The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Wednesday 1 May.
“With permission, I would like to make a Statement on the UK’s trade performance.
When I am overseas, as Secretary of State for Business and Trade, other countries speak with nothing but admiration and respect for what we are achieving in Britain. As the chief executive officer of Nissan Global recently remarked:
‘It is surprising to hear people asking why they should choose the UK’—
because, in his words,
‘we have both great people and great talent here’.
Certainly, in the firms that I have visited up and down this country, I am proud to see our employers and exporters firing on all cylinders. Yet, when I return to Westminster, some people seem unaware of the progress that we have made as an independent trading nation. Today, I want to put that right.
The latest trade data, published by the Office for National Statistics and also by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, should give everyone in this House cause for celebration and renewed pride in our country. They confirmed that the strategy the public voted for on 23 June 2016 is delivering. Leaving the European Union was a vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom, and we are seeing results. Since that referendum, the UK economy has grown faster than that of Germany, Italy and Japan, and contrary to gloomy predictions, our manufacturing productivity has grown more than that of Germany, France, Italy and the USA.
According to the latest UN statistics, the UK, outside the EU, became the world’s fourth biggest exporter in 2022, overtaking Japan, the Netherlands and France. The value of UK exports was £862 billion in the 12 months to February 2024. That builds on progress we have made in growing our exports outside the confines of the EU. Exports are now 2% above 2018 when adjusted for inflation. Services exports are at an all-time high. A summary of these figures, along with the most recent business and labour statistics, were published on GOV.UK in April. Together, they definitively disprove the claims of those who prophesied a catastrophic economic collapse when we left the EU to become a sovereign nation.
Today, we are selling not only more services to EU countries than ever before, but record amounts of services to the rest of the world, too. We are the largest net exporter of financial and insurance services in the world. Far from an exodus of businesses out of the UK, European firms have doubled down on their commitments to the UK. In 2020, Unilever chose to headquarter exclusively in London over Rotterdam. Since 2022, Cadbury has brought more chocolate production back to the UK from Germany. In the same year, Shell moved its headquarters out of the Netherlands and into the UK.
We are tearing down the barriers to trade. Since the start of 2022, we have resolved barriers all over the world, estimated to be worth more than £15 billion to UK businesses over a five-year period. In 2023, this was equivalent to removing around £1 million-worth of trade barriers every single hour. British pork farmers are benefiting from newly agreed access to the Mexican market, which is worth £80 million over the same period. Our work on bottle labelling for UK gin and whisky has driven up exports to Chile by tonnes. We have ended the US ban on British beef and lamb.
We are working to deliver a strategy on a situation that faces the whole world, not just our friends and neighbours in Europe. This is crucial if we are to lock Britain into the future of where global growth will be. In 2022, the EU took more than 60% of UK goods exports. In 2023, this was 47%, because UK goods exports to the EU remained broadly flat, while exports to non- EU countries rose by around 70% in real terms.
We are going further to seize the benefits of an independent trade policy. We have deals with 73 countries around the world, with more to come under this Government, plus the most comprehensive trade deal to which the EU has ever agreed. Later this year, we will join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the world’s biggest trading blocs. This will mean that more than 99% of UK goods will be eligible for zero tariffs in some of the Asia Pacific’s most dynamic economies. British business is set to benefit.
As well as service exports, where Britain excels, our top goods sales were in cars, mechanical-powered generators, medicines, pharmaceutical products and aircraft components. We have one of the world’s largest manufacturing sectors. Productivity in our manufacturing industry has grown faster than in every other G7 nation since 2010. Hundreds of businesses in steel, chemicals and other sectors stand to benefit from the newly introduced British industry supercharger, which is bringing energy costs down for key industries. Our £4.5 billion advanced manufacturing plan is opening new markets and removing obstacles to growth while helping to crowd in new funding for plants and factories throughout the UK. Every penny the UK Government spend on manufacturing is matched fivefold by the growth creators of the private sector. This pro-investment approach is working: the UK’s automotive sector attracted £3.7 billion -worth of greenfield foreign investment in 2022 alone.
The Labour party will remember Mr Alastair Campbell, who asserted during the referendum that if we leave the EU, Nissan will leave. Nissan is still here. The two new 100% electric models are set to be built at its Sunderland this year. More Minis are rolling off production lines in Oxfordshire today, thanks to a £600 million investment from BMW. These are firms that look for opportunities the world over and decide that the UK is the place to be. Listening to some of the remarks made in this House and elsewhere, people would think that our country was not worth investing in at all. Let us be clear: the British ingenuity and industry that made this country prosper in the past still exists today, and even if those on the Opposition Benches cannot see it, international investors certainly can.
The statistics published by my department show that the UK’s inward FDI stock has reached more than £2 trillion. Our FDI stock is the highest in Europe—more than Germany, France and Italy combined. The most recent OECD data show that our employment rate is higher than that of the US, France and Italy.
The regulatory freedoms that we gained by leaving the EU have allowed our smarter regulation programme to cut the red tape that has been holding them back. We have already reformed the working time directive reporting requirements, saving businesses up to £1 billion per year. We recently announced that we will raise the thresholds that determine company size, reducing burdens on smaller businesses, and remove low-value and overlapping reporting requirements.
Those changes will make reporting simpler and deliver savings of around £150 million per year to UK companies, with small and medium-sized companies benefiting by around £145 million. It is no surprise that the most recent NatWest SME business activity index shows that output is increasing strongly, driven by renewed manufacturing sector expansion, and companies’ activity expectations remain upbeat. These things do not happen by accident, and I hope that honourable Members on both sides of the House will welcome those figures.
I have no doubt that this Statement will disappoint some people, as it does not align with the story that they want to tell of a nation riven by injustice and economic stagnation, clinging to Europe for any hope for the future. That is not to say that everything is perfect —of course there is still more to do—but we are not alone in our problems. Ministers in other countries are quick to remind me about supply-chain issues affecting everything from getting car components to stocking supermarket shelves. They tell me about how they are coping with problems in the jobs market, as societies from Germany to Japan get older.