§ Mrs. Wiseasked the Secretary of State for Trade (1) whether he will now seek information as to what extent British textile manufacturers are themselves importers of textiles;
(2) whether he will now seek information as to what extent British cutlery manufacturers are themselves importers of cutlery;
(3) whether he will now seek information as to what extent British shoe manufacturers are themselves importing shoes;
646W(4) whether he will now seek information as to what extent British manufacturers of machine tools also act as machine tool importers.
§ Mr. Meacher, pursuant to his reply [Official Report, 19 February 1979; Vol. 963, c. 66], gave the following answer:
Information from surveillance licensing of imports of table cutlery, other than from EEC countries, and a special study of the sector, indicate that about a quarter of total table cutlery imports by quantity in mid 1978 were by United Kingdom manufacturers. There is no comparable information for the textiles, footwear and machine tools sectors, and establishing it would be a substantial and very difficult exercise. Textile imports from some countries are subject to surveillance licensing, but imports are not analysed to establish whether the importer is a manufacturer or not. Textile production is very fragmented and preparing a list of all textile manufacturers would be a sizeable task. It would also be very difficult to quantify those imports bought by manufacturers from importing merchants, who are an important feature of the textile trade. There is also the further problem that substantial imports of textiles are from other EEC countries. These are not subject to licensing and estimating the proportion of these imports that were purchased by manufacturers, directly or indirectly, would be even more difficult. Similar considerations apply to the footwear sector. For machine tools there is no surveillance licensing.