Africa: Commercial Opportunities and Exports

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, following that great tour de force, your Lordships can safely go back to sleep again. I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Popat on and thanking him for securing this important debate and introducing it so comprehensively. No one is more qualified to lead our discussion than him. I record my admiration for his outstanding work in his role as a trade envoy.

I declare my interest as director of a company that works in Africa, particularly in Uganda. I have therefore seen at first hand the respect with which my noble friend is held in the Government in Entebbe. From the President down, it is almost impossible to meet any Minister or anyone of influence in the business community who does not know my noble friend. More than that, he is ferocious at promoting UK businesses to gain access to whomever they need in Uganda, with charm and determination. He is now doing the same thing in Rwanda, where there is a great appetite to do business with UK companies, and he is doing his best to help open up the DRC to UK businesses. I recognise, having worked in the DRC some years ago, both the vast potential, as my noble friend said, and the difficulties of working in that country. Let us all hope that situation continues to improve.

I hope the Minister will be able to clarify the Government’s position on trade envoys, which all noble Lords have mentioned. I believe I am right in saying that the post was invented by the previous Government, and they have been a great success. I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that the new Government will continue them and that they will not make the mistake of reappointing trade envoys on a party-political basis. Trade envoys are not political, and we want the best man or woman for the job, regardless of political affiliation.

Some 70% of the population of Africa is below 25 years of age, so it is a growing market. In just 40 years, it will become home to more people than India and China combined. Some 24 countries in Africa are anglophone, and around 16 have common law legal systems. Having run a business in China for 10 years, I cannot emphasise enough to your Lordships how important this is. In China, where the courts do not really work—and, if they do, no European company can access them—legal agreements are simply not enforceable and are, frankly, not worth the paper they are written on. In African countries, where the law is loosely based on English law, it is a different matter. A lawyer in Kampala can speak on the telephone to a lawyer here in the UK to discuss the detail of a legal agreement, speaking not only in English but in the same legal language. For UK businesses, the advantages of language and legal systems are significant, and we should do all we can to advertise them because this is not widely recognised.

Although we are always told that we should hang our heads in shame as a former colonial power, my experience is that British business is welcome and encouraged throughout Africa. It is almost impossible to know which opportunities are best. Infrastructure is one, of course: across Africa, they need roads, hospitals, schools and houses. Financial services have huge potential and there is much need for UK banks and insurance. There is a growing market for virtually every sort of retail product noble Lords could imagine—and, of course, sport. The UK Premier League has more fans in Africa than in the UK.

I am delighted to say that the various embassies and high commissions throughout Africa have, as my noble friend Lord Risby said, become much more commercially focused and give first class advice to people trying to enter those markets. That is not well known in the UK, and the Government would do well to make more of this, both marketing it—telling people about it—and encouraging it. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will repeat the Africa investment summit, which virtually every noble Lord mentioned? It was such a success, and everybody regrets so much the one that was cancelled.

In closing, I make a final, slightly more controversial, point. The previous Government supported the trophy hunting Bill, which was in both parties’ manifestos at the election. I realise that our elected colleagues lose all sense of reason when animal issues come up, but Governments need to be a bit more adult. The ban on trophy hunting is, apart from anything else, a measure restricting trade from six of the most important southern African countries. It makes no economic difference to us but it implies criticism of friends and allies in Africa of the sort that the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, mentioned: people who have taken deep offence at the high-handed way in which colleagues here in the UK have addressed this matter in both Houses. Poor behaviour like this has caused and is causing a serious rift between people and Governments who are friends and with whom we should be developing stronger commercial links, not insulting them in a way that borders on racist. I hope that the Minister will take that back to colleagues.