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was sceptical about whether it would be possible to work the proposals out much earlier than this. He entirely agrees that decisions ought to be taken well before the end of the year, and he hoped that they may be taken before the end of October.
4
But he has to start somewhere. As you will recall, the basic year for calculation of plafonds and the rest for sensitive products is now 1972. He says that he has all the necessary statistics with appropriate breakdowns on imports into the Six but he has not got such statistics for imports into the three new member states. He requires full statistics of imports on all the sensitive products (and if possible on semi-sensitive products as well) into the United Kingdom in 1972, with a complete breakdown of the source of such imports. He needs such figures; as the necessary basis on which he can begin to work out sensible Commission proposals. Until he has these he cannot do it. Obviously the British figures are far more important to him than the Irish and Danish figures, so I hope that they can be provided with a minimum of delay.
5
Secondly, Tran proposes to visit each of the Community capitals round about the end of February or the beginning of March. He expects to be in London for two days. I have told him that if he will give me a week's notice of the dates of his visit I will try to arrange for him an appropriate series of contacts. It is certainly worth the trouble to pay him as much attention as possible, and I hope that both you and Peter Preston will be willing to give him some of your time. Tran is attending a conference at Wilton House in mid-February at our invitation, but I doubt whether he will have much time then to discuss these matters.
6 We then moved on to discuss Hong Kong. And here I found Tran's thinking more optimistic than I had expected. On the basis of his many talks with Hong Kong officials (the latest being last December) he is well aware that their main concern is to avoid a situation in which their exports are discriminated against in comparison with the exports of their main developing country competitors. Tran also has well in mind that at the last Council discussion the Dutch Minister talked in terms of restricting benefits available from the Generalised Preferences Scheme for some of these more competitive countries. He, therefore, has it in mind that it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone on this basis. The present scheme, as you know, incorporates long lists of sensitive products and semi-sensitive products. For the sensitive products there are strict ceilings on what can be imported and for the semi-sensitive products there are indicative ceilings. Within the ceilings for sensitive products there are butoirs under which individual beneficiaries find their preferentialadvantages withdrawn once they have fulfilled more than a certain percentage of the ceilings. These percentages are for the most part either 20% or 30%. In the case of semi-sensitive products the correspond- ing figures are mainly either 30% or even 50%. Tran's plan is first of all to try and cut down the number of products in the sensitive and semi-sensitive lists, but for those which inevitably
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