UK Trade & Investment

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I thought the hon. Gentleman would say that, but whether or not we agreed with privatisation, we all remember the campaign. That is the sort of campaign that I want the Government to proceed with, so that everybody understands and is cognisant of UKTI, and so that no matter how small a business is, if it has the ability to export, it is given that opportunity.

The report also suggests that UKTI should be a single entity. Ideally, I would like it to be an Executive agency. At the moment, it is split between the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Foreign Office, so it straddles two Departments. I fear that when a body reports to two Departments, there may be a degree of overlap or too much interference. I would like it to be a single entity and an Executive agency. What is an Executive agency? The definition is as follows:

“Executive agencies are part of a government department which enables executive functions within government to be carried out by a well-defined business unit with a clear focus on delivering specified outputs within a framework of accountability to ministers.”

I believe that UKTI should be a single entity, with a chief executive who is directly accountable to Parliament for the strategy, focus and organisation of that body.

At this stage, I pay tribute to Mr Nick Baird, the chief executive of UKTI. I think that when I started the report, he must have had a voodoo doll of me in his office into which he stuck pins, because I have been a real pain, but he has always interacted with me, no matter how difficult I have been with him, no matter how many probing questions I have thrown at him and no matter what barbed comments I have thrown his way. He has always been extremely civil, courteous and polite. He is doing great things at UKTI. He is appointing more business people to the organisation. However, I want him to have more autonomy and to be accountable directly to Parliament.

Following all the research that I had done, I wanted to utilise all the passion that I had for exports for my constituency of Shrewsbury, so we have moved on to the next step. Let us not forget that although UKTI is meant to help companies to export, it is also responsible for attracting direct inward investment into our constituencies. We all know that the vast majority—a massively disproportionate amount—of direct foreign inward investment into the United Kingdom goes to London. I want to ensure that UKTI on the ground in Shropshire is working in conjunction with my local council, the local enterprise partnership and the chambers of commerce directly to identify the top 10 inward investment opportunities for Shropshire. I have therefore tasked the UKTI team in the west midlands—Mr Paul Noon is the director of UKTI in the west midlands, and his staff includes Nicky Griffiths and others—with getting round the table with Shropshire council, the chambers of commerce and the LEP. I have brought them all into the same room and said, “What are the top 10 inward investment opportunities for Shropshire?” They are currently working on identifying those opportunities.

However, I suspect that the level of activity that I have described is not going on in every part of the country. I have spoken to many Members of Parliament who have told me that they are unaware of any interaction between their local UKTI teams and their local councils and LEPs, yet in Shrewsbury we have taken the bull by the horns and ensured that that work is happening. My office and I are at this moment writing a case study of exactly what we are doing, which we will share with every Member of the House, so that they can experience what we are doing in Shropshire and, we hope, try to replicate it in their own constituencies.

I pay tribute to Paul Noon and Nicky Griffiths and to Mark Pembleton from Shropshire council for their co-operation, their sterling work and their enthusiasm for getting together, with my encouragement, to start working on the top 10 inward investment programmes.

The critical point that I want to make to hon. Members is that it is no good a council or a LEP coming up with 10 opportunities that are not costed or not properly tabulated in a business format. They must be agreed with UKTI staff in such a way that those staff are happy and confident to sell them overseas, and that is precisely the work that is being carried out now. To ensure that we get extra resources for that project, I have invited Mr Nick Baird to come to Shrewsbury on 5 November. The chief executive is coming to spend a full day in Shrewsbury, so I hope—I am sure this will be the case—that everybody completes the work on those top 10 inward investment opportunities before his visit. Once they have been identified, I will play my part, as someone who is passionate about exports to the middle east and who knows the area. All other Shropshire MPs and everybody else who has a passion for Shrewsbury will also have to play their part in selling the top 10 inward investment opportunities to foreign sovereign wealth funds and countries abroad.

I would like the Minister to follow very closely what is happening in the case study in Shrewsbury and to give us every support in the run-up to Mr Nick Baird’s visit. It is very important that we can show success—that we can show how UKTI can work with the local councils and LEPs on the ground.

I want UKTI to leave no stone unturned when it comes to scrutinising every market in the world as a potential market for British exports. Of course UKTI is focused on the large emerging markets of Brazil, India, Indonesia and others, but we must never forget the very small markets. I came back yesterday evening from Gibraltar, where I had the great honour of addressing thousands of Gibraltarians. Most of Gibraltar came to the square to celebrate national Gibraltar day. I have to say that seeing 20,000 people singing “God Save The Queen” and “Rule, Britannia!” and flying the flag meant that it was a very emotional day for me. I pay tribute to the Gibraltarian spirit. However, because of my passion for exports, I started to ask a few questions about what is happening with Gibraltar. Of course it is a tiny market; of course it has a population of only 30,000 people, but my goodness me, it is more British than we are in many aspects and if we cannot sell to the Gibraltarians, who can we sell to?

I spoke to the deputy to the Governor and was told, “Oh no, it’s not my job to relay any opportunities to UKTI.” Then when I asked the question of the Governor, he looked at me with incredulity: “Oh no, of course it’s not my job.” By the time I had got through everybody, I had found that nobody was relaying business opportunities in Gibraltar to UKTI. Luckily, I have spoken to the Chief Minister, Mr Fabian Picardo, and put him directly in touch with Mr Nick Baird, and they are having a telephone conversation this afternoon to see how UKTI can interact directly with the Government of Gibraltar to ensure that the United Kingdom is aware of every opportunity, whether in construction, tourism or anything else, that exists in Gibraltar.

However, the thing that really upset me was that I found out that exports to Gibraltar are run out of offices in Madrid. I hope that I am not the only one who finds that rather ironic, given everything that Spain is doing to try to strangle Gibraltar at this time. I said to the chief executive, Mr Nick Baird, that it is completely unacceptable. The Foreign Office and UKTI seem to have these hubs. They do not have officials on the ground in certain countries, but commercial activity in smaller areas is directed from a bigger hub somewhere else. I understand that in certain cases, but it is completely unacceptable in the case of Gibraltar. The gentleman in Madrid who is dealing with Gibraltar obviously is very focused on the Spanish market, which probably accounts for 99.9% of this trade. He does not want to upset his Spanish partners. We must have direct contact with the Government of Gibraltar at the highest levels, and I will be monitoring that very closely.

Over the past year, I have created the cross-party British middle east and north Africa council, which more than 200 parliamentarians have joined. I feel passionately about the importance of the Arab world. The 22 members of the Arab League are, after all, our neighbours and of huge strategic importance to the UK from a security perspective. Hon. Members will be horrified to learn that only 5% of British exports go to the region—just 5%, to the whole of north Africa and the middle east.

What is striking when travelling around the middle east is the incredible strength of the British brand. We have good commercial links in the United Arab Emirates, but there is almost no commercial activity in countries such as Mauritania. When I visited Mauritania a few years ago, I was the first British MP to go since 1960. I asked some of my colleagues what they thought of Mauritania and they said that they thought it was a ship. They did not understand that it is an important, up-and-coming country of huge strategic importance with huge mineral resources.

When I went to Tunisia and met the Anglo-Tunisian chamber of commerce, I was notified that only 60 British companies operate in Tunisia, compared with 1,800 French companies. Tunisia is a close, Mediterranean country on our doorstep.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on obtaining this important debate. Does he think that a reason why countries such as France and Germany do much better in those markets is that their export guarantee schemes—what we now call UK Export Finance—are far more substantial than ours? For example, the German Hermes scheme protected or guaranteed €29.1 billion of exports last year, while our equivalent in the UK gave out insurance for something like £4.3 billion. Germany provided more than five times the amount of protection through the Hermes scheme than we provided in the UK. The Hermes scheme is profit making—people pay premiums—so it is not a direct pull on the state purse.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The middle east and north Africa are my areas of interest. It is important that the scheme is extended to SMEs to encourage them to export to those countries—they will clearly be taking risks as some of those countries are pretty unstable.

Luckily, I studied French at university; I can speak French. We seem to avoid non-English speaking countries when trading. We are brilliant at exporting to countries where people speak English, but anywhere where French is a first language is a vortex for us: “No, no, no. That’s the French-speaking part of north Africa.” That is of great concern to me, because we must penetrate those traditional French markets. What unites them all—whether Tunisia, Algeria or Mauritania—is that they are fed up with the German export monopoly and with France repeatedly using them as dumping grounds for cheap exports, rather than engaging in bilateral economic co-operation and technology transfer. They are desperate to pull themselves away from their over-dependency on France and want greater economic exchange with the UK.

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[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.

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[Charles Hendry]

That can be achieved within the focus of the Department, and we can certainly see if there are ways in which the chief executive of UKTI can be given the authority that my hon. Friend calls for. However, removing UKTI from the direct responsibility of individual Ministers would lead to a loss of a significant part of the working relationship—a part that brings real benefits.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the work that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has done since 2010 to make trade, business and exports a real part of the roles of our diplomatic missions overseas has been hugely important, and that we are already seeing the results in increased exports to some countries that we perhaps had not traded significantly with before?

[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.

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[Richard Graham]

I thank my hon. Friend for his mathematical assessment of the situation. He makes an absolutely valid point—everyone in the House should champion business and exports for UK plc.

At the heart of my hon. Friend’s argument was whether it is effective for UK Trade & Investment to straddle two Departments. That is an interesting conundrum for the Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for Skills—who, of course, straddles two Departments himself, although they are not the same two Departments that UKTI straddles. Personally, I am all in favour of activities that straddle different Departments. Cross-departmental activity is a good thing, because silos do not exist in the real world. The key to it all is having autonomy for UKTI rather than independence, which I think is what my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry), who is the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to “the -stans”, was effectively advocating and supporting earlier. However, I will leave the Minister to comment on that.

What my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham was really advocating was the crucial importance of small and medium-sized enterprises, and the importance of exports to the future growth of SMEs. He knows as I do—as we all do—how vital that is to the growth of jobs, in Shrewsbury or in my constituency of Gloucester, where we have a long tradition of manufacturing and exporting. However, as I have said before in the main Chamber, in Gloucester we lost 6,000 jobs in business during the 13 years of my two Labour predecessors as Gloucester MP, although we have created 1,600 new jobs in business since 2010.

There is a great deal more to be done, which is precisely where SMEs come in, including the 500 members of the Gloucester branch of the Federation of Small Businesses and the members of many other branches all around the country. So how do we help SMEs to export? That question has been around for a long time. In fact, I wrote a paper on it as British trade commissioner for China, which, alarmingly, was 23 years ago. What has changed since then is the speed of communication and access to information through technology. We also have the new sectors and centres of UK expertise and, above all and most interestingly, the much higher standing of the brand “made in Britain”.

To bring alive that fact most immediately, at breakfast this morning I was with the CEO of the west Kowloon cultural district authority, which covers 40 acres of reclaimed land from Hong Kong’s harbour that will be transmogrified into a fantastic centrepiece for architectural design and creative arts from around the world, under a masterplan made by Foster and Partners. It will feature a huge number of UK stars from different sectors. The CEO of the cultural authority went yesterday to see some of the things achieved by Britain in time for the Olympics. He was staggered by the fact that the BBC sports hub was created in 21 weeks.

It is worth remembering that the west Kowloon cultural district authority has been in place for 16 years and has only just put a spade in the ground. The assumption that many of us had—I spent a large chunk of my life in that part of the world—that everything is done at great speed in Hong Kong and that nothing happens very fast in Britain has been turned around over the last few years by some of the achievements in this country. They help to reinforce the concept of “made in Britain” or “created in Britain” being a powerful brand, and they give our SMEs the chance to export to markets they previously might not have even thought of.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Does my hon. Friend agree—I lived in Tanzania for 11 years, and I declare an interest as chairman of the all-party group on Tanzania—that one thing that we need to turn around is complacency? In Tanzania, we saw “made in Britain” being a huge advantage as a brand, yet the advertising for some of our products, which in those days included Land Rover, was miserable compared with their competitors, such as Toyota. There have been many improvements since then, but we need to do far more on marketing in target countries.

[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?

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[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie). I want to dwell for a moment on the point that he made so forcefully about the importance of inward investment and to pay tribute to the work of UKTI, which has seen an advance in British exports and inward investment over the past few years. Those two things are intimately connected, as my hon. Friend says, because a lot of that inward investment results in exports for the UK.

To take my constituency and my county, Stafford and Staffordshire, our major private sector employer is a French inward investor, Alstom, which is a major exporter from the United Kingdom. Only last year, it won a large contract to supply the Swedish electricity authority with transformers. Another major employer is Perkins, which is part of the US Caterpillar group. I believe that at least 90% of its Stafford production of large generator sets is exported around the world to countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Nigeria and South Africa. Evo-Stik is a French direct investment, which is now owned by the Total group. While it is a consumer product company it, too, has exports. Broadcrown in Hixon also makes generator sets that are sold all around the world, and that company employs almost 200 people in my constituency.

Jaguar Land Rover, to which reference has already been made, is in the process of building one of the largest engine factories in the world in South Staffordshire, on the border with Wolverhampton, with excellent support from both councils. That plant will be of huge benefit not only to employment for the people of Staffordshire and Wolverhampton, but to the United Kingdom, because much of its production will go into cars that are eventually exported. JLR, under its Tata ownership, contributes a huge amount to British exports. The link between inward investment and exports is therefore important, and UKTI absolutely understands that the two things must not be seen in separate silos.

We have our own British manufacturers in my area. JCB is one of the largest and best known private British companies, employing the best part of 10,000 people in the UK. It not only exports but manufactures overseas, so it benefits workers not only in the United Kingdom, but in those other parts of the world where it manufactures—India, China, South Africa and Brazil. There are also the pottery companies in my area. People tend to think of ceramics as a business of the past but, when I last looked, pottery and ceramics were a net exporter for the UK—we export more than we import—because we export high-value ware that lasts much longer than other products and that is appreciated throughout the world by hotels, catering businesses and individuals.

That brings me to our own procurement in this country. Sometimes, those who procure—in the public sector in particular, but also in the private sector, such as those companies that have a big responsibility for our electrical infrastructure—tend to take a short-term view on value for money. They look at something and say, “This will wear out in 10 or 15 years, so we need to buy something that is cost-effective over 10 or 15 years.” In our country’s transport and electrical infrastructure, some transformers that were made in Britain—perhaps by English Electric, then General Electric—have been in place for 40 or 50 years. In effect, they have been working for free for the past 20 to 30 years. Customers overseas understand that buying something marked “Made in Britain” means that they will get a product that will last not five or 10 years, but 20, 30 or 40 years. They are therefore prepared to pay a premium for our products, yet our own organisations, which have a fairly short-term view when procuring for infrastructure, are not prepared to do so. I ask the Minister to consider how we can persuade British organisations, such as National Grid, to take a long-term view of the value of British products and to realise that they will last for not 10 or 15 years but 20, 30 or 40 years, as our overseas customers know that they will.

I also want us to concentrate on learning from the country with the best record in the world on exports: Germany. We need to learn from the Germans, because they do some things that we do not, but that we need to do. As I said, Germany’s Hermes export finance scheme covered €29.1 billion of exports last year, whereas UK Export Finance covered a little more than £4 billion.

The Germans also have a development bank, Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, which was set up after the second world war and operates specifically in Germany as well as overseas. In Germany, it often enables the Mittelstand, or medium-sized companies, to access credit and equity. We do not have an equivalent here. If we are to build up our middle-ranking companies—the equivalent of the Mittelstand—which would probably be the ones to do most exporting, they need to have access to the kind of finance that their competitors in Germany can obtain through KfW and the banking system. I therefore urge the Minister to consider whether the UK business bank, which I welcome, could be developed into the kind of financial institution that KfW so ably represents in Germany.

That was all I wanted to say. In short, we should concentrate on long-term thinking in the UK. If UK organisations are not prepared to buy UK products, because they are only thinking about short-term value for money, how can we persuade our overseas customers that they should buy our very good products? Secondly, let us learn from the Germans. They are the best exporters in the world, so if we want to rival them, we have to look at why they are so successful.

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[Matthew Hancock]

It is indeed important to have a target for satisfaction, and if three quarters are satisfied or very satisfied, that shows we are heading in the right direction, but more can always be done. For instance, since 2011, a realignment of UKTI has taken place to ensure that it can better serve the needs of UK plc. The process has included: the introduction of stronger senior management with private sector experience; new private sector delivery of trade services in England, with incentivised contracts, which my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham asked for; improving performance overseas and strengthening teams in key growth areas, such as China and India; and reviewing targets to ensure that they incentivise the behaviour of individuals on the ground. The right balance is having strong direct accountability to Ministers, which is appropriate, alongside the right incentives to give individuals on the ground the autonomy to be able to promote trade.

Several hon. Members mentioned—favourably or otherwise—the fact that UKTI reports to two Departments. I am a Minister in two Departments, and it is true that it is necessary to have co-ordination between the two. It would not be right to remove accountability for UKTI from either the Foreign Office or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, because UKTI is precisely about the link between business and our international relations. This is about, on the one hand, strengthening links between UKTI and domestic business, for which the Business Department is responsible, and, on the other hand, strengthening links between UKTI and our diplomatic service, which has happened a great deal over the past two or three years. Both those are valuable and necessary if the service is to perform, so it is therefore right that UKTI reports to a Minister who sits in both Departments but, of course, it is accountable to one Minister—my noble Friend in the other place—so there is a clear line of sight for ministerial accountability.

Several hon. Members talked about the links between UKTI and the Department for International Development. UKTI has an aid-funded business service that works with DFID to try to ensure that opportunities for procurement through DFID, not least from SMEs, are valuable. UKTI holds seminars with businesses, including SMEs, and it will hold another seminar in November to ensure that SMEs and domestic British companies have the opportunity to make the most of procurement through DFID, which these days, of course, bears the Union Jack.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) talked about the importance of inward investment and the business bank. It is vital to ensure that finance is available for exports, and funding for lending and strengthening the domestic private banking system are important parts of that. We are also seeing the growth of challenger banks, which are increasingly providing business finance. We will, of course, have the first ever British business bank, which is being set up precisely to look at the sorts of investments that he talked about. It is right that the British business bank does not take direct instruction from Ministers for each loan because, quite properly, they have to be made on a commercial basis.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Will my hon. Friend examine the relationship between UK Export Finance and the commercial banks? My constituents have said that some commercial banks—not all but some, including very large ones—do not seem to be interested in promoting export finance and are unaware of the new products that are available. As the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said, they are not interested in exports at all. Will the Minister challenge the major UK banks to say what they are doing to promote exports?

[Matthew Hancock]

I can go one step further because we have already been raising those challenges with UK banks to ensure that the facilities on offer are better integrated into their services. My hon. Friend will also know that the GREAT campaign to which many hon. Members referred, which brings together the promotion of UK export under one strong brand, is being piloted domestically in the north-east of England to promote export by UK companies in addition to Britain overseas, as has been the case hitherto. The promotion of the different Government schemes available for British-based businesses will be brought together under that brand in the pilot, which I hope is successful and can be rolled out further, to do exactly what he talks about.

Regarding the broad discussion about the recognition of UKTI, I strongly agree that it is important to ensure that every business, as appropriate, knows about UKTI and its services. We are doing an awful lot to try to make that happen, not least through local engagement. More than 100 constituency seminars have been put on by UKTI with local MPs, serving about 150 constituencies. A seminar in my constituency was very well attended and has led to increased contacts between UKTI and local businesses. If any Member wants UKTI to come to their constituency, we can look at that, because I think that we have been able to meet every request that has been made. Such events mean that UKTI, with the help of the local MP, can reach businesses that it has not yet reached. I am sure that the hon. Member for Hartlepool knows of many businesses in Hartlepool, so that is the sort of thing that we can put on for MPs of all types.