Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of proposed reductions to the number of roles in his Department’s overseas network on supporting British exporters abroad.

We are creating an overseas network which is ready to deliver for British business.

In June we published our Trade Strategy including a vision for a more effective and agile overseas network, shaped by our assessment of the markets, sectors and opportunities that will drive UK economic growth for the next decade and beyond.

We will focus more of our resource on attracting the high value inward investment the economy needs and tackling market access barriers that hold British businesses back. However, directly supporting British exporters will remain the biggest part of what DBT teams do overseas.