LSEG welcomes the Parliament Business and Trade Committee
The Business and Trade Committee examines the policy, spending and administration of the Department for Business and Trade and its public bodies, making recommendations to Government to improve policy and policy outcomes. We embarked on this inquiry because access to finance — and in particular scale-up finance — has been consistently one of the top issues raised with us by many hundreds of firms on our road-trips and conferences around the country.
We are launching this major new report in the heart of one of the strongest financial centres in the world, with the aim of developing a new national consensus on how to ensure our country’s entrepreneurial performance matches its potential.
Our pension funds steward £3 trillion in long-term savings, our financial centre in London intermediates trillions of pounds of global capital every day. We have the largest venture capital market in Europe. Our universities have generated 1,300 new spinout companies in the last 12 years.
But 380,000 UK businesses that want finance cannot get it. The Alternative Investment Market has lost over 1,000 companies since 2007. Ninety-four percent of UK scale-ups are acquired before they reach maturity — half by overseas buyers. At the age of ten, London-based scale-ups raise only half the capital secured on average by their counterparts in San Francisco. Some £610 billion sits in the cash savings accounts of British savers, earning below-inflation returns, while the businesses that could put it to work cannot access the finance they need to grow.
The Government will not deliver the highest rates of growth in the G7 unless it makes bold reforms to the nation’s institutions for mobilising investment. Today we set out seven sets of reforms that together can create a new British prospectus for growth.
“Britain is not short of money. We are short of institutions capable of putting that money to work.
We have £3 trillion in pension assets, £264 billion of undeployed investment capital, £610 billion sitting in cash savings accounts and one of the world's great financial centres.
Yet 380,000 businesses that want finance cannot get it.
For too long we have exported our savings and sold our scale-ups and watched other countries capture the rewards. If Britain wants the highest growth rate in the G7, we need the best system in the G7 for turning savings into investment and ideas into world-leading companies.”
Liam Byrne MP
Chair of the Business and Trade Committee
