Trade and Investment

Lord Empey Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I want to make a brief contribution in the gap. It is encouraging that the Minister is in his current post. Having someone who has been at the centre of government in the past five years come into this post I hope illustrates that the Government are taking the issue much more seriously and putting our exports and trade further up the agenda. I wish him well in his new task.

Like other noble Lords, I was privileged to be a member of the Select Committee on SMEs and exports in 2012, to which the noble Lord, Lord Popat, referred. I commend our report to the Minister for consideration because there are important lessons to be learned there.

The principal reason why I wanted to speak is that I have the honour of being a vice-president at the Institute of Export. The Minister will know that the institute is an educational charity that has existed since 1935. It is an Ofqual-regulated body, which allows it to give qualifications up to degree standard to students, both young and old, with various levels of experience in exports. Listening to the debate and the very significant contributions—some very encouraging, others more worrisome—there is one thing missing. As a nation we no longer value to the same extent as many of our competitors people in business, in trade or who are exporting. We do not give it the same amount of priority.

All of us can come here and ask for more money for this service, for health, for transport or for infrastructure —we are all good at it. Indeed, if we did, we could pump up expenditure with very little difficulty. But the fact is we are less good at telling Governments how this money is to be provided and where it is coming from. We have not had a trade surplus since 1983, if my memory serves me correctly. Obviously that cannot go on. I ask a simple question: would you allow someone to perform dental work on you if that person did not have a qualification in dentistry? Would you allow somebody to fix your car if they had not been trained in fixing cars? I suspect not, but we are quite happy to have people come into exporting who are not trained in exports. We are quite happy not to train people, to give them qualifications, or even to give them tax incentives to be trained in exports. The basic knowledge that qualifications in exports can give is a very simple thing. If we prioritise that, such as through providing a tax incentive for people who are trained in export qualifications, that would be one small step to help businesses move forward.

The far bigger issue is the attitude of our country. We just do not put the same value on other skills as some of our major competitors, such as the Germans. The title “Herr Engineer” is really big among our German colleagues; here, it is a person with an oily rag in their back pocket. That is the core issue that is wrong with our approach. I hope, with the Minister in his new role and with the profile and contacts that he has, that perhaps we will be able to break through this barrier. Many people talk about glass ceilings; we have a concrete ceiling in this country that we need to break through to get people to realise that we have to do trade to pay for the public services that we all want.