Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of benchmarking UKTI's performance against that of other countries' export agencies.

There is considerable merit in understanding how our competitors’ export agencies are structured and the services they offer. This is something the Exports Implementation Taskforce, which the Secretary of State chairs, looked at in some depth in developing a whole-of-Government approach to exports. This included, UK Trade & Investment participating in a formal benchmarking exercise by the International Trade Centre.

Among the key things found from these comparative reviews is that UKTI employs more people than other countries’ export promotion agencies, but deploys less resource on practical support for exporters (such as interim export managers). Learning from this, UKTI is currently developing some small-scale direct practical support services and products to see what might work in the UK.