China export deals have left Britain’s business spreadsheet wearing a lanyard and describing projected activity as if it has already bought a second home.
The government announced £2.2 billion in export deals, around £2.3 billion in estimated market access gains over five years and hundreds of millions of pounds in investment outcomes after the Prime Minister’s visit to China. These are significant announcements. They are also the sort of announcements that make a spreadsheet stand up, clear its throat and ask whether anyone has seen its ceremonial handshake.
The figures include projected exports, investment commitments and estimates based on removing market access barriers. They do not mean every British company can immediately pack a van for Shanghai and return with a growth story. One firm tried it. The van contained three catalogues, a stapler and a sales director who had forgotten the adaptor.
Trade figures need context, contracts and time. They do not necessarily need a branded wall made from the word “momentum”, although the Ministry of Commercial Nodding has commissioned one. It has installed a small bell for every time somebody says “opportunity”. The bell has already been declared a strategic asset.
Director Penelope Margin praised the announcement. “Exports are serious business,” she said, in an invented remark from the department’s fictional communications universe. “That is why we have issued the tea trolley a badge and asked it to identify its growth pathway.”
Market access is less glamorous than a deal announcement, but it matters. Rules, tariffs and approval processes can determine whether a company reaches a customer or spends five years explaining a form to a second form. Nigel Invoice, deputy keeper of overseas receipts, calls this “removing the invisible gate while everyone else poses beside the ribbon.”
The whisky tariff reduction, new company investments and projected export figures give the announcement plenty of material. Yet each number arrives with a footnote, a timescale or a methodology. The figures are useful. They are not a magic wand with a balance sheet attached.
Businesses want customers, certainty and someone who answers an email. Policy offers those things after a consultation, a roundtable and a queue for coffee that has developed its own tariff regime. The spreadsheet has now met its targets, shaken hands with a pie chart and submitted the lanyard as an expense. The expense form has rejected it for insufficient proof of neck.
Source: Department for Business and Trade.
