30 years of the LOTIS Committee
The year 2011 marked TheCityUK’s first birthday. Coincidentally, it also marked the 30th anniversary of the setting-up of TheCityUK’s Liberalisation of Trade in Services (LOTIS) Committee in 1981. The LOTIS Committee has become a long-lived body. It was originally established within the wider institution developed by the late William Clarke. The body he set up in 1968 was first known as the Committee on Invisible Exports – a sepia photo of the Committee members hangs in TheCityUK’s offices – and later became the British Invisible Exports Council, then British Invisibles, still later International Financial Services London, and is now TheCityUK.
The timing of the LOTIS Committee’s establishment was no accident: it coincided with the realisation, even pre-Big Bang (1986), that UK financial and professional services needed a dialogue with government to tackle barriers to UK services exports in overseas markets round the world. At that time, neither the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) nor the EEC’s Common Commercial Policy really covered services. But all that was to change when, a few years after the LOTIS Committee’s formation, the GATT Uruguay Round was launched in 1986 and resulted in the inclusion of services in the multilateral rules-based trade system, under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Services are now the preponderant component of most countries’ GDP, and a major source of global economic growth. So the LOTIS Committee can justly be seen as a precursor, thought-leader and opinion-influencer for globalisation of services in general, and financial and professional services in particular.
Work in the field of trade liberalisation seems to be associated with long lives of undiminished activity. True, William Clarke died earlier this year, at the age of 88, and the LOTIS Committee’s founding Chairman (Sir Malcolm Wilcox) has also passed on. But the other past Chairmen of the LOTIS Committee (Sir Michael Palliser, Sir Derek Thomas, Sir Nicholas Bayne and Christopher Roberts) are all still very much with us. This is a moment to salute them, and to wish them – and the LOTIS Committee itself – well for the future.
