“Uzbekistan's independence matters to the UK.” Ambassador Timothy Smart on reforms, cooperation, and regional security

“Uzbekistan's independence matters to the UK.” Ambassador Timothy Smart on reforms, cooperation, and regional security

The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Timothy Smart, is finishing his mission in Tashkent. He served as His Majesty’s Ambassador from 2023 to 2026. In his last interview before leaving, he told Gazeta.uz what has changed over the past three years in trade, investment, education and security, why Uzbekistan’s independence and territorial integrity matter to Britain, and what the future holds for cooperation with Central Asia.

— When I came to Uzbekistan, my priority was to strengthen the relationship between this country and mine: what we can do to boost trade and investment, and what we can do on security and people-to-people ties. All of that built on the foundation laid by the ambassadors before me — Tim Torlot, Chris Allan, and everyone who worked here before them. Without forgetting your great history and culture, we recognised that the real transformation in our relationship and in the region came after 2016.

By 2023, when I arrived, we had only just emerged from COVID, the fall of the government in Kabul had already taken place, and so had Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So by then, geopolitics had become even more difficult.

Just a month before I came to Tashkent, I attended a meeting in the UK between Uzbekistan’s Foreign Minister, Bakhtiyor Saidov, and the then Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly. There was a really nice moment when they met for the first time — they gave each other a great big hug. And I immediately saw that genuine warmth and welcome.

Your reform agenda is genuinely impressive, and we are ready to be your partner in those areas where our support can bring real benefit.

We understand that your country is in a difficult region, including because of the situation south of your border, in Afghanistan. We also recognise that you understand your country’s geopolitical position better than we do. Yes, we will urge you to do whatever you can to help bring the war in Ukraine to an end, but we know how difficult that issue is for you. So first of all, we want to hear from you: how can we help? How can we support your reform agenda, your territorial integrity, and your independence?

And I have heard every British minister, every foreign secretary and everyone else who has met their Uzbek counterparts begin a meeting with exactly that message:

“We are here as a partner and a friend — where can we help?”

It is in our mutual interest to help you. That has been the guiding light of my whole posting.

— Diplomacy is sometimes hard to measure in KPIs, in indices. What we deal in is often the wars not fought and the lives not lost. But in Uzbekistan, you can measure it.

When I arrived, bilateral trade stood at 275 million pounds. The latest figure, to the end of July 2026, is 1.3 billion pounds, and for 2025, the total was 2.1 billion pounds. Much of that is the UK buying gold. But even so, trade has grown several times over.

In conversations with opinion formers, ministers, and people from the Presidential Administration, I hear the same key message again and again: around a million people are born in Uzbekistan every year, and a landlocked country needs, above all, to expand trade and attract investment. Today, Uzbekistan is moving towards a modern, reformed market economy. A transformation like that takes time. And the country wants to build trade links in every direction: north, south, east, and west. To do that, it needs reliable partners. Investment is flowing into Uzbekistan from China, from the Gulf, and from more traditional partners too.

The questions I ask are these: What is needed to support the reforms? What brings stability? What will attract investment? What can Britain offer so that it works to our mutual benefit? Clearly, it is access to capital in London — the London Stock Exchange, debt and equity capital, private finance, Islamic finance — these are the areas where I am told time and again that we can help. And we are helping with the listing of the assets of the Uzbekistan National Investment Fund (UzNIF) in May this year, for example. The government is planning to list other state assets over the next few years. We want to be part of that story with you.

— When David Cameron came here, when he was foreign secretary, he put it very precisely and very fairly: your democracy is essentially eight years old — today it is ten. It took Britain more than 300 years to give women the vote. And look how far you have already come.

One area I supported wherever I could: shortly before I arrived, or around the same time, the President announced that he wanted an international commercial court, adapted specifically to Uzbekistan but modelled on what already exists in Dubai and Astana, because that would help attract foreign direct investment.

The creation of such a court was announced recently and, from what I can see, it will be genuinely independent. That means arbitration does not have to go to London, New York, the Gulf or Astana — that business will come here. And it will help my successors deliver one of the key asks: bringing investment into Uzbekistan.

When I arrived, too few British companies knew about Uzbekistan; today far more do. When they hear that you are about to join the WTO, when they hear about the reform agenda or see GDP growth above 7 per cent, they will also ask: What guarantees do I have in a market I do not know? An independent commercial court will be the answer to that question and will draw investors in; in a market that is new to them, they will feel far more confident.

There are, of course, areas where progress is slower — but for entirely understandable reasons, and I am not sure many countries in the world could speed it up. You have made impressive progress on gender-based violence legislation. But beyond everything the state does, an enormous cultural shift has to happen.

Understanding what it is like to be a woman in any of our cultures is something too few men in the world spend time thinking about. The women in our lives and in our society need greater support and understanding from men. Until women in our countries can be active participants in economic growth — entrepreneurs, ambassadors — we are losing 50 per cent of our workforce. For sustainable economic growth, all of us need to make sure women are fully included.

Culturally, what impresses me most is the way Uzbekistan combines Islamic tradition with openness, modernity, and respect for its many-layered historical heritage.

A wonderful example of that can be seen in the new Centre of Islamic Civilisation in Tashkent, which sets out every layer of the country’s history, including Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and the Bactrian kingdom, while at the same time emphasising the values that unite us: the pursuit of knowledge, the love of science and our shared humanity. Those ideas are embodied most vividly in the legacy of Mirzo Ulugbek, Ibn Sina, and Al-Khwarizmi.

I think that is a genuinely inspiring model for the whole region. Against the backdrop of what is happening to your south, you are showing an open, inclusive, modern Islamic society. In that sense, Uzbekistan can be a real point of reference for the region, and I value that highly.

— Since then, contacts have become regular; ministers keep visiting. Two or three ministerial visits are already scheduled for after I leave. The head of the Presidential Administration has been to the UK twice. The President and our previous Prime Minister met in Doha and Baku. In February, London hosted a meeting of foreign ministers in the Central Asia-UK format. The delay with some of those meetings was down to the fact that our foreign secretaries kept changing.

And each time a new foreign secretary or a new Prime Minister comes in, we try to get across to them how much Uzbekistan and Central Asia matter.

Before David Cameron, no British foreign secretary had come here since Malcolm Rifkind in the late 1990s. Now our foreign ministers meet regularly. Minister Saidov has met James Cleverly, David Lammy, and Yvette Cooper, and I am sure he will meet Mr Miliband soon. I know they are already exchanging messages. Ministers travel in both directions: Minister Kudratov signed the action plan on deepening economic cooperation and a memorandum of understanding on critical minerals in London last year. The trade envoy, Lord Alderdice, came to Tashkent; he had an excellent meeting with the President and stayed here for a week. Lord Jason Stockwood, the Minister for Investment, came out for the Tashkent International Investment Forum. And his visit was quite symbolic.

In May 2024, I went to the third Tashkent International Investment Forum and saw a huge number of delegates from all over the world. I thought: this is where the world comes to meet Uzbekistan and Central Asia — we need to do better, we need a far more visible British presence.

And together with our trade director in Uzbekistan, Lori Moorhead, and then his successor, Nicholas, we brought around 60 representatives of British business in 2025. This year Lord Stockwood led the delegation. The chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank came, along with the heads of the London Stock Exchange and UK Export Finance — and 250 British participants this time.

So it was a single, united offer from Britain to Uzbekistan: government, business, finance.

Photo: Presidential Press Service

We held several sessions at the investment forum itself, and we had an excellent meeting with the President, the head of the Presidential Administration, and Deputy Prime Ministers Kuchkarov and Khodjaev, among others. Far more deals were signed, and there was far more appetite to work together. We agreed with the President that in the autumn a delegation from Uzbekistan led by Deputy Prime Minister Khodjaev will come to Britain to move to the next stage and agree on new projects and roadmaps, and to work out what more we can do together.

— For me the sky is the limit on that one. If you look at the international agenda on Uzbekistan in 2015, there was a great deal of focus on human rights — justifiably, I think — and it would have been impossible to sign agreements on counter-terrorism operations. Now we work with each other, now we know each other. Everything you might have worried about with us, or we with you, we have talked through and built trust on.

We work with the Prosecutor General’s Office — on upskilling, in particular. The security services on both sides work far more closely together. Cooperation has been established with the National Guard and the Ministry of Defence.

Previously, as I understand it, we were allowed to teach English, and that was it. Now it is: What do you want to do? Do you want to talk about drones? Do you want to talk about mountain warfare tactics? We can work together on those and other questions now. Uzbekistan has had excellent results at the Cambrian Patrol exercise in the UK, where your military goes to compete; they are outstanding athletes and professionals. But our relationship today is much broader than that exercise.

We have absolutely no problem working together. We have shared as much as we could about our system, you have shared as much as you could about yours, and there is immense trust between us. That relationship is genuinely strong. We are working together to keep your borders secure for the decades ahead. And your security is our security.

We do not like it when big powers expand and take advantage of the weakness of others.

— Your independence matters to Britain. If any large powers decide not to respect the territorial integrity of this region, that matters to us as much as it matters to you.

And we will do everything we can — through our status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, or through the economic growth and the security relationship we are building today — to put you in the best possible position, so that no one can ever take your independence away again. Because that would mean the rules-based international system was being shattered too far, and that, selfishly speaking, matters to Britain.

And personally — pretty much any British diplomat or business working in Uzbekistan will tell you: you are good friends, and we want you to flourish. Genuinely.

— One aspect of the cooperation I am personally very enthusiastic about, and which my system supports fully, is getting to engagement at the leader level. The only thing standing in the way has been the changes of prime ministers and foreign secretaries in the UK. We have had five prime ministers in the last five years.

So the willingness to get to a leader-level meeting really is there.

It is something I want to see because I know how much it matters in your system. And it matters in my system too that our leaders talk regularly. I regret that I have not been able to deliver it so far.

We have just had a new Prime Minister come in, and I very much hope that early in my successor’s time those meetings at the highest level will finally get going.

I think that is the direction we need to move in. We want it, you want it, we see the benefits, it should be happening. When David Cameron came here two years ago, he was convinced of the need for the Prime Minister of the UK and the President of Uzbekistan to meet regularly — including in a Central Asia+UK format, bilaterally and at summit level. The one obstacle has been our frequent changes of government. But I think that with stability, we will finally close that last gap.

— We very much like your multi-vector foreign policy and the fact that you have different partners in different areas. We think that is an extremely pragmatic and sensible approach. We know you have a broad range of partnerships — we understand it, we accept it, we support it.

You are a beacon of independence for Central Asia. Previously, before the current President, when you were not so focused on regional integration, Central Asia was divided, and everyone was weaker as a result. Kazakhstan could largely stand on its own thanks to oil and gas. But under President Mirziyoyev, links have been built with every Central Asian country, and now Baku is joining too; a regional identity is taking shape, and it is genuinely powerful. And that connectivity will help fund your growth and give you access to markets.

The railway through Kyrgyzstan into China changes an entire east-west supply route for generations to come. The Trans-Caspian route will do the same.

The focus on renewable energy, on shared electricity generation, on connectivity, and on water supply turns what could have been a colossal source of tension into a source of strength.

You are binding yourselves together in much the same way the European Community did in the late 1950s. And the economic growth that comes out of that is remarkable. So it is a pleasure to support that process, whether directly through our own programmes or through our support via the UN and the international financial institutions. It is great to be here and to support it.

— As with everything else, I can answer this from my own thinking, but the better thing is to ask the region itself what it wants. Where does the region want to see Britain and countries like us actively involved?

Where is British expertise needed? Where can we help? We have very good expertise in design. If we are talking about regional connectivity and the Trans-Caspian route, in which areas could British expertise help you design the roads, the border crossings, and everything else? We have an excellent financing offer for the region. Four billion pounds of export financing is available for Uzbekistan alone. Tens of billions of dollars for the five Central Asian countries and Azerbaijan. That is quite a substantial effort. We also sit on the boards of most of the international financial institutions, so if something is not working properly, you can talk to us, and we can help. We signed off on WTO accession long ago; we are a key supporter.

There is a clear desire for Uzbekistan to become a transport and aviation hub. How can Britain help with that? We have a world leader in aviation — Rolls-Royce, which developed the Trent 1000, the most fuel-efficient and cost-effective engine in the world. Nothing competes with it. They invested 2 billion pounds in research and development to take it from its first phase, where it had problems, to phase three, where it beats any competitor. You get a better engine, you get it cheaper, it stays on the wing longer, you can sell it for far more at the end, and over its life, it will save you tens of millions in fuel compared with its nearest competitor. That is just one small example of where we can help.

Which state enterprises will go IPO, and how do we become part of that story so that you have the money to fund the enormous growth this region is going to see? How can we help with climate resilience? We have a great deal of experience in that area. We are not going to compete with China on supplying solar panels — but we can help design those networks. Wind power — we are pretty good at that. Small modular reactors — we are world-class there, for the part of nuclear generation that will give your grid stability as you move towards renewables. So there is huge potential for partnership, both here and across the region.

One of the biggest questions for me is this: are you the Central Asian Five or the Central Asian Six? That is not for us to decide. We work in whatever format you tell us.

On 14 September, the International Institute for Central Asia is hosting a whole group of British think tanks — RUSI, Chatham House and others — to talk about exactly that: connectivity and the future of Central Asia. How do we bring our leading thinkers, our best strategists, to help you plan, exchange ideas, and test them?

We could do far more together, but I want to be led by the region. One of the subjects I talk about is agriculture. We have regenerative agriculture programmes. You can use a third less water in your orchard or on any other plot. You get the same yield and use no industrial fertilisers at all. Which means the ordinary farmer stops depending on world oil prices for fertiliser. A third less water, sharply lower costs, no dependence on the world oil price — and the same crop. And the soil improves. We have examples of pilot projects in Kyrgyzstan.

— I do not think a single listing on the London Stock Exchange is enough. But it is a very important signal. We have already talked about the International Commercial Court, and I really do think institutions like that help build investor confidence.

The UzNIF listing was a moment when everyone quite literally held their breath. Would it work or not? Would the biggest international investors and hedge funds look at Uzbekistan and say, “We know nothing about this country”? Or would they say: “There is stability here, reforms are under way, the risks remain, but you can already invest”? It seems to me that the market has already given its answer.

At the same time, big investment does not come from one successful listing alone.

We can help government to government: working with the Agency for Strategic Reforms, supporting public administration reform, providing British expertise in law, regulation, strategic communications, and other areas. If you manage to lay the right foundation, then the market comes in. And that is where the really big money is.

It also matters to me that our relationship moved beyond the donor-recipient model long ago. This has to be a genuine partnership. Of course, every country is guided by its own national interest. Britain too. But a durable relationship only works when both sides win — win-win. If we want to build a strategic partnership rather than simply do individual deals, trust is essential. It is trust that underpins investment decisions.

So UzNIF matters for more than itself. I hope it has helped build confidence for future listings of Uzbek assets. Where to hold those next listings is for Uzbekistan to decide. But I do think London is a very good venue, given the returns you are getting and the signal it sends to international investors about the maturity of the Uzbek market.

You cannot come to a venue like the London Stock Exchange without demonstrating a certain level of transparency, corporate governance, and compliance with ESG standards. The very fact of such a listing tells the global investment community: Uzbekistan is open for business and ready to work by international rules.

So I would say this is about more than a stock exchange. It is about the rule of law, the quality of institutions, the predictability of reform, and investor confidence. And looking at the trajectory of recent years, it seems to me that Uzbekistan is gradually moving away from being perceived as a “frontier market” and is beginning to establish itself as a serious investment destination.

— I come back to what I said two years ago: we want people to have a good experience in the UK. It works for us — we know we need help picking our fruit; we need help in our factories. But we also want to be sure that Uzbeks coming to Britain have a genuinely positive experience, and that they have money to come back and invest in a business at home.

We do not set the numbers; the private sector does that. If a Deputy Prime Minister came to me and said we now need 20,000 seasonal workers in the UK, I would have to say I cannot deliver that — you would have to negotiate with the companies. But we are working on it: we helped fund the International Organization for Migration, and we work with the Migration Agency so that the Uzbeks who go are genuinely well prepared — understanding the cultural differences, understanding how to handle the money they earn, and knowing who to contact and when if problems arise.

The British Home Office has fairly tough threshold percentages for breaches of visa conditions, above which a programme can be suspended. The whole time I have worked here, Uzbekistan has stayed on the right side of that line. We came close once, but we resolved it fairly quickly. And that also shows that Uzbeks travelling to the UK are having a positive experience, while still seeing the point of coming back and investing back into Uzbekistan. That is a win all round.

And we can see how much you are now diversifying the countries your labour migrants go to. It is good to see the recent 62 per cent rise in remittances from the UK.

And that is the strength of people-to-people links — whether it is seasonal workers, students, or business. I have watched all of it develop over the last three years. And that is not down to me; our role, with colleagues, is to help build the wider foundation and the relationships. We spot opportunities and draw them together.

— For me, all of this comes back to people-to-people links.

As an ambassador I help to build those links, but here I have been very lucky. They began to form long before I arrived, with the opening of Westminster International University. Today, there are around twenty partnership programmes with British universities operating in Uzbekistan. Last year, 15,000 people were studying here on British higher education programmes, compared with 10,000 the year before. I would not be surprised if this year the figure is over 20,000.

Cambridge University Press supplies textbooks to millions of Uzbeks. This is not only about the English language or a British degree. What matters most here is critical thinking and the skills the economy of the future will need. They help young people see opportunities in artificial intelligence, financial services, critical minerals, and other fields. In effect, you are bringing up a new generation of specialists and entrepreneurs who can give the economy a serious push. Being part of that and actively supporting it is genuinely exciting.

And if there is one thing I take away from this posting, it is that we were able to do more together on education — because that is not just for today and not just for tomorrow; it is for your children and your grandchildren. And it benefits Britain too, because we now understand each other far better.

And if you add to that the students going to the UK — around 1,500 Uzbeks are studying at British universities. Many of them are self-funded, and some are scholars of the El-Yurt Umidi Foundation or of the Chevening programme. Over the last couple of years, our partnership with the foundation has been flourishing. Last year, we were the number one destination for your fellows; this year we are number one again. Of the 210 people who left under the El-Yurt Umidi programme very recently, 104 are going to the UK. We and the British Council helped the foundation build links with British universities, so that you can negotiate good terms with them and send even more scholars to study in the UK.

This year marks 30 years of the British Council in Uzbekistan, and its chief executive will come out to celebrate it. That is a reason to pause and look at the relationship as a whole. Where are we going? I hope that the three years in which I, my team, and the British Council supported the links already in place will only grow stronger. If it is 20,000 Uzbeks getting a higher education qualification, let us increase that figure every year; if we can double it every couple of years, wonderful. If we can expand transnational education and bring more British universities here, excellent. If we can transfer skills and knowledge so that Uzbekistan becomes the centre of a wider regional education hub, that is superb.

It was great to see the Oxford hub open, and to see the range of relationships Cambridge University Press has here. But there are many British universities that are not here. Twenty are present in various partnerships — let us do more. Let us look at what you need. Where are the gaps in your own education system that British expertise could fill? And equally, you are doing a lot of innovative things too — so what can we learn from you in this partnership?

I hope that in future this relationship becomes more balanced, because at the moment a great deal of the knowledge and expertise flows from Britain to here. But I genuinely hope there will be more academic exchange in both directions, more students in both directions, more British students coming here. One example I have seen: for the first time, Oxford is now teaching Uzbek and Chagatai. Let there be more of that, and let interest in Uzbekistan keep growing.

— First, I like seeing what we have achieved in education: whether that is accelerated English language learning or everything else we have talked about. It has been an honour to be a partner and to support that area.

Second, support for the reform agenda, the work we have done together on the business environment. Our development assistance matters, but the real way to accelerate your economic growth is through the private sector. So helping you — whether on the international commercial court, on WTO accession, or on the wider governance programmes where we support the Delivery Unit at the Agency for Strategic Reforms, while learning from you ourselves — is a real win. From when I arrived three years ago to today, I really have seen that British business is far better informed about the opportunities in Uzbekistan. And my successor, I hope, will strengthen that many times over, because a great deal more can be done.

When I arrived, in my first two weeks, the Minister for Trade and Investment, the Minister for Exports — Lord Offord — came out, and we discussed how to reach a billion dollars of exports, or of bilateral trade, by 2030. And I thought: that is not enough. We have already surpassed that figure. I think the ambition has to be far higher. I am both very grateful for and proud of how exports and bilateral trade have grown during my time. But I am also itching for the figure to get much bigger. Two billion does not feel like enough for the scale of our economies. What should it be? What is the right figure? I do not know, but I think we should be genuinely ambitious about it.

On a personal level, it has been a truly wonderful time. My family and I lived in Uzbekistan for three years, and the time flew by in the blink of an eye. It is not long enough. We love this country. My daughters went to school here. We did not travel as much as we wanted to, but we travelled a fair amount. And we will certainly come back, because this welcome and this partnership are genuine, and they will continue.

And last, perhaps — when I speak to people who know little about Uzbekistan, and I want them to take away one thing about the country’s development, I quote the extreme poverty figure. In 2017, it was 35 per cent of the population. Now it is about 4 per cent. That is 7.5 to 8 million people lifted out of poverty under President Mirziyoyev. Seeing the pace of your country’s development has been the most positive aspect of my time here. That does not mean everything is perfect. Nothing is perfect; a great deal is far from perfect in my own country, too. But the desire to improve the life of every citizen of this country and to see a much better future comes across clearly.