§ Mr. Gouldasked the Secretary of State for Trade what information he has about the current state of export order books in manufacturing industry generally, and in engineering particularly; and how the recent fall in the value of the £ sterling has affected these orders.
§ Mr. Clinton DavisIndex numbers of export orders for the engineering industries up to July will be published today inTrade and Industry and export orders by tonnage for new merchant shipbuilding are published up to the second quarter of this year in the "Monthly Digest of Statistics" (Table 91). These publications are available from the Library of 587W The House; statistics of export orders are not collected for other manufacturing industries.
New engineering export orders have been encouraging, with marked growth in recent months, and there was a modest increase in new export orders for ships in the second quarter. Engineering order books, however, have not yet commenced to recover and orders on hand for exported ships have continued to fall.
It is too soon for the orders figures to have been affected by the recent fall in the sterling exchange rate, and it will never be possible to isolate the precise effect from many other factors, especially rising costs, that simultaneously determine competitiveness and trading performance.