UK Exports

Lord Mendelsohn Excerpts

Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, for introducing this debate.

I also use this opportunity to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Marland, who did an excellent job of bringing together and galvanising the Commonwealth’s Trade Ministers. I join him in urging the Government to clarify as quickly as possible that it was not the Government who organised this but the Commonwealth, with whose nations we have a special relationship. As the president of the Commonwealth Jewish Council, I think it is important that our best relationship with that modern, free association of nations is one where they do not believe that we still feel we have a special sense of ownership.

I would like to focus on the export side of the trade debate. Exports account for 30% of Britain’s economy, but our export performance lags behind. We have an annual value of around £500 billion, generated by 223,000 companies, and while the proportion of our companies exporting is comparable with Germany and France our performance on exporting goods lags behind.

I was very interested to read in the last edition of the Sunday Times about its excellent small and medium-sized export 100 list. There was an interesting section where it said:

“The number of companies focusing their efforts on customers in Europe has edged up to 85 companies, from 80 last year. More of the companies, 77 versus 71, are also targeting North America, with Asia seeing a decline as a main market, from 45 companies to 37”.


So our fastest-growing SMEs are focusing exporting on Europe and America, and interest in the Far East is declining. That is a very worrying sign.

A recent study also suggested that, based on past experience, around half of those exporting today might be expected to quit exporting within six years. We are looking for an additional 100,000 companies to be exporting by 2020, but I suggest that if we found ways to support those thinking of quitting exporting, we might get some easy wins.

I join the noble Lords, Lord Haskel and Lord Bilimoria, in regretting that the Budget did not have a single measure of support for exports.

I regret that the noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, had to introduce this debate as it is of such importance that it should have been introduced by a Minister. When the noble Lord, Lord Maude of Horsham, took on his post, he introduced an important debate in this House, which I thought produced a fair degree of consensus and a lot of support. It rested on four pillars, and I would like the Minister to give us some sense of where we stand now, because it was a good strategy for trying to change things.

The first of its pillars was about turbocharging the EU trade agenda by making sure that we implement swiftly the trade agreements that exist. Where do we stand on those currently?

Another was about galvanising across Government, not just UKTI and UK Export Finance. The whole of Government needed to be mobilised, not just the glacial progress that we have with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and all home departments should engage with business sectors to be involved in this. Where are we on this? Has the Department for International Trade, in which exports are a pillar, helped or hindered and what progress has been made?

Another tried to focus on first-time exporters and there was money applied to them. How much progress has been made there?

The noble Lord also made an interesting point about innovation. He pointed to the UK-Israel Tech Hub, which is an important example of bringing together potential partners to look at investment or the potential of exports. Israel, a very small nation, has been able to globalise its trade principally by using American companies. Will we use that as a template to create joint ventures where we can use Britain’s scale to attack other markets, using the high technology in other places?

This is an essential debate and I worry that our performance has been poor. If we do what we have always done, we will get what we have always got. Now is the time to make a significant change and I would like to see the Government coming forward with a serious change strategy.