Commonwealth Countries: Trade

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Wednesday 15th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox]

It is my pleasure to acknowledge that. Everyone is working together. We are able to place our experts from UKTI in embassies and missions, and we are extremely grateful to them.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

Given the importance that the Government attach to involving SMEs in exporting, can the Minister tell us what progress has been made in this area in relation to Commonwealth countries and what the strategy is?

[Baroness Wilcox]

Many SMEs look first to the nearer markets in the European single community because of the shared regulatory regime and the proximity of them. Therefore it takes extra effort on our part to make sure that we help SMEs when they go further afield. We are certainly doing so and I know for a fact that at the Intellectual Property Office we have just started to put envoys into other countries to be able to help small and medium-sized businesses when they try to export to countries to which they would find it quite daunting to export if they did not have the help of the Intellectual Property Office and the embassies.