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Opinion on commercial attachés
June 2008
Commercial Attaché of the Year
Commercial teams at dozens of British embassies around the world are being closed down as the Government cuts support for exporters and switches the public spending emphasis to attracting foreign investment.UK Trade & Investment, the agency that helps firms export and is responsible for inward investment, has pulled out of 41 countries in the past two years and withdrawn support for another 25, leaving firms to fight for themselves in markets such as the Bahamas, Macedonia and Paraguay.
The Chancellor has told the agency to reduce its budget by £35m in the next two years and the burden of the cuts is falling disproportionately on the international network.
This is despite recent research by the Department of Trade and Industry's chief economic adviser that suggests public money has more economic impact when used to help exporters. Foreign firms investing in the UK, the research found, were rarely influenced by the civil servants' sales pitch.
Nevertheless, the Chancellor is pushing ahead with what is presented as a "fundamental transformation of [UKTI's] effectiveness in marketing the UK". He used his Budget speech this year to signal that, while British businesses looking to emerging markets like China and India should receive more support, the agency's focus would be on marketing Britain as a place to do business and so attract inward investment.
New UKTI chief executive Andrew Cahn has until late summer to come up with a plan to deliver this brief. The agency said that in "major, difficult and emerging markets" a full trade service remains on offer and that the value of exports to the 66 countries where there is now only a political presence stood at only £900m in 2003, less than half of 1pc of total exports in that year.
Business groups have already warned that the focus on China and India should not come at the expense of helping exporters to trade in less fashionable markets.
InternationalTrade.co.uk has teamed up with The Daily Telegraph to give timely recognition of the hard work put in by many overseas commercial attachés.
We want to hear your own exporting experiences and, if you did use the resources of a local embassy or consulate, to reward those commercial attachés who have proved the most helpful by short-listing them for our Commercial Attaché of the Year award.
We are also keen to hear from those firms that have not had a good experience to ensure that UKTI gets the feedback it needs to improve the service.
To nominate your commercial attaché, embassy or consulate team and to tell us about poor service, please visit: www.telegraph.co.uk/attache
