UK Trade Performance

Lord Bellingham Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

I just wish the noble Baroness had been at breakfast this morning at No. 10 Downing Street, where my noble friend Lord Petitgas and I hosted 16 SMEs which are exporters to Europe and elsewhere. They reported on how their businesses are trading up and that they now have the opportunity to trade around the world beyond Europe. I have been through the numbers; they do not lie. The numbers say that in terms of our manufacturing there has been no difference between Europe and the rest of the world. There are of course individual circumstances and individual companies where there have been ups and downs. That is business, but, overall, we are very clear that our SMEs have a great appetite to export. We need to get more of them exporting—as I said, 300,000 out of 2.5 million VAT-registered companies do so; I personally feel that we should push that up to half a million. We can do that, especially with the new digital industries coming through. Certainly, I would be very happy to introduce the noble Baroness to a number of the export champions today. Some of them are actually bringing manufacturing back—onshoring manufacturing —to the UK following Brexit. That is a very pleasing development.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his optimistic and dynamic Statement about the economy and these trade figures. Can he confirm again that the UK’s exports are at an all-time high? The UK is the largest net exporter of financial and insurance services in the world. Those are surely staggering figures, and all of us ought to make more of them.

Can I ask the Minister to refer again to the new border checks that will be put on animal and plant products, as raised by the Lib Dem spokesman a moment ago? A number of trade associations estimate that these new checks will cost in the region of £2 billion per year. I think we all agree that there needs to be no let-up in the maintenance of standards and that we need consistency across Europe, particularly post-Brexit —farmers and the rural community will demand nothing less. However, is there not an argument for looking at more of a light-touch regime and relying on spot checks based on intelligence-led—perhaps communications intelligence-led—policing of individual consignments rather than imposing this very large potential blanket burden?

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

That is exactly the regime being implemented. We might even consider that some of the delays in implementing the regime are precisely for that reason—to make sure that it is light touch and not a blanket position.

We have a very interesting future on the border, largely because of the Northern Ireland situation. We had to solve the problem of how to make a meaningful trade border without recreating a hard border. The only way to do that is digital and through self-certification and pre-checking. Hence, we have ended up with the green lane and red lane and the trusted trader system—which the rest of the world is now going to adopt—where you pre-certify your goods and check them before they go through the border. The CEO of the Channel Tunnel recently said that trade is moving through the tunnel faster than when we were in the EU, because it is all on a QR code on the phone that is pre-checked and pre-certified. You certify where it is going to and what goods need to be checked. The checking being done is therefore on a confirmatory basis—an exceptional basis—and not on a blanket basis. If we include the Electronic Trade Documents Act and the single trade window, the direction of travel in the next five years will be to collapse trade very quickly into, in effect, a digital passport, which will speed things up considerably.

Yes, there will be costs in putting in place a border, but I can see you and raise you on the benefits that will come from a digital border.