UK Trade & Investment
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Charles Hendry(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Charles Hendry
My hon. Friend brings me absolutely beautifully to the final part of my comments, which is on exactly that point. We are incredibly well served by our missions around the world, and by the extent to which our ambassadors and their teams are now very focused on industry and trade opportunities.
Much as I and other trade envoys would love to meet every company in Shrewsbury that wants to become involved in a country, my job is primarily to help open the doors of Government Ministers in countries where often there is not a regular flow of foreign Ministers going through, so as to push that trade process forward. However, we could not do it without the expertise and focus of others. The extraordinary growth that we are experiencing in some of those markets—there has been a doubling of trade with Russia, and a trebling of trade with some countries in the middle east—shows how that policy has been working.
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman’s point about the quality of British higher education and universities was very well made. On his travels, does he pick up, as I do, on the fact that there is great concern about the complications of applying for visas to study in Britain—the tier 4 visa system—and about the cost of higher education in Britain? From my experience of local universities in my constituency, I know that we are losing students to other places because of those complications, and the message that I get from those universities and from my travels is that we should simplify the system to continue to attract students.
Charles Hendry
The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. In the countries that I have been going to, I have found that most of the students who come to the UK either self-pay or are on Government scholarships. Kazakhstan sends 9,000 students overseas, and 4,000 of those have come to Britain on full scholarships. We have been the country of choice because of the quality of our universities. There is a case for removing from the immigration figures the number of students who are coming here to study, because students can become an easy target when it comes to trying to bring down the immigration figures, when our ability to attract them is actually a tremendous national asset that we should be looking to capitalise on as best we can.
Nazarbayev university in Kazakhstan is partnering with Cambridge university and University college London, and I hope that in due course it will partner with Edinburgh university and other universities as well. All its students are taught in English; they are trilingual, speaking Kazakh, Russian and English. Our universities have a fantastic chance to make a contribution, and to ensure that the next generation of people coming through have a strongly pro-British approach, at least in part a British education, and a willingness to do business with this country.
The opportunities for us around the world are simply extraordinary and UKTI deserves a great deal of the credit for the progress that we are making in opening up markets.
National Policy Statements (Energy)
Debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Charles Hendry
Charles Hendry
My hon. Friend makes an important point. There is a strong case for smaller, local waste facilities because people understand the connection between them and their local community and the waste it has produced. We are also seeing a range of new technologies coming on, such as pyrolysis and the gasification process, which are very clean technologies and which we are very keen to encourage. The national policy statements apply only to larger facilities. My concern about any suggestion of taking this element out of the national policy statements is that the Infrastructure Planning Commission would then have no guidance whatever in making a determination on a large plant. That would create havoc; it would be much worse for local communities and it would create many additional anxieties. Therefore, the way in which we have incorporated it in the statements, which are to be read in conjunction with the waste review, is the right way to approach this in an holistic manner.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
The Minister is discussing renewables and technology. Is he not concerned at the relatively weak state of British manufacturing’s capacity for solar generation, either for hot water or for electricity? Does he envisage Government intervention to try to strengthen those necessary and valuable industries in order to take advantage of an very fast-growing market?
Charles Hendry
Again, the hon. Gentleman raises an important point. We have made changes to the feed-in tariff to focus on microgeneration, as was the original intention. The nature of the tariff will drive forward significant investment in solar. We have to recognise that the UK is not a game changer in the pricing structure of solar, because our market will always be smaller than that of countries where there is greater potential for solar. Nevertheless, we want solar to achieve what it can in this country, and we want an industry to grow up to support that and deliver the products.