To ask Her Majesty's Government how much money will be granted to the Department of International Trade in order to safeguard trade promotion jobs; and whether this figure will be enough to ensure that the Department has the resources necessary to fulfil its responsibilities.
Answered on
24 May 2018
The Department for International Trade inherited a Spending Review 2015 settlement that requires it to generate efficiencies in its services. This includes trade promotion activity.
On top of this settlement, the Department received additional funding of £79.4m over four years at the 2016 Autumn Statement to fund an expansion of the Trade Policy Group. This year the Treasury has allocated additional funding of £74m to cover essential EU exit spending to transition existing EU trade agreements with third countries, build capability for negotiating new trade deals in the future and for dealing with market access, trade disputes and trade remedies issues. This will also fund the digital systems and infrastructure to support this activity. This amounts to a total of up to £97.3m of additional funding in 2018-19.
The Department is carefully prioritising its work to ensure it can fulfil its responsibilities and is working with the Treasury as it does this.