“[Trading with] the Commonwealth is a no brainer,” says Lord Marland, chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council (CWEIC). “[But] there’s no doubt the UK has withdrawn from a lot of the Commonwealth countries, because it hasn’t had the support of the government as it used to. We’re going to have to work quite hard at rebuilding the relationship with some of those countries and reap the benefits.”

Marland is speaking ahead of the CWEIC’s first trade ministers’ meeting, scheduled for March 2017. The timing – just as Article 50 is scheduled to be invoked by Theresa May’s government – is entirely coincidental, he insists.

“We’re not going to be talking about Brexit,” he says. The workshops between trade ministers and chief executives of companies such as Tesco and the chairman of Rolls Royce will, instead, revolve around financial services, ease of doing business, technology and innovation, business and sustainability, creating an export economy and attracting investment. “It was planned before the EU referendum.”

It has nevertheless been suggested by British officials that the UK should strengthen ties with the Commonwealth after it leaves the European Union. The former prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott in particular, recently called for Australia and the UK to scrap tariffs and quotas on goods traded between the two countries. “Brexit means that Britain is back,” he says in a new report by the Free Enterprise Group [pdf], co-authored by Braintree MP, James Cleverly.

Historically, the UK has had “a significant footprint” on these countries, says Marland, meaning the legal systems in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, are similar to that in the UK, there aren’t any language issues, and the flight connections are straightforward.

However, while he is supportive of more collaboration between the 52 Commonwealth members, he does not believe a free trade agreement is necessary. In fact, he believes the focus on free trade agreements has become a “media obsession” that hides the real issue: not enough small businesses are exporting.

“Most businesses don’t think about exporting to a country on the basis that the UK has a free trade agreement,” he adds. “People are obsessed with free trade agreements. Our biggest trading partner is the US and we’ve never had a trade agreement with them.”

Marland was a former trade envoy to David Cameron, and has had a long career in business, founding the Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group in 1997, and leading a consortium of investors who bought out the upmarket wellington brand Hunter Boots in 2006, moving production to China, Serbia and Brazil. He says the attitude of business owners has changed – today only 21% of UK SMEs export, according to the most recent figures [pdf] from the Federation of Small Businesses.

“It is a totally different state of mind to when I first started in business. We thought of nothing about getting on an aeroplane and going to do a deal in the Middle East or America,” Marland says. “What happened was, we had the financial crisis. People either went bust or they started paying off any debt they had, generating cash, concentrating on downsizing their business to fit the economic environment they now faced.”

Predominantly a membership organisation to facilitate engagement between Commonwealth governments and private companies, the CWEIC has recently launched CommonwealthFirst to support British SMEs. Over the next three years, 100 small businesses will be chosen to become Commonwealth export champions and given training, mentoring and development support to win new business internationally.

The first group of winners included tonic water company Fever-Tree, fashion brand 8DIX, and Kano, which makes computer and coding kits. Twelve of the entrepreneurs travelled to a trade mission in India in November 2016, and there are future trips planned to Malaysia and Singapore.

Pressed on what the ideal post-Brexit deal would look like for the UK – Marland has previously said that he fears “Whitehall as a whole has really not got the skill set to deliver a really hard-nosed negotiation” – he says: “I want the UK to get its mindset around the fact we’re in an incredibly strong position.

“We’re a massive market for [the Germans], as we are for the French. We have better tax regimes … we’ve got a very good skills base, we’ve got a great education system ... [and] from an intelligence base, we’re one of two global leaders.

“The UK government has to get itself organised, understand how to negotiate, and recognise that this is not some sort of rollover. We are a great country, it’s not by accident that we’re called Great Britain.”

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