APPG for Entrepreneurship Digest: July 2022

Growth. It seems everyone in Westminster is talking about it. The past few days have seen countless Conservative leadership contenders set out plans designed to stimulate the economy and lift sluggish growth rates. Labour’s leadership is at it too. In a speech this week, Keir Starmer said: “The most important goal of my Labour government will be to grow the economy.

At the APPG for Entrepreneurship, we have some ideas of our own about the best way to achieve growth. In many ways, everything we do is ultimately about growing our economy. Whether we are talking about educating the next generation of founders, making sure regulations around the sharing economy are fit for purpose, or removing the barriers which keep women out of leadership positions, it all links back to growth.

Our next event is no different, but the link between it and growth is hopefully easier to spot. This Thursday (i.e. tomorrow) at 2pm, we are partnering with Virgin Money to host an online expert roundtable on SME Productivity.

At the roundtable, we will ask: what is the best way to support business owners to upskill and adopt better technology? This could be transformative. In 2019, the Government published its Business Productivity Review, which found that if the UK's 5.9 million small and medium-sized businesses became as productive as their German counterparts by adopting better management practices and technology, it would add £100bn to the economy.

The discussion will input into the questions we ask as part of a Call for Evidence and will eventually feed into a briefing paper.

Note: This event has now happened.

Liftoff
Two weeks ago, we launched our report Entrepreneurship Education. It highlighted the key benefits of integrating entrepreneurship into the curriculum and set out credible policy proposals to move the agenda.

It was great to see so many entrepreneurs and educators in Parliament supporting Finn Conway’s excellent report. We thank APPG Officer Jo Gideon MP and APPG Vice-Chair Lord Leigh for speaking at the launch. The report was sponsored by finnCap and it was easy to see how much expanding entrepreneurial opportunity mattered to finnCap’s group CEO Sam Smith in her speech at the launch.

To ensure the launch of the report wasn’t the end of the journey, finnCap and The Entrepreneurs Network organised an open letter signed by over 250 leading British entrepreneurs. The letter was covered in The Times and you can read the full letter here.

In Parliament

In the debate on Support for the Welsh Economy and Funding for the Devolved Institutions, Stephen Kinnock, the Labour MP for Aberavon said: “There has been a strong performance by the Welsh Government, who have made a commitment that ‘no one would be held back or left behind…in a recovery that is built by all of us.’

“We have seen the creation of the young person’s guarantee—the offer of work, education, training or business start-up help for all under-25s—and ReAct Plus, which will provide practical and bespoke employment support as unique as the person looking for work. The ReAct Plus programme will offer up to £1,500 for training, £4,500 to help with childcare costs and £300 for travel costs.”

As the Minister for Levelling Up, The Union and Constitution, Neil O’Brien, as part of the committee for the Levelling Up Bill took evidence from experts and asked: “One of the other missions for which the Bill is creating statutory requirements is to increase domestic public R&D investment outside greater south-east England by a third over this spending review period. Alongside that, there has been the creation of an innovation accelerator centred on the Glasgow city region. How can we best harness the large public investment in research and development to drive growth right across Scotland?”

Mairi Spowage, Professor of Practice and the Director of the Fraser Allander Institute, an academic who works on on economic policy, economic statistics, national accounting, public sector finances, and economic and fiscal forecasting said: “That is a great question, and one that policy makers in Scotland have been grappling with for a long time, particularly given the quality of our universities in Scotland and their international prowess in research and development. We seem to have an issue between the development of the ideas, the start-up, and the translation of that into commercial opportunities that can be scaled up into medium-sized businesses. In Scotland, we often find those opportunities are lost, particularly to the south-east of England, because the infrastructure is there to scale up that business to the next step. I think the sorts of investments that you are talking about, not just in Glasgow but in other locations in Scotland, will be really important. We have to think about how we take all of the great advances that have been made in academia in Scotland and turn them into commercial opportunities, have them scale up and feel that there is the infrastructure and capacity in Scotland so that they do not have to move or be bought by companies outside Scotland.”

The Committee for the Bill on Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) also took evidence from experts. Daniel Zeichner, Labour MP for Cambridge asked: ”The argument is that innovation will happen because obstacles are being removed. Is that enough to foster the kind of innovation that you would hope to see, based on your passion and excitement for this technology?”

Professor Napier, a plant biotechnologist said: “I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about IP because it is an area that I have to think about a lot. The beauty about the UK is that we have a really strong research use exemption, which allows us to operate in a way that is not encumbered, at least at the research level, by IP. We are in a really good place. I think the bigger barrier to innovation is what I have already mentioned: it is not IP but the cost of regulatory approval. That is why I am so worried that in new legislation, if we start building in layers of costs associated with more regulation, we are just replicating what we had previously under the EU regulation. I think that would be an enormous missed opportunity if we go down that road. That is my personal view.”