India is a dynamic, fast-growing trade partner, and a free trade agreement offers the opportunity to deepen our already strong relationship, which was worth £24.3 billion in 2021. Round 5 of trade agreement negotiations began on Monday 18 July and will continue until the end of next week. We have already closed 12 chapters and continue to work hard to reach a balanced and comprehensive agreement. We are in detailed negotiations and discussions on texts now and are confident in our progress with India, as we work towards a comprehensive FTA.
I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. Clearly, doing a trade deal with India is complex and difficult. The European Union, for example, has been trying to do one for 25 years without success, so I wish her and her team well on negotiations. Clearly, it will be challenging to achieve it by Diwali, but I know that she is committed to doing so. Will she set out, for the benefit of the House, the benefits to the UK and to India of the free trade deal she is undertaking?
Our priority in talks has always been to address the significant barriers that businesses face in exporting to India. In the past decade, UK services exports to India have increased by 60% in current prices, totalling £3.6 billion in 2021. However, the reality is that India’s barriers to services trade are still relatively high compared with those of other trading partners, so this FTA will provide a great opportunity to address those barriers and support the UK’s service sector, in particular, to do business in India’s growing markets.
The Secretary of State must know that Huddersfield and West Yorkshire are the beating heart of the manufacturing sector; so many firms are good at exporting, and have expertise and a history of trade with India, but they are still finding huge barriers to any exporting effort they make. Can her Department not really step up the action to help, especially for the small and medium-sized enterprises?
As always, the hon. Member is a champion of businesses in his constituency. He is exactly right: those barriers to trade are still difficult, and the free trade agreement brings us the opportunity to work with India to strip away those market access barriers. We are listening, obviously, through the consultation process. On the FTA process, at the beginning of the year we asked businesses to talk to us and share their own experiences and the particular areas where they wanted us to negotiate reductions in barriers. I hope that we are doing that. I would be very happy to hear directly from the hon. Member’s businesses whether they have particular areas in mind. We are looking to reach a broad and comprehensive agreement that will strip away many of those market access barriers, be they tariff areas around goods or, indeed, those very many areas of service sector activity, which will benefit both sides. We have some highly mutually compatible business opportunities to work on together.
8. What steps she plans to take to help increase trade with the EU.
Free Trade Agreements: Workers Rights
UK Arms Exports: Transparency
Export of UK Services
Barriers to Global Trade
Exports to the EU: Devolved Nations
SMEs: Trade with the EU
Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership
Australia and New Zealand FTAs: UK Food Sector
UK Exports
Free Trade Agreements: Scrutiny
Topical Questions
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Trade (Andrew Griffith)
ConservativeArundel and South Downs
This Government continue to seek an excellent trading relationship with our former EU partners, just as we do with other international markets. Hon. Members will be pleased to note that goods exported to the EU for May 2022 were over 17% higher than the 2018 monthly average, so trade here is already increasing. To increase exports, we need to get more British businesses exporting, and to do that the Department has initiatives such as the Export Academy and the export champions scheme that help to give them the knowledge and practical help that they need.
Research by the London School of Economics has found a huge drop in the number of trade relationships between UK businesses and the EU, with a 30% decrease in the variety of goods sold. That is a clear indication of the damage that the Government’s Brexit deal is doing to smaller businesses, which cannot afford the increased costs of administration. Will the Minister detail how many small and medium-sized enterprises applied to the Brexit support fund and how many were successful? May I also ask the Minister, on behalf of the small and medium-sized businesses in my constituency, where is the urgency to find solutions to enable SMEs to trade with our EU neighbours once again?
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for your welcome. I also thank the hon. Member for her question. Of course, she did not support the EU trade agreement that this Government put in place, so it is quite rich for her now to turn around and say that we are not increasing exports. In my previous answer, I talked about the many interventions that this Government are making, including internationalisation and the Brexit support fund of £38 million that is going to small and medium-sized enterprises to help them overcome the barriers that the protectionist EU puts in place.
I, too, welcome the Minister to what I hope is a long and fruitful career. My question is about services, not goods. Our biggest export is the English language—it is the lingua franca of the world, isn’t it?—but the language schools that teach teenagers over the summer months are collapsing at quite a scary rate. Only seven out of 20 remain in Hastings, and there are three in Ealing, but before 2019 there were five. Will the Minister—whoever it is at any particular time—and their officials sit down with me and the trade bodies? They say that there has been an 80% drop in business, which is now going to Malta and Ireland. We can do better than this in global Britain. Can we sit down to talk about removing those things for this once lucrative—
Education is indeed one of the great opportunities, and the lingua franca of English is one of the benefits as we seek to do trade deals not just with our friends in Europe but across the whole world. I am very happy to talk to my colleagues in the Department for Education and between us respond to the hon. Lady.
As we look to the future, does my hon. Friend agree that it goes beyond the EU, as do the opportunities for trade around the world? From my constituency of Watford to the rest of the world, we have the opportunity to build industry and opportunity for everyone.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He is a champion of small business in his constituency. That is why it is so important that, as we seek to do trade deals such as the comprehensive and progressive trans-Pacific partnership and those with the Gulf, India, Canada and many more, we have SME chapters and SME preference within them.