK Trade & Investment

Lord Swire Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr Hugo Swire)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) on securing this important—at least to some hon. Members—debate.

It is vital for the Government to succeed in transforming the UK’s export and inward investment performance. As the Prime Minister has said often, we are in a global race. We have suffered from weak trade performance for decades. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) rightly said, there was a decline in manufacturing between 2000 and 2009, although there are now signs of a recovery. It is for this reason—the appalling, precarious financial situation we inherited—that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and my noble Friend the Minister of State for Trade and Investment, Lord Green, launched the national export challenge, encouraging more small and medium-sized enterprises to export. They set an ambitious target to get another 100,000 companies exporting and to double UK exports to £1 trillion by 2020, as we have heard.

My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) talked about the rather patchy local enterprise partnerships and said that there is more to do. A number of hon. Members said that we need to better publicise what UKTI can do for mid-sized businesses. In January 2012, BIS formally launched a national campaign to help raise the profile of medium-sized businesses, working with the CBI, The Daily Telegraph, the Institute of Directors and other intermediaries and relevant organisations. UKTI now has some 30 mid-sized business advisers in place, will engage around 400 mid-sized businesses by the end of the year and will deliver engagement with a target of 1,500 MSBs over the three-year life of the programme. There have been specific trade missions for mid-sized businesses; jointly with the CBI, the noble Lord Green has led trade missions to Turkey, Russia, Mexico and Colombia. But of course we can always do much more.

The nation’s trade and investment performance will not be transformed overnight. My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) spoke about real growth in micro-businesses, which we can grow further, and getting them exporting. The prize is clear. We need to get more SMEs exporting. The more they grow, gain efficiency and create jobs, the more they help the UK to pay its way in the 21st century. I hope that all hon. Members are left in no doubt that we are committed to that transformation. I shall now mention what we have done and what more we will do.

My hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) kindly congratulated Nick Baird and his team. They do a magnificent job. I am not altogether sure that Nick Baird supports all the proposals that my hon. Friend suggested he did. My hon. Friend made some interesting points and we welcome his continuing interest. He is right to take companies to UKTI. All hon. Members should be proactive in doing so. I am doing that myself, to try to get inward investment into my area. Doing that is right.

It is worth saying and fair to say that, organisationally, UKTI has become more entrepreneurial, with 75% of the senior management team now having been recruited from the private sector. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is injecting commercial thinking into the way we work, with commercial awareness training for staff and private sector secondments for new ambassadors, before they go to post. That close alignment of trade and diplomatic interests is new. That is not only welcome, but necessary.

A number of hon. Members talked about what we are doing in terms of building up capacity and about the capability of British Chambers of Commerce and other potential delivery partners overseas. My noble friend Lord Green has been doing a lot of work on this. UKTI is piloting a scheme to harness British businesses groups and chambers of commerce overseas, to help them develop their networks and capabilities. Increased autumn statement funding of £8 million will allow UKTI to run a pilot project that will focus initially on 20 priority markets, including Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Russia and China.

We will also be working to increase the amount of trade in emerging markets. My hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) went to India recently, in the biggest trade delegation ever to leave British shores. I am glad that the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) has discovered the importance of trade with India. It took the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) 10 years, from the time he was Chancellor to when he was Prime Minister, to go to India. It took my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer 10 weeks. I do not think we need any lessons on the importance of existing and emerging markets or about high-level politicians visiting them. Some 100 companies, including more than 30 SMEs representing different sectors, travelled to India on that trade mission. I am travelling there again this evening, in support of a British company that will be revealed in the fullness of time.

Another contrast between this Government and the last is the fact that we are trying to get Ministers to travel much more than the previous one ever did. That is recognised. Ministers have already undertaken 24 trade missions in 2012, to places such as Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil and Saudi Arabia. I undertook missions to the United Arab Emirates and Burma.

Front-line support for business comes, of course, from our diplomatic staff. It is important to note that we are increasing our presence in the emerging powers. We are strengthening the UK’s diplomatic network, including opening embassies, as my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds said, whereas the previous Government were closing them. By 2015 we will have opened up to 20 new embassies, consulates and trade offices, and deployed 300 extra staff in more than 20 countries, particularly in Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa, linking us to the world’s fastest-growing economies.

To help showcase the many opportunities available in these markets, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister launched the trade envoy programme, which is specifically designed to help promote trade in emerging and growth markets. So far, 48 separate events have been undertaken by the prime ministerial trade envoys. My hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) recently led a trade mission to Turkmenistan, where he met the President and Foreign Minister and signed a memorandum of understanding on major sports infrastructure delivery. That is just one of the many notable successes for him and his colleague as trade envoys. My noble Friend Baroness Morris met the Jordanian Prime Minister, Dr Abdullah Ensour, and Minister for Trade, Hatem al-Halawani, to develop the relationship and expand opportunities in health care, a significant sector for the UK.

We should not forget the excellent work of the business ambassador network and its chair, my noble Friend Lord Marland. That network is a powerful advocate of the UK abroad, promoting the UK’s expertise, economy, business environment and reputation as the trade and investment partner of choice. The hon. Member for Wrexham said that we were not doing enough in the creative industries. A good example of the network’s participation is the Los Angeles creative forum, which was designed to develop relationships between the best forward-looking US and UK companies across the wider creative digital and related technology sectors. The forum was a success, with £50 million of business reported so far. We are doing things in the creative sectors.

The high-value opportunities programme is benefiting from our overseas network. The programme provides UK businesses with intensive support to access opportunities worth billions, as well as significant supply chain opportunities for SMEs. The scheme has helped deliver £4 billion of success for UK business since its inception, but we have increased the target for UK contract wins from £3.5 billion to £10 billion per annum. To meet that, we will strengthen our HVO support by doubling the number of campaigns from 50 to 100, with the top 20 campaigns being led personally by Ministers. There are £14 billion in projects around upcoming global sporting events in South Korea and the £1.3 billion expansion of Hong Kong’s airport. Among the successes are the multi-million pound contracts won for the Sochi winter Olympic games in Russia, the Zhuhai-Macau bridge project in China, and for UK rail companies, which are securing more than £78.5 million of business in Singapore.

However, our work is not all about trade. Foreign capital investment is vital if we are to enable UK infrastructure projects to be delivered. UKTI has a particular focus on major projects and major investors, with extra autumn statement funding available to enhance support in growth markets, such as the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Russia.

The right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) talked about the work of Invest Northern Ireland. I testify to its excellent work. Northern Ireland has an excellent story to tell. I take on board the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the G8 meeting, which is a real opportunity for Northern Ireland. I hope that he and colleagues, including Arlene Foster, will see whether there are ways of promoting even further investment in Northern Ireland in connection with that.

We are also working to position the UK as the leading location of choice for European headquarters, elite global entrepreneurs and exceptional talent, with a new dedicated visa route for entrepreneurs brought into the UK. For the first time ever, to answer the question of the hon. Member for Wrexham, we have identified the leading companies in the UK and have allocated to them Ministers responsible—not small companies, but the leading companies, which we want to look after now they are here and to encourage them to grow. We are not trying to do that for small companies. We simply cannot do that; it is unrealistic to expect that.