George Osborne is not only going to miss his target of £1 trillion in British exports by 2020, he is going to miss it by 14 years, MPs have been told.
At a hearing called by the House of Commons business select committee into Britain’s poor export performance, leading trade bodies queued up to say that UK companies have no chance of hitting the chancellor’s overseas trade target. They laid much of the blame for the shortfall at the fractured strategies of the government’s key export agency, UK Trade and Investment.
Asked by MPs whether Britain’s exporters could hit the £1 trillion export target set by Mr Osborne in his 2012 Budget, Adam Marshall, policy director of the British Chambers of Commerce, said that he did not expect the goal to be hit until 2034.
Lee Hopley, chief economist of the EEF, the manufacturers and engineering bosses federation — 90 per cent of whose members are exporters — said: “The consensus view is that is unlikely, and that is putting it diplomatically.” Ms Hopley said that to hit the target, UK exports would have to rise 12 per cent a year for the next five years.
She said that UKTI’s relationship with exporters had suffered from changes of tack, in which at different times it has prioritised large experienced exporters, backed medium-sized companies or encouraged micro firms into going overseas. “UK net trade is woeful and something needs to change,” she said. “If we are serious, we should be doing all of these.”
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Simon Moore, the CBI’s international director, said the employers’ organisation believed that the 2020 target would undershoot by £300 billion. He said that the ability to rally British exporters, Mr Osborne’s “march of the makers”, had been hindered by the fact that in the past five years UKTI had had four chief executives, answerable to four different ministers. A fifth minister, Mark Price, at present the chief executive of Waitrose, is to be appointed to the job and to the House of Lords next month, after Lord Maude of Horsham’s unexpected decision to quit.
Ian Wright, director-general of the Food and Drink Federation, said that the UKTI had become “less impressive” in recent months under Catherine Raines, who was promoted from her post leading UKTI China last autumn.
Mike Cherry, policy director of the Federation of Small Businesses, said that despite hopes that the smallest companies would help the export push, three quarters of his federation’s members would not or could not export.