APPG for Entrepreneurship Digest: March 2022

The APPG for Entrepreneurship is embarking on a new project looking at the current state of entrepreneurship education in the UK and we want to hear your views. Today, we are publishing a call for evidence designed to bring together the views and insights of leading entrepreneurs, charities, and researchers on the role of entrepreneurship in the education system. In my experience, education is a topic where everyone has an opinion. After all, we have been through the education system at one stage in our lives.

Our aim with the call for evidence is to keep it practical. We want to know what’s working and what isn’t, so we can produce tangible recommendations for Parliamentarians.

We’ve put together a list of questions that we’d like to see answered, but we find that the best submissions to our Calls for Evidence are short and typically focus on a single question or a narrow point. If you’ve looked at our list and only have a strong view on a single point, we still want to hear it.

This project is being kindly supported by finnCap. As a firm of entrepreneurs, they are proud to partner education programmes which focus on developing youth entrepreneurship and enhancing social mobility.

The Call for Evidence closes on Friday April 15th. You can find more information here. Please send your submissions to sam@tenentrepreneurs.org

Anyone for Tea?
A few months back we released a paper on the best way to support entrepreneurship in the sharing economy to realise the potential benefits for consumers and businesses. It featured a range of ideas from tax simplification and modernisation to a smarter approach to regulation. Next week, we’re holding an Afternoon Tea in the House of Lords to discuss the ideas of the report and the best way to support sharing economy entrepreneurs in the UK.

The event will take place in the Lords on Tuesday March 15th at 3.30pm-5pm. MPs, Peers and sharing economy entrepreneurs should send an email to events@tenentrepreneurs.org to register if they would like to attend.

From our Advisers
Emma Jones from Enterprise Nation draws attention to their StartUp Saturday events. They are fun and friendly workshops for aspiring entrepreneurs to learn everything you need to get started on your business – in just one day. The free events are being hosted in cities across the country. You can find out more details here.

Ben Macon-Cooney from the Tony Blair Institute notes that today they are launching their latest instalment of Moonshots. Contributions include those working in technology, such as Balaji Srinivasan, Graphcore’s Nigel Toon and Wayve’s Alex Kendall, as well as from politicians such as Congressman Ro Khanna, Audrey Tang and Luukas Ilves. The subjects covered range from AI, satellites through to how to do clinical trials.

Mike Spicer of Policy Department has a useful article on how to prepare for the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. It unpacks the details of what we do and don’t know about future funding for local business support as well as what local government, Growth Hubs and others need to do next.

In Parliament

In the Lords, in a debate on the Health and Care bill, Lord Mawson, a crossbench peer, told the story of how in 1997 he set up the first online facility for the voluntary and social enterprise sector. “When we started this, we naively thought that this online environment was going to solve all our problems, as if it sat “out there” somewhere. We bought 12 computers: they came in very big boxes at that point, as noble Lords might remember. We put them in a room in a conference centre - we were in the Cotswolds - and I invited 12 entrepreneurial people working in the social sector to come and share a few days with them. We connected them all up. We thought it was about technology, but we actually discovered that it was all about people and relationships; that this technology was simply a tool—an enabler—to facilitate a marketplace that we needed to build between us. We began to understand that this was not about large systems up there that you plonk in the middle of things in some separate way. It is actually organic: they are very connected, and you need to co-create it and invent it together around the real needs and opportunities that are presenting themselves. I think this technology is telling us something about what needs to happen to the health service. It is organic; it is entrepreneurial; it is about creating a learning-by-doing culture. My colleagues and I have seen examples in the NHS and other parts of the public sector where millions of pounds have been spent on systems that have landed from Mars and have not worked.”

Baroness Cumberledge, a Conservative peer, talked about the first healthcare centre in the UK that was owned by the patients. “Founded in 1984, it began with just 12 elderly patients, a rundown church, and just £400 in the bank. Today, by applying entrepreneurial principles to challenge social and health issues, it now has more than 250 staff. It is responsible for 43,000 patients … and four health centre sites across Poplar. It operates on 30 sites even more widely across east London. It has supported local entrepreneurs. What is really interesting is that it has built 93 small and medium-sized enterprises. This is people helping themselves and ensuring that there is employment through a charitable structure, a housing company, which is controlled by the residents and now owns 10,000 properties and 34% of the land in Poplar.”

Last year the government created a scheme that allowed lots of people to move to the UK from Hong Kong. Over the last three months, 90,000 people moved here via this scheme. This was brought up in the Lords debate on Nationality and Borders. Lord Patten of Barnes, a Conservative peer, said “The latest figures in Hong Kong suggest that, of those working for medical services, the number of doctors has decreased by 5% and the number of nurses has decreased by almost 8%, and there has been a huge drop in the number of teachers – 1,000, I think, have left. Most of them have come here. It may be a matter of amazement to the Chancellor that fewer of the young entrepreneurs have come here than have gone to Australia, Canada and the United States.”