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TRADE AND INDUSTRY
Call Centres
Mr. Connarty: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether her Department plans to outsource call centre work to premises outside the United Kingdom. [132109]
Ms Hewitt: There are no plans to outsource overseas the call centres operated by my Department, ACAS, the Small Business Service or British Trade International (which brings together the work of my Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in support of British trade and investment overseas).
The Chief Executives of my Department's other Agencies will reply direct to my hon. Friend.
Combined Heat and Power
Norman Baker: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether the allocation of allowances under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme will benefit low carbon technologies such as combined heat and power. [133115]
Mr. Bradshaw: I have been asked to reply.
The Government are aware of concerns that the EU Emissions Trading Scheme may act as a disincentive for the installation of combined heat and power (CHP) technologies. For this reason we are considering options for the treatment of CHP plants in the process of developing the National Allocation Plan.
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The CHP industry believe that supplying operators in this situation with allowances for free from a limited CHP set-aside may act as an incentive. In this case operators installing new CHP plants would be provided with allowances equal to the difference in emissions between their existing or proposed traditional boiler and the proposed CHP plant. We are considering this and other options in the draft National Allocation Plan which we intend to publish for consultation in early December, giving industry an opportunity to comment on the various options.
Construction Industry
Mr. Nigel Jones: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if she will commission research into the impact of the practice of retentions in the construction industry on the continuing viability of companies and individual traders; and what plans she has to promote legislation on this subject. [134238]
Nigel Griffiths: The DTI reviews all key research on retentions and has no plans to incur expenditure on duplicating independent research. The Government agree with the Trade and Industry Select Committee's views on legislation on retentions in that there is:
- "no attraction in the prospect of engineering their abolition through legislation".
Nigel Griffiths: The Government does not have information on the number of employers paying less than the nationally agreed rate or the national minimum wage in the construction industry.
We are not being complacent on the enforcement of the national minimum wage. The Inland Revenue completed over 6,200 investigations in 2002–03, identifying more than £3.5 million in minimum wage arrears on behalf of underpaid employees in the economy as a whole. The National Minimum Wage (Enforcement Notices) Act 2003 also came into force on 8 July 2003. The Act makes it absolutely clear that Revenue officers can issue enforcement notices (an instruction to employers requiring them to start paying the minimum wage to workers and make good any arrears of pay) on behalf of former workers as well as current ones thus closing an enforcement loophole.
Consumer Direct
Mr. Chope: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what the cost has been of the Consumer Direct initiative. [134413]
Mr. Sutcliffe: The cost of the Consumer Direct initiative to date is £1,150,000.
Mr. Chope: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if she will make a statement on the purpose of (a) Consumer Direct and (b) the Consumer Gateway. [134481]
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Mr. Sutcliffe [holding answer 27 October 2003]: The purpose of Consumer Direct is to increase the provision, quality and consistency of consumer advice across England, Scotland and Wales. Current unmet demand for consumer advice is estimated at up to 1.5m calls per annum ("DTI Consumer Helplines Study", February 2002).
The Consumer Direct approach is to empower consumers to make the right choices and to resolve problems themselves, so placing more effective pressure on companies to improve. Consumer Direct will also increase the quality and coverage of information for those enforcing consumer legislation.
The Consumer Gateway acts as a portal to consumer information available online. It provides links to a variety of relevant information sources. Consumer Gateway will be subsumed by Consumer Direct Online when it goes live next summer.
Mr. Chope: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether it is the policy of the Government to provide advice on individual consumer (a) problems and (b) complaints; and if she will make a statement. [134482]
Mr. Sutcliffe [holding answer 27 October 2003]: It is Government policy to increase people's access to quality consumer advice and information through Consumer Direct. Local Authorities, working in partnership within the English Government Office regions, Scotland and Wales, will be responsible for running Consumer Direct contact centres. These centres will provide advice on individual consumer problems and complaints via telephone or e-mail, or will refer consumers to local Consumer Support Network members if further help is required, or to other organisations who are better placed to assist. Consumer Direct will allow existing advice services to focus their skills and resources where they can add most value, in particular helping vulnerable consumers, providing face-to-face advice, implementing education programmes and clamping down on rogue traders and scams.
Departmental Staff
Mr. Jenkins: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many staff of her Department were redeployed out of London and the South East in the last five years. [125358]
Ms Hewitt: There have been no major redeployments of DTI staff out of London and the South East in the past five years. We are unable to provide figures for individual members of staff who have moved to the Department's numerous offices outside London and the South East in the same period without incurring disproportionate cost. Support work on Finance and Human Resources has, however, been moved to Billingham and Cardiff over the past two years.
Mr. Flight: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many (a) special advisers, (b) press officers, (c) civil servants, (d) advisers to civil servants and (e) permanent staff were working for her Department in each year since 1996. [126475]
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Ms Hewitt: I refer the hon. Member to Table C of the annual publication, "Civil Service Statistics", which covers Permanent Staff Numbers in each Department and agency from 1995 to 2002. Copies of the publication are held in the Libraries of the House. The latest edition was published on 24 July 2003. These figures include press officers.
Information is also available at the following address on the Cabinet Office Statistics website: http//www.civil-service.gov.uk/statistics/css.htm My special advisers are currently Jim Godfrey, Kitty Usher, Deborah Lincoln and Roger Sharp. Roger Sharp is part-time.
Exports
Mr. Wray: To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what the value is at current prices of United Kingdom (a) exports to and (b) imports from (i) Europe, (ii) Africa, (iii) Australasia, (iv) North America, (v) South America, (vi) the Middle East and (vii) Asia in each year since 1973; and what percentage of (A) UK and (B) world trade UK trade with these regions constituted in each of these years. [132936]
Mr. Mike O'Brien: An answer to the question could be provided only at disproportionate cost.
Information on UK trade, published by HM Customs and Excise, gives figures for selected regions of the world but these do not correspond to the regions required. It would, therefore, be necessary to use data for UK trade with individual countries and aggregate them to arrive at the totals for the required regions. UK trade data prior to 1988 are not available electronically so compiling this part of the answer would require manual entry of 6,000 numbers. Another 6,000 items of data would have to be downloaded from the trade database for more recent information on UK trade. Downloading recent data is complicated by various political changes that have taken place over the period in question, such as the break up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, as well as the German unification. As a result of these changes, several countries did not exist in the earlier years but do now, while some that did exist earlier no longer do so. Finally, the combined set would have to be aggregated to provide trade statistics for the specified regions.
The second part of the question requires a comparison of trade by the UK and the World. Information on world trade is available from the International Monetary Fund (Direction of Trade Statistics), but again, their regions do not correspond to those required to answer the question. For example, the IMF grouped centrally planned economies together, as a separate "region", although geographically they were in (Eastern) Europe, Asia and Central America. It would be necessary to calculate regional totals from those for individual countries. The IMF data are not available in electronic form so this procedure would entail manually compiling a database consisting of 30 years' worth of data for around 200 countries for two trade flows (imports and exports).
For strict comparability, it would be advisable to use the IMF source for UK trade rather than Customs' figures. In all, this would entail manually compiling a
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data set of around 24,000 figures, which would then need to be processed to arrive at the information required.
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