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The Minister for Trade
21
DEPARTMENT OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY Bottak
The Rt Hon Anthony Barber TD MP Chancellor of the Exchequer
M Treasury
Great George Street
London SW1
1 VICTORIA STREET
LONDON SWI
01-222 7877
April 1971
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мог
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M2. Hele /
Trade policy bas Mi38/4
My Dear Tony,
REF
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REF.
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I am sorry to have to approach you at this stage with another proposal for inclusion in the Finance Bill, but we have an awkward problem over the transition at the end of this year from quotas to tariffs on imports of cotton textiles from the Commonwealul Briefly, we need powers to relieve from duty for the first three months of 1972 imports of cotton textiles from developing countries in the Commonwealth preference area (and also South Africa) which are shipped under quota in 1971 but do not arrive here until 1972. Unless we can give such relief, we believe there will be an t- necessarily heavy bunching of imports for a few months which could seriously disturb the market to the detriment of domestic and overseas suppliers and could also lead to embarassing pressure frot Lancashire for the reimposition of the quotas which we intend to
remove.
We expect this bunching to come about in the second half of 1971- because exporters in the Commonwealth preference area will wish to make sure that the whole of the 1971 quota arrives in the UK before duty-free entry ends at 1 January 1972. (Normally, quota shipments carry over for up to two or three months in the following year). In the early part of 1972, there will probably be a scrambio for market shares on the part of suppliers like Taiwan and Korea who have been held down by the quotas.
We should like to minimise the disturbance of the market in two ways:
a.
by continuing to the end of 1971. licensing up to,
enforce the quotas on shipments to
This would involve retaining import say, 31 March 1972 so as to keep out goods shipped before the end of 1971 in excess of the
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