APPG for Entrepreneurship Digest: November

It is Global Entrepreneurship Week. In almost 200 countries across the world, 10 million people are taking part in more than 40,000 events and campaigns to celebrate entrepreneurship. As Jonathan Ortmans, President of the Global Entrepreneurship Network, points out, entrepreneurs are needed more than ever before.

“They are more than glass-half-full optimists – they are natural leaders made for times like these. While some of us get frightened during uncertain times, entrepreneurs thrive on disruption and overnight changes in the rules. They see hundreds of thousands of possibilities, countless solutions to test, and a lot of work to be done. We need more entrepreneurs in the world - people with the aptitude, courage and resilience to help us innovate our way through challenges. This week is all about them.”

If you want to get involved, you can find out more about some of the 50 plus events that are taking place in Britain this week here, and you can show your support through the hashtag #GEW2021.

Budget 2021

Last month saw Chancellor Rishi Sunak deliver his third Budget speech to Parliament. While the general focus was on the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review and what that meant for public services, there were a few major announcements for entrepreneurs.

APPG Adviser and Coadec’s Executive Director Dom Hallas summarised some of the key announcements in a short Twitter thread.

Among the policies announced were an expansion of the R&D Tax Credit to cover cloud computing and data costs and new reforms designed to encourage more pension fund money into venture capital. These two issues have come up at multiple APPG for Entrepreneurship events, so it was positive to see movement here.

For me personally, it was an exciting budget, as the Chancellor cited data from a report I co-authored on immigrant entrepreneurship when he set out the details for the new Scale-up visa, which simplifies the visa system for fast growing companies.

The Budget also saw more money pledged to the British Business Bank’s regional funds to provide more equity and debt finance to SMEs and to expand the bank’s regional angels programme.

Calls for Evidence

We want to better understand how we can ‘level up’ the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystems and promote job creation across the UK. The call closes this Friday.

We want to hear from both entrepreneurs and researchers. So if you have any insight to offer we would really appreciate a submission.

From our Advisers

The CBI has launched Big Fish Little Fish, a new project designed to share best practice on facilitating innovation partnerships between large and small businesses.

New research from Enterprise Nation and Dropbox highlights the benefits of adopting tech for small and micro-businesses. By turning manual working processes into digital ones, a small or micro-business could save around 150 hours each year.

In Parliament

In a debate on the Income Tax charge, Nick Fletcher a Conservative MP, takes a moment to give a shout-out to people who start businesses. “Let me express my gratitude to all the businesses out there—from the white van man to the entrepreneur; from the young people setting up a start-up to the loyal employee of a private enterprise; from the chief executive who is sweating about his next board meeting, to the salesman who has just lost or won their latest order. This is not some cheap talk from a politician: I know what it is like. I have been there: no days off; sleepless nights worrying about getting paid; fretting about being able to pay staff; the thought of reading that tax bill. I know that literally thousands of people have those thoughts on a regular basis, and they are members of our business community. We must not forget them, and neither must we forget to thank them for all the work they are doing to prop up this great country and help to fund the services that we hold so dear.”

In a debate in the Lords on the Budget Statement, Lord Londesborough, cross bench, said: “drawing chiefly on [his] own experience in the private sector—30 years as an entrepreneur and employer, and the last seven years as an adviser and investor in start-ups” that “to boost living standards in real terms, we need sustained growth and productivity, something that we have not seen in more than 10 years. Since 2010 the UK’s productivity, as measured by GDP output per hour, has grown by just 4%, according to the OECD. That seems extraordinarily low when you consider the huge advances in technology and communication over that period. Let us put it in context: France had an 8% gain in productivity in the same period, Germany almost 10% and the US more than 10%. This spells trouble for global Britain’s place in the world marketplace, and indeed for building back better.”

Not everyone is as pessimistic. In the Commons debate on Budget Resolutions, Bill Wiggin, a Conservative MP, said: “Now, as we make our way out of the pandemic, it is encouraging to see signs of our economy recovering at a great pace: record numbers are in work, job vacancies are at a record high and we have the fastest-growing economy in the G7.”

In a debate on Carbon Emission Charges, Conservative MP and APPG for Entrepreneurship Officer Jerome Mayhew, gave an impassioned case for a border adjusted carbon tax. He said that: “too often, the market has been seen as the villain. We talk about business profiteering at the expense of the environment, or businesses trashing the world’s resources, and that applies not just to carbon net zero but to biodiversity … It is true that historically, the market has been almost totally blind to the cost of carbon in its economic transactions. When I buy a product—such as this glass—I pay for the raw materials, the design process, the manufacturing, the marketing, the transport and the profit, but I do not pay for the cost of the carbon emission, because that is described as an externality: it dissipates into the atmosphere and there is no significant cost attached to it. The result of that misallocation of resources is that the transaction is incomplete. As a purchaser, I am not having a true economic exchange with the supplier, because I am paying for only part of the product, not all of it.”

He described the current situation as “plans from Government, who are picking technology winners by investing in hydrogen, for instance.”

He said that he “hopes that hydrogen will be a key part of the solution in our progress towards net zero by 2050, but it might not be. The real problem is that we are currently relying on the Government to take those kinds of decisions because the market is substantially blind. We need to unleash its power through a price for carbon … As an economy, we have been very timid in our approach to applying a cost of carbon. We do apply it in some sectors—about a third of our manufacturing base is affected in some way by carbon pricing through the emissions trading scheme. But that is only a third: two thirds of our manufacturing base has no carbon pricing attached to it at all, and none of this country’s imports are assessed or priced for their carbon content.”