EU Internal Trade Mr. Hayes To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform what the monetary value of UK (a) exports to and (b) imports from other EU countries was (i) including and (ii) excluding the Rotterdam/Antwerp effect in each year since 1997. Mr. Thomas Office for National Statistics data for UK exports to and imports from the EU27 are shown in the following table. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | |UK goods exports to the EU|UK services exports to the EU|UK goods imports from the EU|UK services imports from the EU| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |1998|99,336 |— |105,048 |— | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |1999|101,537 |30,783 |109,622 |32,510 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2000|112,459 |33,718 |117,644 |35,356 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2001|114,406 |36,850 |126,973 |37,686 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2002|114,737 |38,306 |136,931 |39,715 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2003|111,286 |41,871 |137,404 |43,014 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2004|111,650 |46,037 |142,523 |45,517 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2005|121,486 |49,741 |158,163 |50,423 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2006|152,357 |53,828 |183,748 |52,579 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2007|127,813 |60,078 |169,799 |55,193 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |2008|141,136 |66,740 |180,322 |57,954 | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For technical reasons associated with EU enlargement, consistent figures are not available for trade in 1997 or for services trade in 1998. For some periods, trade in goods figures were affected by transactions associated with missing trader VAT fraud, most notably in the first half of 2006. No figures are available for the impact of the Rotterdam/Antwerp effect on statistics on UK trade with the Netherlands and Belgium compared with other countries; nor is it obvious how this affects statistics on trade with other EU countries compared with the rest of the world. HM Revenue and Customs regularly analyse asymmetries between UK trade statistics and those produced by other countries: in particular, in December 2005 they published a report called “Analysis of Asymmetries in intra-community trade statistics with particular regard to the impact of the Rotterdam and Antwerp effects” which can be found at: www.uktradeinfo.com/pagecontent/documents/edicom_rotterdam_effect_2005.pdf The ONS and HMRC keep the methodologies underlying trade statistics under review.