British Ambassador: General Secretary To Lam’s visit sets the direction for stronger bilateral cooperation in the future

General Secretary To Lam and Spouse, and the high-ranking delegation of Vietnam to pay an official visit to the United Kingdom. (Photo: Nguyen Hong)

At the invitation of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Keir Starmer, General Secretary To Lam and his Spouse, together with a high-ranking delegation of Vietnam, will pay an official visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from October 28 to 30, 2025.

On this occasion, British Ambassador to Vietnam Iain Frew granted an interview to The World and Vietnam Report on the cooperation between the two countries in recent years.

Could you please share with us some of the significant milestones in the recent partnership between Vietnam and the United Kingdom, particularly in the area of finance and education?

This year we're actually celebrating 15 years of the UK-Vietnam Strategic Partnership, and that means over the past 15 years we have been deepening the relationship between our two countries across a wide range of areas. And I've been really pleased and impressed to see the ways in which, across trade, education, finance, our cooperation on security, our cooperation on climate, in all of these areas we're deepening the ways in which the UK and Vietnam are working together and, indeed, supporting each other. So I think I'm most impressed by the way in which our bilateral trade investment has grown. In fact, over the past decade it has almost tripled.

It's now over £9 billion in the past year. And that represents a real investment by both sides in building the relationship. So we now have a free trade agreement between our two countries. With Vietnam's support, the UK joined the CPTPP regional trade agreement last year, and this has really underpinned our companies, our businesses, and individuals benefiting from increased trade between our countries. So I think that is a really fundamental development and one that we want to see build in the next period.

Alongside that, we've seen really impressive education partnerships between the UK and Vietnam. So I'm delighted that we've seen over that period, the past 15 years, we've seen over 75,000 Vietnamese students studying in the UK. And every year we know there are 12,000 Vietnamese studying in the UK now. And I'm excited because this isn't just about people building their skills.

It isn't just about people improving their English. It isn't just about people connecting institutions together. It's also about what flows from that. The bridges built between our countries, between those individuals who now know both of our countries and are building businesses, building ideas, working across society, media, government to help bring us closer together. So education is fundamental. But I've also been really pleased to see not only Vietnamese students going to the UK, but here in Vietnam, we are seeing British education being embedded and becoming a very important part of Vietnam's future development.

British Ambassador to Vietnam Iain Frew. (Photo: British Embassy in Viet Nam)

So we've seen recently the Ministry of Education and Training decide how to implement the decision on embedding English as a second language across Vietnamese education. So there are many British organisations and others who are helping to make that happen, make the reality for the next generation to be fluent and capable and internationally integrated via the English language. And alongside that, we're seeing higher education institutions.

We're seeing university partnerships being built, which means you're getting British quality education here in Vietnam. Courses being offered from the University of London, from other high quality universities in the UK here in Vietnamese institutions. And so that access isn't just available to those who can travel to the UK or live there for some time.

It's also available here. And I'm really pleased to see that develop further. A couple of other areas I think our relationship has really developed in. I mean, first, climate and the green transition is an area that has become increasingly important for both countries. And we saw the historic decision by the Vietnamese government at the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021 to aim for net zero by 2050. This is a high ambition.

It's one that the UK shares with our own net zero carbon emissions target. And we're working together to help make a reality of this. This is not an easy task. It means transforming our economies. It means transforming our energy systems. And that is why the UK is working with Vietnam to support that energy transition.

So we're working through the Just Energy Transition Partnership. We're working through UK energy companies. We have an energy mission here in Vietnam this week supporting thinking about how do you develop the offshore wind sector. The UK has experience to share in how we have done that over the past decade to transform our own energy system. And as Vietnam moves into the new era of that green transition and renewable energy, we think that this cooperation is going to make a fundamental difference to how the sector develops here in Vietnam. And perhaps the last thing I'll mention of so many areas is our cooperation on defence and security.

And I've been really proud to see over the past decade how Vietnam has accompanied, so the UK has accompanied Vietnam's development as a country which is, for example, now contributing actively to UN peacekeeping internationally. And the UK has been, through training and through cooperation with the Vietnamese military, supporting that development. At the same time, looking at how Vietnam modernises and diversifies its own defence industry and its own military forces.

That's something where perhaps 20 years ago these are not areas where our countries would have been working together. But now it's a really active area for us to look at how we cooperate on defence and how we cooperate on how that supports our regional security and how we work together to support global security as well.

UK Energy Trade Mission is currently visiting and working in Vietnam. (Photo: British Embassy in Viet Nam)

At present, Vietnam and the United Kingdom maintain a Strategic Partnership. On the occasion of the official visit by General Secretary To Lam, his Spouse, and the high-ranking Vietnamese delegation to the UK, could you please share your assessment of the significance and importance of this visit?

This is a very important visit for the UK and I think it symbolises a real step forward in the relations between our two countries to a new, higher level. We're going to see during the General Secretary's visit, which by the way is the first visit by a General Secretary to the UK in 13 years, a very significant moment.

I think one of the most significant things we will see is that high-level political dialogue between our leaders. I think that is going to help to embed and symbolise the trust and the shared interests that the UK and Vietnam have together. We know that the world is an uncertain and unstable place and we think that a partnership between our countries and the trust and dialogue that is built at the highest level will help to underpin advancing those shared interests we have, whether that is in an open and free trading system, whether that is in ensuring peace and security globally and tackling some of the most difficult global issues.

We want to work together and we see the partnership between our countries as fundamental to that. This visit is going to underpin that and allow us to show how our partnership in practise will do that. I think that is going to come out in a number of different areas.

Firstly, we're really going to build on that story of our economic development. Vietnam is now moving into a new era of development. As it does so, the UK wants to be a close and important partner for that development. We think if you look at areas like the development of technology, that is going to be fundamental to Vietnam's development. It is also fundamental to the UK's development around AI, around semiconductors and around new emerging technologies that we want to partner on together. At the same time, we know that as Vietnam's economy develops from middle to high income, new sectors are going to grow.

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I think a really important part for us to partner on is the financial sector. Financial services and professional legal services, these are a strength of the UK's economy traditionally. Vietnam is establishing an international financial centre in Ho Chi Minh City, in Da Nang and we're working together already to share our experience and our expertise from the UK and support that development because we think it's in both of our interests for that sector to grow and flourish.

As the financial sector grows and flourishes, it provides products and services to consumers but it also supports finance flowing in the rest of the economy to support sustainable development in Vietnam. We think this is a really strategic and important sector. We've talked about education and I think that is going to remain fundamental.

During the visit of the General Secretary and the agreements we reach, we're going to ensure that skills and training and education are at the heart of our partnership. That's going to ensure that the next generation of Vietnamese coming through and building and developing this country further are going to have the right skills for the future economy and that we're going to have the links between our countries. I think our work together on sustainable energy and green energy transition is going to be really accelerated by this visit.

So the UK is committed to moving further and faster to support that energy transition and I think the discussions in London that the General Secretary will lead and his delegation will be involved in will really show that we're going to turn that ambition into reality to support both of our countries going through this transition.

And finally, I've mentioned that our countries together face a quite unstable global context and I think that one of the things we want to see for the future is building on what we know are shared interests, whether that is in the international rules-based system or whether that is in the ways in which we want to see our economies able to trade openly and freely, supply chains to be secure. We have a really strong shared interest in making sure these things are embedded and that we want to work together on them in the future.

So I see our partnership during the General Secretary's visit as fundamentally pointing the direction for our countries to cooperate more deeply in the future.

Vietnam and the United Kingdom sign an action plan on combating human trafficking. (Photo: British Embassy in Viet Nam)

As you mentioned about how we are going to a new development era, but first of all we also want to look back at what we did. What's your take on the recent accomplishments of the Vietnamese economy in recent years? What do you see as the most impressive achievement for you in recent years?

I'm very happy to talk about this because I think Vietnam's story of development is one of the most impressive globally. If you look back over three decades, then Vietnam has transformed, transformed from a low-income country to a middle-income country which has lifted millions of people out of poverty and that achievement should not be underestimated. It was not easy and it was done through the hard work and consistent investment of the Vietnamese people and Government. Where Vietnam now finds itself is in a very strong position. Strong fundamentals of a young, well-educated population, a strategic location, skills, manufacturing industry, integration into global supply chains, and a network of free trade agreements that means Vietnam is embedded into the development of the world economy. These are all really important fundamentals for the future.

But Vietnam also faces challenges and I think understanding how Vietnam can move from a middle-income country that has these strong fundamentals to its rightful place amongst the developed nations of the world is really important for this next phase. And I see a lot of promising signs for this. So the challenges there are how to move up the value chain, how to ensure consistent investment in high-value areas of the economy, how to make sure that the population has the skills that are needed.

And I see a lot of direction that has been set. Set by recent resolutions we've seen, whether that's Party Resolution 57 which directs towards innovation at the heart of economic development, Resolution 68 that puts the private sector as the leading force in the economy. These are very important steps to show how can Vietnam get there, how can it get to become a high-income country by 2045.

These are the steps to get there. But another important part is these international partnerships. So I'm really pleased to see that this question of international integration and the importance of building those partnerships to support that development is part of this overall direction.

There's a big challenge ahead. I think with those kind of partnerships Vietnam has every chance of continuing and succeeding in that new era of development. And that the partnership between our two countries, that's going to be fundamental to that.

I'm very optimistic for this future. And I think that by taking advantage of the opportunities that are there, by navigating some of those challenges internationally that we both face, tariffs and trade are always in the headlines, very important. But at the same time, global security challenges.

These things could knock us off track as well as Vietnam off track. So we need to work together to overcome them and to ensure that all of that ambition, all of that potential is realised.

Thank you Ambassador for sharing with us!

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