Portfolio Question Time – in the Scottish Parliament at on 10 December 2025.
Tess White
Conservative
To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the impact of its export growth strategy, “A Trading Nation”, including what metrics it has used to assess this. (S6O-05262)
Richard Lochhead
Scottish National Party
The Scottish Government has provided regular updates on the delivery of “A Trading Nation”, our policy on the issue, since it was published back in 2019. We published a full progress report in 2022 and we have also published an independent evaluation of the delivery and impact of “A Trading Nation”, with a further update due next year.
In 2024-25, Scottish Enterprise secured a record forecast of £2.46 billion in future export sales, which was an increase of more than 10 per cent from the previous year. However, as the member might be aware, Scotland’s international exports remain just below 21 per cent of gross domestic product against our 2029 target of 25 per cent, which reflects the scale of the challenge that is being experienced in trade as a result of global uncertainty and the impacts of Brexit.
Tess White
Conservative
Recently released data shows that United Kingdom exports have grown by 4.6 per cent while Scotland’s have fallen by 7 per cent. Since 2018, Scotland’s international exports have fallen by 4 per cent in real terms, and instead of rising to 25 per cent—the target that is set out in “A Trading Nation”—they now sit at just 20 per cent. In light of those outcomes, will the Minister admit that the Scottish National Party Government is failing on trade and failing businesses that export?
Richard Lochhead
Scottish National Party
I am astonished by the points that Tess White raised in her question. It is clear that Scottish exports to Europe were very important to the overall picture of Scottish exports. Therefore, Brexit, which was introduced by her party, has really damaged Scotland’s export efforts. We have a lot of work to do to recover from that. It would help the Parliament if she at least recognised that Brexit is the key factor behind the decline in exports from Scotland to Europe in the statistics that she mentioned.
Daniel Johnson
Labour
The Minister is doing an admirable job in defending the Government’s record, but the target is 25 per cent and exports fell from 22 per cent to 20 per cent last year. Worse than that, the figures show that exports to the rest of the UK have fallen by 10 per cent. What is the Government doing to help exporters to export to our biggest and most proximate market—the rest of the UK?
Richard Lochhead
Scottish National Party
The member is quite right that the UK is a very important market to Scotland. We have more than £90 billion in exports, much of which goes to the rest of the UK, and there are a lot of international exports as well. We now have a six-point export plan to address some of the challenges.
Scotland has been disproportionately hit—I repeat the word “disproportionately”—by Brexit compared with other parts of the UK, which is why we face the challenges that we currently do.
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