In the Industrial Strategy white paper released this week, there were further signs that the UK government will look to take more of an active role in energising the UK’s economy, with exports playing a key role.
Key points
The paper titled ‘Industrial Strategy: building a Britain fit for the future’, said the government will do the following to ‘support businesses to access international markets’:
- Conduct a review of national export strategy with the support of business; reporting in the Spring next year this review will discuss how to:
- Provide better support to medium and larger businesses for accessing new markets
- Better identify smaller businesses with potential to export
- Signpost to information resources about export, and finance
- Work with private sector to improve quality of export advice
- Strengthen governmental relationships to make export opportunities better realised
- Install nine UK Trade Commissioners to promote trade policy in the regions
- Build on UKEF initiatives, including a new guarantee to banks to increase liquidity in supply chains
- Create ‘Team UK’ consortiums of businesses of all sizes to bid for global infrastructure contracts
- Pilot intensive export growth support for scale-ups and ambitious medium sized businesses
- Work with Local Enterprise Partnership Growth Hubs to ensure joined up business growth advice
- Further develop the great.gov.uk platform
- Continue overseas investment to facilitate more export opportunities in new markets
We support the further thought and strategic planning mentioned here – especially in terms of joining up the support landscape for businesses looking to drive their exports. We will be keen to see what actions are set following the export strategy report next year.
Exporting is easy – when you know how to do it!
As always, we will be speaking to government on behalf of our members to ensure all the UK’s exporters’ concerns are listened to ahead of this strategy report. We are conscious that much more needs to be done to give businesses and individuals the skills needed to do international trade successfully and compliantly.
While the government is saying the right things in terms of making more businesses aware of the export opportunities out there, we are keen to add to this that exporting is only easy when you have the skills and knowledge of how to do it properly.