APPG for Entrepreneurship Digest: December 2020

The last month will have been tough for many. Small business owners have once again been forced to adapt to tough restrictions at short notice. The way many have adapted to protect jobs and serve consumers is worthy of celebration. Also worthy of celebration were the biotech entrepreneurs who announced the successful development of safe and effective Covid-19. The news was a remarkable reminder of the powerful contribution entrepreneurship can make to tackling our most pressing problems.

Coincidentally, last month also saw entrepreneurs get their well-deserved annual celebration with Global Entrepreneurship Week. It was an opportunity to highlight the importance of entrepreneurship and discuss the best approaches to supporting it. At the start of the week, I spoke on a panel alongside APPG for Entrepreneurship Vice-Chair Lord Leigh of Hurley and advisory board member Chris Haley on the theme “Reset for Growth”. Fellow vice-chair Lord Bilimoria also spoke as a part of the week.

Entrepreneurship will be essential to the economic recovery, and so it is great to see so many members of the APPG for Entrepreneurship actively engage with how to enable a reset for growth.

Most discussions of a post-Covid recovery soon come onto the topic of ‘building back better’ and meeting the UK’s Net Zero mission. Last month, the Prime Minister unveiled his ten point plan to tackle the climate emergency. While MPs debated SMEs' role in getting to Net Zero in Westminster Hall (more on that below), we also saw The Entrepreneurs Network, who serve as the Secretariat to the APPG for Entrepreneurship, launch a new report, Green Entrepreneurship, in partnership with The Enterprise Trust. To support the launch, multiple events were held with Labour (Luke Pollard MP), Liberal Democrat (Sarah Olney MP) and Conservative (Bim Afolami MP) parliamentarians alongside innovative green entrepreneurs such as JoJo Hubbard of Electron, Jo Bamford of Ryse Hydrogen, and Alex Fisher of Saturn Bioponics. The report highlights the common ground between the potential for entrepreneurs to solve key environmental challenges and the need for government to play a supporting role.

From our Advisers

Our advisory board keeps us up-to-date with the latest initiatives to support entrepreneurship in the UK.

Global Entrepreneurship Network UK, the driving force behind Global Entrepreneurship Week in the UK has launched the GENUK Hub. It’s a space where all those who are active in the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem can connect and share ideas and activities, either publicly across the community, or in private groups. We encourage you to check out.

Last month’s digest mentioned an APPG event hosted in partnership with the Institute of Economic Affairs to launch Dr Eamonn Butler’s new book ‘An Introduction to Entrepreneurship’ featuring Viscount Ridley and Lord Leigh of Hurley, alongside APPG for Entrepreneurship advisers Emma Jones and Annabel Denham. If you missed the event, you can now watch it online here. The IEA has also announced their latest Richard Koch Breakthrough Prize – a contest to find the best policy ideas to help ‘left behind’ areas with a £50k prize.

Extend VC’s Diversity Beyond Gender report analyses the extent of the UK funding gap to understand if bias beyond gender exists in the UK venture capital market and what opportunities lie ahead to make access to innovation and entrepreneurship more equitable. You can read it here.

It’s been a tough year for small businesses, but our friends at Enterprise Nation are doing what they can and have organised Gifted, an online Christmas market to support SMEs.

In Parliament

At the Spending Review, Mel Stride MP (Con) raised the issue of growth post-covid and asked the Chancellor if he “agree[d] that we should look to private sector businesses and entrepreneurs to provide that growth?” He also asked the Chancellor to “set out how he is going to ensure that, as we come out on the other side of the crisis, businesses and entrepreneurs are given every possible support and freedom to power our economy forward over the years ahead?”

The Chancellor replied stating: “I completely agree with my right hon. Friend that we will build our recovery through the dynamism of the private sector, and he is right about the power of entrepreneurship.” He also noted that he had announced “more funding for our start-up loan scheme, which provides discounted Government-backed loans of up to £50,000 for budding entrepreneurs to start their new businesses at the smallest level.”

In a Westminster Hall debate on ‘SMEs and the Net Zero Target’, Kevin Hollirake MP (Con) said: “If we are going to get to net zero, it is absolutely vital that the private sector is taken with us. It will provide the cash and capital to invest in new processes and new techniques.”

Alex Sobel MP (Lab) replied: “SMEs make up 99% of firms and 61% of the private sector workforce, and contribute £2.2 trillion in turnover, which makes them indispensable to the UK economy. They are extremely innovative, generate vast amounts of employment, and deliver economic prosperity and social cohesiveness. They are also disproportionately present in deindustrialised areas, and therefore present a unique opportunity to build back better.” He mentioned that multiple SMEs in Leeds have been set up with the express intention of protecting the local and global environment and highlighted a few including “Last Mile Leeds, Revive IT, the Phoenix Works and Revive Leeds.”

Scott Mann (Con) followed Sobel in showcasing great green SMEs in his constituency: “CleanEarth Energy in Wadebridge is helping people to refit their homes to provide energy-efficient solutions. Also playing its part is the Bude ReFILL shop—a brilliant shop that is designed to eliminate the need for plastic packaging by encouraging customers to bring their own containers to refill. Bude Cleaner Seas is working on a couple of brilliant solutions to cut plastic pollution?”

Gareth Davies (Con) referenced the newly announced green bond and suggested that the Government “use the proceeds from that green gilt to help finance the British Business Bank to hypothecate its funding to help SMEs prepare for climate change and our net zero targets, and also to help them innovate and capture the opportunities.”