Question to the Department for International Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, what recent assessment he has made of the level of business interest in the great.gov.uk digital platform.

Great.gov.uk is a digital platform with a suite of digital tools built to help UK businesses expand their reach overseas and secure their place on the global stage.

UK and overseas marketing activity and DIT’s commercial partnerships are used to promote the platform.

In the 14 months since great.gov.uk was launched in November 2016, great.gov.uk has been visited by nearly 2.8 million unique users. Of these:

• The Invest tool, which promotes the UK as an obvious destination for inward investment, has received over 764,000 online visits with over 1,200 enquiries
• The Export Opportunities tool has received over 67,000 responses from UK businesses to 13,000 published export opportunities, which have been gathered and published by our network of in-post Embassy and High Commission trade experts, as well as overseas partner stakeholders
• The Trade Profile tool has published over 2,600 verified UK business profiles, presenting them to a wide network of prospective overseas buyers and partners
• The Export Readiness tool, which went live in December 2017 and helps UK businesses see how export-ready they are, and presents them with tailored information has already been used by 710 companies.

Activity is planned to promote this platform further to the UK and overseas businesses.