UK Trade & Investment

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski]

This debate and the report focus predominantly on the general export picture, of which our defence exports are just one aspect. However, if the right hon. Gentleman stays until the end of my speech, he will hear a reference to arms exports.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

At what point?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman will have to wait and see.

The report makes three or four specific recommendations, which I will highlight to the Minister. One of the most critical is extra parliamentary scrutiny. In the process of writing this report, we went to see the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills and interviewed its esteemed Chairman. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is a large Department, and the Committee is focused on domestic business and skills matters. During this Parliament—I may be corrected if I am wrong—I understand that the Committee has not undertaken any reports specifically scrutinising UKTI.

The Committee and the Department are so large that we need a subsection of the Committee or even, dare I say it, a separate Select Committee. The Minister and others might say that that is unrealistic, but I am putting the suggestion out for deliberation and consideration. Some form of body or mechanism is needed to perform ongoing scrutiny of the work and performance of UKTI. Let us not forget that UKTI receives hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. It is vital that all of us in the House play our role in scrutinising how that money is spent.

If we have additional scrutiny in the House, we can be confident in going to the Exchequer and others when things need additional funding and saying, “This is the work that the House of Commons has performed in scrutinising UKTI, and these are the deficiencies and shortfalls that UKTI faces. We need to secure additional money for it.” One mistake that the Government made at the outset, although I completely understand that budgets had to be cut across the board, was cutting the communication and advertising budgets for UKTI and others a little too much. I am certainly making representations to the Prime Minister to ensure that additional funding is given to UKTI so that it can advertise itself in providing service delivery and market itself to SMEs.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) rightly referred to SMEs. About 47% of British SMEs have never heard of UKTI. They do not know anything about it; they do not understand what services it can provide. How can we expect cutting-edge SMEs, some of which have the most extraordinary innovation and ability to export, to use UKTI if they simply do not know what resources exist? I want UKTI to have product placements, even in soap operas. There could be a storyline where a local UKTI chap comes to see a company to help it export. I want advertising in national newspapers and on the radio and television, so that everybody starts to talk about export and understand that we can use our experiences in other markets to help SMEs export. We all remember the “Tell Sid” campaign, whether or not we agreed with—

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Absolutely. I could not agree with my hon. Friend more, and I am sure that the Minister will reply to his point.

If I can achieve one thing from the debate, it will be that the Minister goes out and advertises for a top French export expert. I want the Minister to pinch him or her from the French export agency or a French export sector. I want him to find him or her, whoever is best, and pay him or her double what he or she is getting in France. Frankly, we will never get into the French markets unless we have French understanding, in both language and how French-speaking countries operate. We are not normally prone to saying wonderful things about France; but to start pinching their contracts, we need to understand how to do it. I want the Minister to take that point seriously, and if not, at least explain to me what his Department is doing to ensure increasing competence in the French language and the ability to understand how French contractual operations function in French-speaking north Africa, so that we are in a better position to attract contracts.

I pay tribute to the two Prime Minster’s trade ambassadors who are here. They do a superb job and are in a privileged position. To appoint them trade ambassadors, the Prime Minister obviously has great confidence in them, but how many people out there or in Shrewsbury know about trade ambassadors? I am sure that they know my hon. Friends the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) and for Gloucester (Richard Graham). It is important that we communicate with SMEs in Shrewsbury and elsewhere, so that if they are interested in exporting to Indonesia, for example, we can say, “There is a dedicated trade ambassador. This is his name. This is how you get in contact with him,” and do the same with Algeria and other countries. What work is the Minister’s Department doing to ensure greater understanding among SMEs of the vital resource of trade ambassadors and envoys that the Prime Minister put in place?

I have spent 20 years studying Libya. It is a country about which I am passionate. I have many friends there whom I treat as family. Before the last election, I wrote a book about Libya and the appalling human rights abuses there. My tremendous frustration with the previous Labour Government trying to curry favour with Colonel Gaddafi was such that I decided to write the book, highlighting the extraordinary abuse in Libya. I presented the Prime Minister with a copy two weeks before the 2010 election, and in 2011, I, along with others, pleaded with him to intervene in what we thought would be a bloodbath on the streets of Benghazi. Recently, I went to see him to highlight my concern about the ongoing instability in Libya.

I passionately feel that British companies should be exporting to Libya. The media circus has of course moved to Syria, but we must never forget that if we intervene in a country such as Libya, we have a duty and a responsibility to ensure that everything is done subsequently to help with security, building democracy and ensuring that residents have stability, so that they can trade with the UK.

From my friends in Tripoli, I get daily reports of kidnappings, violence and acts of terrorism; the Government still do not have control over large parts of the country. It is very important that we do everything possible to help Libya, by assisting her with security, and here I am drawn into the point made by the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) about our security industry.

There are many people who would like to criticise British security exports, but exporting the knowledge that we have accumulated in the UK over decades—on policing, border guards and training armies, navies and air forces—to a country such as Libya is a good thing. Surely, we ought, at the very least, to help Libya—with all its instability—with our expertise.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. His points about Libya and its instability are absolutely correct. Is he not concerned that vast amounts of the weaponry that was supplied—not just by Britain, but by France and many others—to various opposition groups under Gaddafi, or post-Gaddafi, have now found their way into Mali and many other places across north Africa? There is a genuine danger of further instability.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman that a lot of equipment that the Gaddafi regime had has got across the border into Mali and other countries. We are deviating slightly from the subject of the debate, but I will say that most of that equipment is Russian. I am not sure what proportion is western-supplied arms.

I pay tribute to Mr Richard Paniguian, head of the UKTI Defence and Security Organisation, which is the military security part of UKTI. DSO is populated by people who have been in the armed services. They understand the products and are passionate about them and their work. If UKTI generally can understand how DSO operates and replicate the passion, energy, enthusiasm and calibre of the staff, we will be motoring further ahead.

I shall say a few things about British defence exports because I, for one, am not embarrassed that the United Kingdom exports security—it is extremely important for our country. Many hon. Members have in their constituencies, as do I, defence operators and contractors, firms on which many jobs and a lot of this country’s prosperity depend. The UK has some of the most rigorous export licensing procedures in the world. It considers each application on a case-by-case basis, taking into account, among other factors, the precise nature of the equipment and the identity and track record of the recipient. Her Majesty’s Government do not—and will not—issue licences if they judge that the proposed export would provoke or prolong internal conflicts, or if there is a clear risk that it might be used aggressively against another country or to facilitate internal repression. When circumstances change or new information comes to light, we can and do revoke licences if the export is no longer consistent with the criteria.

Recently, I had to defend the Prime Minister on the radio when he went to the United Arab Emirates and many people criticised him for trying to sell them some Typhoon jets. It would be the height of irresponsibility if the United Kingdom did not collaborate with our Gulf allies—sound, strategic allies such as the United Arab Emirates—to ensure that they had the capability to defend themselves against a belligerent neighbour who might attack them at any time. If countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia did not have British planes with which to try to pre-empt naked aggression against them from Iran or others, we would see increasing instability in the region.

You will be pleased to hear, Mr Betts, that I am coming towards the end of my speech, but let me just raise one or two remaining points. My hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), accompanied me on the delegation to Gibraltar, and I want to make a point that he wanted to make about the British Council. The United Kingdom has a global British Council network. Its work is very good, but we do not see it providing any information on UKTI. How is the Minister’s Department collaborating with the British Council, utilising its extraordinary network, to ensure that as well as sharing information about British language courses and all the other good things that it does, it communicates about UKTI and British commercial links?

I wish to talk very briefly about the European Union. The Prime Minister hopes to renegotiate various aspects of our position with the European Union, and I hope that one of those aspects will be how we go about international trading agreements. The first thing that happened to me when I was elected in 2005 was that I was sent to the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong. The other two Members of Parliament with me were the hon. Gentleman who is now the Speaker and Lord Mandelson who, as Trade Commissioner, was representing the whole European Union. I found that very frustrating, because the United Kingdom did not have a voice. The UK was represented by Lord Mandelson, who was representing all 27 nations, but different countries mean different things to other countries—for example, Gibraltar and New Zealand are far more important to us than to Poland. I very much hope that there can be some movement on individual countries being able somehow to negotiate with countries of long standing, so that there is no one-size-fits-all criterion for the whole European Union.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for securing the debate and ensuring that we had the opportunity for this discussion. I will make two points that he will agree with, but he may have problems with the rest of my speech.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Let us have the nice things first.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. As someone who grew up in Shropshire, I fully appreciate the beauties of Shrewsbury.

My first point is that the hon. Gentleman’s comments about language and the British approach to the rest of the world are absolutely right. It is depressing to find that the number of students entering university this year to study foreign languages has gone down, as it did last year, and that the quality and quantity of language training in many secondary schools are wholly inadequate. We need to start language teaching much earlier, in primary schools as well as in secondary schools, and to give greater emphasis to the learning of all foreign languages at university—not just the obvious European ones, such as Spanish, French, German and Italian, but the Chinese and Arabic languages, as well as Hindi, Bengali and others. We are a country that has to trade and export, and if German and French companies can send people around the world who are competent in all the local languages, we should be able to do the same. It is extraordinarily arrogant for us to turn up in a country and assume that, because we are British, everybody will want to speak to us in English, so we just have to be prepared to make those changes.

The second point on which I am sure the hon. Gentleman will agree relates to the engineering base of much of British trade with the world. It is obviously essential to have a high degree of understanding of engineering and science teaching both in schools and universities, and to recognise the status of engineering, which has done so much in this country; I am thinking of the railways, shipbuilding, motors and all the other aspects of engineering. Engineering is often seen as a dirty-hands profession, rather than a mainstream one. I can say that because I come from a family of engineers who closely followed that whole narrative. The basis of an awful lot of our past trade was the export of high-quality, high-tech engineering products.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I entirely endorse what the hon. Gentleman said about languages. The issue is about improving not only exports overseas, but employment opportunities locally. A company in my constituency cannot recruit staff from Britain, but has to look overseas to recruit its foreign-language speaking staff. There are job opportunities right here in the UK for people who speak the foreign languages he mentioned.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I obviously completely concur with the hon. Gentleman, but I also recognise that many families in Britain who are bilingual in a variety of languages—I cannot put an exact figure on it, but I would think that about 70 different languages are spoken in my constituency—and many brilliant young bilingual people do not seem to get job opportunities in companies that are often trading with the countries that their parents came from. We should recognise that we have those resources in our society.

As I said in my intervention, I want to raise some arms trade issues, which are highly appropriate because the biennial arms fair, the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition, is taking place in the London docklands. I think I am right in saying that more than 1,000 exhibitors—1,400, I believe—are now plying their wares.

I have many concerns, because if we compare the countries and companies involved in that arms fair in the London docklands with the Foreign Office’s report on human rights problems and abuses, we find an unfortunate coincidence between, on the one hand, the countries exhibiting at that international arms fair, countries that British companies that are exhibiting wish to sell to, or countries invited to send delegates, and, on the other hand, serious human rights concerns that the Foreign Office has drawn attention to, and countries with human rights records that it thinks we should be concerned about. Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are among the UK’s biggest customers for arms purchases, and Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Libya, which were not on the list in 2011, have now received invitations, although human rights problems are legion in those countries.

An early-day motion was tabled two days ago, on 10 September, by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), and has been signed by a number of colleagues, including me. It draws attention to the “Scrutiny of Arms Exports and Arms Controls” report, House of Commons paper 205, and states

“that the Government would do well to acknowledge that there is an inherent conflict between strongly promoting arms exports to authoritarian regimes whilst strongly criticising their lack of human rights at the same time”.

I look forward to the Minister’s response to that.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman gave a list of countries about which concerns have been expressed, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but has he visited those countries? I have taken to those countries delegations of parliamentarians, including Labour MPs. They interacted with non-governmental and human rights organisations there, and got a very different perspective on what is happening on the ground from the one reported by the British media in this country.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I have not visited Saudi Arabia or the UAE, but I have visited many countries on the list and others in those regions. Only half an hour ago, I spoke to a young man from Bahrain. He came to this country as a place of safety and security, because of how brutally he was treated in prison in Bahrain. He showed me the shot marks on his body—from birdshot—inflicted on him by the police because he was taking part in a demonstration for democracy in Bahrain. His view is that the Bahrain regime is propped up by Saudi Arabia, Britain and the United States, that it is an enormous purchaser of arms from this country and that it provides military facilities for both Britain and the USA, but it has an appalling human rights record.

Although non-governmental organisations in Saudi Arabia are doing their best, we must ask serious questions about the human rights record of Saudi Arabia; there is the use of the death penalty, the suppression of opposition groups, the denial of women’s rights and a whole lot of other issues. Even the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham could not claim to concur with the Saudi Government’s approach to human rights, or indeed support it in any way. We are the biggest arms exporter to Saudi Arabia, and the influence that Saudi Arabia has is absolutely enormous. We should think carefully on this matter, because if we export CS gas and crowd-control and anti-personnel equipment, as we do to nearly every one of the countries in the middle eastern region, they will be used against the legitimate democratic process that wishes to bring about the kind of society that we enjoy, with our freedom of speech and elected Parliament. If those people are shot by the equipment that we have supplied, are we not part of the problem? Are we not partly responsible for that oppression of human rights?

The hon. Gentleman tells us that the UKTI Defence & Security Organisation works very hard and does very well. I am not surprised that he mentions that it is heavily populated by people who were formerly in the armed services. Let me ask him this. The end-user certificate system and the monitoring of arms exports have been around for a long time, but there seems to be an incredible degree of leakage. As soon as one raises the issue, and says, “We shouldn’t be exporting arms to that country”, we are told that someone else will do it. They say that the French, Germans, Chinese or Russians will. Perhaps that is so; they probably will try, but we have to start somewhere and influence others. If we are exporting equipment that is used—it is often quite low-technology equipment—to oppress human rights protesters, we should ask ourselves some serious questions about it. Who are we to table motions complaining about the oppression of democracy in Saudi Arabia if we have supplied the equipment that oppresses the democratic wishes of people in the first place? I say that as an example; there are many others that can be used.

We can learn lessons from the Iran-Iraq war, which took place some years ago. At the time, as now, the west was fairly obsessed with supporting Iraq against Iran because of the presence of the ayatollah in Iran. I am not in any way defending the human rights record of the Iranian Government, any more than I would defend the human rights record of the Iraqi Government of that time, or indeed Iraqi Governments since. Britain quite happily provided equipment, support and political cover for Saddam Hussein in Iraq because it was opposed to Iran. The west did that, as did the US and lots of other people. In 1988, when the gas attack took place on the Kurdish people in Halabja, I raised the issue here in Parliament and was told that the situation was serious, bad and quite appalling. I then asked why we were involved in the Baghdad arms fair only eight months later. The Minister at the time told me that it was good business. We went ahead with that arms fair, and only two years later we were at war with Iraq. No doubt some of the equipment that was being fired back at British troops had been sold to Iraq by Britain. What goes around comes around.

There is a disproportion in many of the issues. Arms exports contributed, I think, 1.5% of the total exports of this country, yet they have a wholly disproportionate level of support from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and there is a substantial degree of subsidy for the research done through the domestic purchase of the products. I do not wish to go on for too long, but I want to register the point that there are many people in this country who are deeply uneasy about our arms export policy, and about the export of surveillance equipment, high-tech planes and everything else that can be used to bomb and strafe people in civil wars in any part of the world, much as we deplore those civil wars.

I am always told, “If you raise all these issues, it will cost a lot of jobs in the arms industry.” I fully understand the employment issue, but I also fully understand the enormous, brilliant skills that we have that produce these weapons and the equipment that backs them up. None the less, many of the workers and I would rather the brilliance and skills were put towards exporting peaceful products, useful goods, energy-efficient goods and transport products, such as trains, planes, cars and ships, instead of getting us so deeply involved in the arms industry. Once we have supplied arms to an authoritarian regime, we cannot wash our hands of it and pretend that it will go away.

I want to know how much money has been spent on the exhibition in docklands. Who authorised the invitation list, and who allowed many of the companies, including Russian arms exporters and others, to come to Britain, knowing full well where many of the products will end up, and the misery and suffering that are caused as a result of them? We cannot wash our hands of this or wish it away; we have to take responsibility for it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Charles Hendry]

My hon. Friend brings me absolutely beautifully to the final part of my comments, which is on exactly that point. We are incredibly well served by our missions around the world, and by the extent to which our ambassadors and their teams are now very focused on industry and trade opportunities.

Much as I and other trade envoys would love to meet every company in Shrewsbury that wants to become involved in a country, my job is primarily to help open the doors of Government Ministers in countries where often there is not a regular flow of foreign Ministers going through, so as to push that trade process forward. However, we could not do it without the expertise and focus of others. The extraordinary growth that we are experiencing in some of those markets—there has been a doubling of trade with Russia, and a trebling of trade with some countries in the middle east—shows how that policy has been working.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Gentleman’s point about the quality of British higher education and universities was very well made. On his travels, does he pick up, as I do, on the fact that there is great concern about the complications of applying for visas to study in Britain—the tier 4 visa system—and about the cost of higher education in Britain? From my experience of local universities in my constituency, I know that we are losing students to other places because of those complications, and the message that I get from those universities and from my travels is that we should simplify the system to continue to attract students.

[Charles Hendry]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. In the countries that I have been going to, I have found that most of the students who come to the UK either self-pay or are on Government scholarships. Kazakhstan sends 9,000 students overseas, and 4,000 of those have come to Britain on full scholarships. We have been the country of choice because of the quality of our universities. There is a case for removing from the immigration figures the number of students who are coming here to study, because students can become an easy target when it comes to trying to bring down the immigration figures, when our ability to attract them is actually a tremendous national asset that we should be looking to capitalise on as best we can.

Nazarbayev university in Kazakhstan is partnering with Cambridge university and University college London, and I hope that in due course it will partner with Edinburgh university and other universities as well. All its students are taught in English; they are trilingual, speaking Kazakh, Russian and English. Our universities have a fantastic chance to make a contribution, and to ensure that the next generation of people coming through have a strongly pro-British approach, at least in part a British education, and a willingness to do business with this country.

The opportunities for us around the world are simply extraordinary and UKTI deserves a great deal of the credit for the progress that we are making in opening up markets.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Graham]

I agree on the advertising and marketing point, but in the case of Land Rover there have been more significant changes, not least in the speed, efficiency and quality of product that Jaguar Land Rover provides. It is a remarkable success story, as he would agree. I totally accept what he said about its presence in east Africa, which is a happy land in my experience.

To return to my point on the SME debate, in some ways it has not changed since I wrote that paper all those years ago. The debate focuses on what Government should do to best help SMEs export. For example, should they subsidise many trips abroad for SMEs so that they can get to know the countries to which they might export? Do the SMEs have the resources or the sales structure to be able to follow through, or are the trips an interesting but non-productive form of business tourism? Should we help only the larger companies, and through them indirectly boost SME exporters through the supply chains of those large companies?

Should we use Government offices for all export help, or can chambers of commerce be better partners for certain SME goals? In some cases, chambers of commerce can be more selective than Government can. If someone needs a lawyer in Jakarta and rings up the British embassy, the embassy will be obliged to provide a list of every lawyer in town. What that person is really looking for is just one reputable company that can do the business. Government cannot choose a lawyer for someone, but a chamber of commerce might say, “Other companies like yours have effectively used X, Y and Z.” There are situations in which a chamber of commerce can be a more effective partner for SMEs.

What about where the Government should focus? Do we think that the work on strategic goals, such as EU trade agreements made successfully with, for example, Korea will add most value, or do we need an unremitting focus through UKTI on high value added opportunities in selected sectors, such as energy and resources, on which my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden is focusing successfully in the “-stans”? I am focusing more on infrastructure and aerospace in Indonesia. Do we perhaps need something like an army—I apologise to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) for using this metaphor—with a selection of weapons from which we choose the most appropriate for the opportunity and the market?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Gentleman should use the word “tools” instead.

[Richard Graham]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: “tools” is a better word. Do we need a selection of tools? We need a flexible approach that can draw on the most appropriate tool in the right marketplace for the right opportunity, with an organisation led, as UKTI now is, by people with direct experience of leading businesses in their own right. I pay tribute to UKTI for recruiting an old friend of mine, Crispin Simon. He is now leading on SMEs and has led at least one FTSE 350 company in the recent past.

I agree with the Minister, Lord Green, that there is much to be said for a greater role for the chambers of commerce. That is happening and is to be welcomed. We must accept that during the process the quality of service will not necessarily always be even across the world. It will vary from country to country and from chamber of commerce to chamber of commerce.

I will make a small handful of points. First, it is important that UKTI’s GREAT campaign is publicised as widely as possibly to all Members of Parliament. It is a major marketing campaign. It is visually attractive, powerful and resonates in different countries. I launched it in Indonesia. I hope that the Minister will confirm that the regional offices of UKTI have invited every MPs to the GREAT launch in their area. I am delighted to help the launch in Gloucestershire next Tuesday. All MPs can and should play a role in encouraging their SMEs to export by joining the GREAT campaign.

Secondly, UKTI is already doing very good work. My hon. Friend the Member for Wealden rightly paid tribute to that work, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham, on the back of his powerful paper, which he spent much time and effort producing. I am grateful to him for doing that. They are both right, because some remarkable things are going on.

Returning to the west Kowloon example I gave earlier, it is most recent in my mind from breakfast this morning that two small companies that I had never heard of before—Keepthinking and North, which are both based in Clerkenwell, in the east of this city—have won significant contracts with that project. That is a good example of how companies that may not be known to me or other hon. Members here today are winning contracts abroad with the help of UKTI. That is important, because we already know about certain familiar exports, such as the wings, engines, landing gear and coatings and so on that make up 38% of every Airbus and are made in Britain. It is important to remember that those parts are made in Britain, because the export value is always credited to France, but it is equally important that we understand that unknown companies in new sectors have real opportunities overseas.

There is an opportunity, which I hope the Minister will agree to take up, for UKTI to hold a seminar, possibly in Parliament—we know that it is difficult to move MPs out of our comfort zone, and we are required by the Whips to attend debates and vote and so on—to update MPs on some of the opportunities in new sectors and some of the new companies across the country in sectors such as creative media, medical science, nano-science and education.

I have been promoting two things in Indonesia with a degree of success. I hope that there is more to come. The first is a fantastic computer software tabling programme for universities. There are more than 100 universities in Indonesia. The software was created by a Cambridge-based company, is high-quality and could be exported to other parts of the world. The second is a quality assurance agency, which is highly rated internationally. It is based in my constituency and is doing work in many countries across the world, but it could work in others as well. Let UKTI educate MPs, who then could not possibly complain to the Minister that they did not know what UKTI was doing or what new opportunities there were.

Thirdly, in countries in which we have both a UKTI and a Department for International Development presence, I believe we can do more to act as a united UK plc. The story of the first biodiesel plant in Indonesia, made by the wonderful Gloucestershire-based manufacturer Green Fuels—I am taking the Indonesian ambassador to Green Fuels next week—is a good example of a business contract by a private business that is totally in line with our DFID objectives for Indonesia. The contract should open further opportunities for the UK in a general sense, and I believe there are other such examples elsewhere in the world. A more united, working-together spirit by DFID and UKTI could lead to exciting results.

I finish on a note as positive as those of the Members who spoke earlier. The help given to me, as one of the Prime Minister’s trade envoys, by our embassy in Jakarta, which includes both UKTI and the British Council, has been powerful. We are all working together on strategic and tactical goals that will benefit both Indonesia and the UK, which is important. A win-win solution is much more attractive than simply trying to thrust a product at some hapless overseas country.

Prudential, for example, derives significant earnings from its Indonesian operations, and in return it provides insurance and pension solutions for many millions of Indonesians. Prudential employs no fewer than 190,000 people in that great archipelago. That is what UK companies can achieve for themselves, starting from nothing not very long ago. That is what companies can achieve for UK plc and for their host country, which shows the value of inward investment—exported investment from the UK. Such investment offers great opportunities for British SMEs to service, in this case, Prudential either in the UK or overseas, and from that base to expand and service other financial institutions. British service companies can be very successful.

Debates such as this are a great marketing opportunity for trade envoys, so it is appropriate for me to finish by saying that if Members here today, or those who read the debate later, have specialist companies in their constituencies that believe they have something to offer Indonesia, they are of course absolutely welcome to contact me. I will do my best, with UKTI, to try to help those SMEs export a little bit more.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Hancock]

We will pursue the strategy on which we have set out, which is ensuring that the UK economy is strong at home by dealing with our debts, making it more competitive, doing everything that we can to win what we have called the global race and ensuring that UKTI plays its part, not least by delivering a UKTI budget increase over the past couple of years, so that it can reach the target of doubling exports to £1 trillion, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

The Government’s ambition of doubling exports to £1 trillion by 2020 also involves getting 100,000 more UK companies exporting. The hon. Gentleman asked how we are doing on that. As he said I would say, the monthly figures fluctuate, but UKTI is on track to achieve its target of supporting 32,000 businesses for the 2012-13 financial year. Some 90% of those 32,000 businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises. That support has helped generate additional sales of more than £33 billion. I would say that that is money well spent.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), who is no longer in his place, discussed the importance of encouraging small businesses to export. He particularly mentioned chambers of commerce and other business groups. We are piloting the use of chambers of commerce; as non-governmental organisations, they can play a different role and fill a niche. There are 20 pilots, including in Brazil, India, Hong Kong, Russia and Singapore, using chambers of commerce as well as UKTI. He also mentioned one of my personal passions: Education UK—a specific unit within UKTI to help our education exports.

I will also come to the point about the link with the British Council. My hon. Friend mentioned the West Kowloon cultural district project, which has been supported by both UKTI and the British Council working together. That is an example of those two organisations working collaboratively to very good effect.

The good news on languages is that, although entries to A-level were down, entries to GCSE rose sharply. I hope that after a long period of decline, the increase in GCSE entries this year shows that people in English schools who take languages are coming through the pipeline. Let us hope that that is an early indicator of better things to come.

The hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) asked about defence exports. Of course, as he said, the end user certificate system has been in place for a long time—more than 20 years—and the Government have confidence in the export licensing system, which we think is thorough and robust enough to address human rights issues that might arise from individual sales to individual countries. Any application for an export licence is considered against consolidated criteria in the light of circumstances in that country.

That brings me to the point raised by the hon. Member for Hartlepool about exports to Syria specifically. He mentioned two licences issued in 2012. I can confirm that those licences were never used to export chemicals and were revoked under the new EU sanctions. I hope that that addresses his question.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The point that I made was that the FCO’s website expresses serious human rights concerns about regimes to which a large number of British arms exports are approved by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. I particularly draw attention to Bahrain, but also to the whole operation of the defence and security equipment international exhibition, which is on at the moment. A Russian company there that has been supplying arms to Syria is openly parading its wares at the exhibition, which is subsidised by the British Government. We need a lot more transparency about the operation of the defence services organisation and what eventually happens to those weapons. When people are assaulted by anti-personnel weapons supplied by Britain, they do not feel very benign towards this country.

[Matthew Hancock]

As I said, any application for an export licence is considered against the criteria, which have been in place for some time, in the light of circumstances in that country and depending on the products’ end use. The system has been supported by Governments of all three major parties. In the specific case of Syria, which has been raised as a concern, no chemicals were exported under that licence. I think that that addresses the point.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have this wide-ranging debate. I am looking forward to working with my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham, to ensure that we can push UKTI even further. I think that the overwhelming support for the direction of travel within UKTI and, at a higher level, the overwhelming support for UK trade openness and the ability to trade with the whole world will have been noted clearly in this debate. Thank you, Sir Roger, for your chairmanship. I hope that all those who read the report of the debate will notice that we are a country that is very much open for business.