UK Export Finance is being moved closer to the centre of the government's growth plan after the agency said it provided more than £11 billion of loans, guarantees and insurance in 2025-26. In its latest annual report, UKEF said that support helped British firms win work in 37 countries, backing up to 85,000 jobs and as much as £6.4 billion of UK GDP. For Market Pulse UK readers, that makes this more than a routine Whitehall scorecard. Export credit rarely gets the same attention as tax or interest rates, yet for manufacturers, suppliers and smaller exporters it can decide whether an overseas order actually goes ahead.

The government's next step is to widen UKEF's remit through new legislation. According to the Department for Business and Trade, ministers want the agency to do more to support economic resilience, protect critical supply chains and back longer-term growth across sectors tied to the industrial strategy. UKEF already has £130 billion of financing capacity and is designed to step in when a viable UK export cannot get enough finance or insurance from the private market. It also says it operates at no net cost to the taxpayer. In plain English, ministers are treating export finance less as a specialist trade function and more as a working part of economic policy.

The sector mix helps explain why. UKEF's figures show support flowing into advanced manufacturing, defence, sustainable energy and critical minerals, all areas the government wants to strengthen. In the official release, Peter Kyle pointed to support ranging from breweries to renewable energy firms, while Tim Reid said the agency's finance was helping turn overseas demand into jobs and growth at home. That argument stands up because export deals are rarely isolated wins. A contract secured by one headline business can feed through to machine shops, logistics groups, packaging firms and local service suppliers, especially when the order runs over several years.

The more telling number for smaller businesses is 616. That was the number of firms directly backed by UKEF in the year, and 66 per cent of them were SMEs. For an agency often associated with large-ticket trade support, that is a meaningful shift. There was movement on the lending side too. UKEF added White Oak and Nighthawk during the financial year, followed by Mercore in recent weeks, and in January it announced an £11 billion joint lending commitment with five leading UK banks. For owners trying to fund export stock, working capital or longer payment cycles, more lender routes matter far more than a ministerial soundbite.

Wold Top Brewery gives a clear SME example. With backing from UKEF's General Export Facility, the Yorkshire family business secured a £200,000 trade loan from Virgin Money to grow sales into Europe and North America. By Treasury standards it is a small sum. At company level, it can be the difference between testing an export market and building one. That is where public finance becomes easier to judge. If a guarantee helps a business buy stock, extend payment terms or support its first shipment into a new territory, the effect shows up quickly in cash flow, staffing plans and local supplier orders.

Dulas shows the same policy from a different angle. The renewable energy company, with sites in Mid Wales, Inverness and Bognor Regis, has used successive finance packages backed by UKEF and HSBC UK to sustain production and expand operations. Its solar-powered vaccine refrigeration supports immunisation programmes in more than 80 countries, giving the UK a foothold in a specialist export market with genuine social value. For investors and SME owners alike, this is a useful reminder that export finance is not only about headline industrial names. It can also support firms whose customer base is global from the outset and whose production footprint still sits firmly in the UK.

At the larger end of the book, UKEF continued to support major corporate borrowing and long supply chains. The report highlights a £1.5 billion Export Development Guarantee, effectively a borrowing backstop, for Jaguar Land Rover, as well as support linked to Thales UK as it supplies defence equipment to Ukraine. These deals can look distant from day-to-day SME concerns, but the supply chain effects are hard to ignore. Large manufacturers and defence contractors pull work through hundreds of smaller firms, so the case for public backing rests not only on export earnings but on regional employment and production continuity.

Industry bodies broadly welcomed the figures. The Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade said access to trade finance remains one of the biggest barriers for exporters during a period of economic and geopolitical strain, while the British Exporters Association argued that strong export support now carries diplomatic weight as well as commercial value. The bigger test comes next. If ministers do modernise UKEF's mandate and the new lender network reaches firms faster, the agency could become a more visible source of growth finance across the UK. If the changes stay mostly on paper, smaller exporters will still face the same old gap between political ambition and practical access to funding.