Government is failing to boost exporters despite millions spent on ad campaign

The number of British businesses selling products abroad hasn't changed in the last two years and Brexit will make things harder

Too many British businesses are reluctant to join the nation's exporters (Getty Images)

The battering Brexit delivered to the pound appears to have had one benefit: It has made exports cheaper, and thus helped to narrow Britain’s trade deficit with the rest of the world from the gigantic to the merely large.

According to the Office for National Statistics it fell from £5.8bn in September to £2bn in October. A reason to feel cheerful, as some of the Brexit backing media would have you believe, amid excitable talk of record exports?

Hold on to your shipping containers for just a moment. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICEAW) has just released the results of a survey that looks at the Government’s attempts to stimulate exports over a rather longer term. The picture it paints is not a pretty one.

The ICAEW says that despite a £1tn export target and an extensive Government ad campaign designed to encourage businesses to contribute to reaching it, only 53 per cent of them are actually selling their produce abroad, unchanged from 2014.

Meanwhile nearly all (96 per cent) of the non-exporters that the organisation spoke to have no plans to sell overseas in the next 12 months.

“Come talk to us about exporting,” say the ads. “It’s great!” Or something like that.

Unfortunately the limited number of businesses that are thinking of exporting don’t think much of the idea of approaching the Government for help.

The ICAEW, which talked to 647 members working in private businesses, reports that less than a fifth of would-be exporters would use Government departments which promote international trade, such as the Department for International Trade, for information and advice.

It looks very much like the millions of pounds that have been pumped into the campaign over the past two years have been wasted.

So what to do? The ICAEW wants the Government to change its approach, and start funnelling money directly to exporters rather than pouring it into the pockets of ad agencies and broadcasters. It proposes a voucher scheme to help with the (high) cost of researching and entering new markets. That might prove to be rather more cost effective than the current strategy.

If ministers don't like that idea they could, at the very least, talk to some of the businesses that are considering exporting, but aren’t considering approaching government for help, to ask why. And to ascertain what might encourage them to do so in future.

The trouble is it's often hard to get a message like this through to a government which might very well prefer to point to the figures as evidence of a Brexit export bump. Even if the Office for National Statistics says it’s far to early to read anything into one month of data.

It gets worse when you consider that a large number of the ICAEW members who responded to the survey cited Europe as a key market.

Brexit is going to make exporting into that market very much more difficult. Even if the Government faces down the blinkered backers of a “hard” Brexit, firms will still face the new annoyance of customs checks they didn’t previously encounter, not to mention other barriers and bureaucracy that Brexit will impose on them. Just ask Norway, which is still a part of the single market, a benefit British firms are unlikely to enjoy after this country's EU membership has been consigned to history.