Late Expectations

Late payments have been strangling small businesses for decades — and this week, the Government has finally moved to do something meaningful about it, with Small Business Commissioner Emma Jones CBE leading the charge.

On Monday, the Department for Business and Trade announced what it’s calling the toughest crackdown on late payments in over 25 years. The headline measures include a hard 60-day cap on payment terms for large firms paying smaller suppliers, mandatory interest on late payments pegged at 8% above the Bank of England base rate, and significantly beefed-up powers for the Small Business Commissioner’s office — including the ability to investigate poor payment practices, adjudicate disputes, and levy multi-million-pound fines against the worst offenders.

Alongside many others, this is an issue we’ve been banging the drum on for a long time. When the Government launched its Small Business Plan last year, which laid the ground for this week’s announcement, I didn’t mince my words:

“In a world where online banking, accounting software and e-invoicing exist, it’s completely unacceptable that so many burgeoning startups see their growth stall due to late payments. At its worst, they can send perfectly good businesses to the wall — leaving Britain’s economy less dynamic and competitive.”

The damage goes far beyond individual closures though — late payments are a drag on employment, exports, investment, profitability and access to finance right across the economy.

At Enterprise Nation, which she founded, Emma campaigned for robust measures to address late payments, including in the reports we worked on together. As a Patron of The Entrepreneurs Network, it’s particularly pleasing to see her now in the driving seat to deliver on those shared ambitions. Emma is proving the value of her own longstanding call to get more entrepreneurs into the heart of government to effect exactly the changes we’ve seen this week.

The numbers behind this are stark. Late payments cost the economy an estimated £11 billion a year, and roughly 38 businesses close every single day because they simply aren’t paid on time.

These new powers will allow her to take that work to a much larger scale. As she said:

“We are on a mission to make life easier for small firms by getting money moving faster through the economy by tackling late payments… These reforms will reduce the hours spent chasing debt allowing small businesses to focus on more productive and enjoyable growth.”

There’s also a notable move for construction: the Government is consulting on banning the withholding of retention payments, a practice that has long left smaller contractors exposed when larger firms go bust or simply don’t pay up.

Take a bow, Emma Jones CBE.

Deal Breaker

We’re putting the finishing touches to our response to the Department for Business and Trade’s consultation on refining Britain’s competition regime. Among other things, it proposes reforms to how the Competition and Markets Authority can regulate mergers and giving it new powers to investigate how businesses use algorithms. If any founders or investors want to tell us their perspectives (either anonymously, or loudly and proudly), you can book a 20-minute call with our Research Director Eamonn Ives via this link.

Trust the Process

Our latest UK AI Fieldbook interview is out. Eamonn Ives sat down with Murat Tunaboylu, co-founder of Antiverse, a biotech company using AI to design antibodies against targets that big pharma has struggled with for decades.

The whole conversation is worth reading, but one insight stood out from a policy perspective: the UK’s medicines regulator, the MHRA, appears to be pioneering something genuinely world-leading — process-level drug approvals.

Rather than approving individual molecules one by one, the idea is to approve the process itself, so that everything it produces carries a validated safety and efficacy profile. As Murat puts it:

“Just imagine: you design something, and in a matter of weeks or months it gets to a human patient who has no other option — whereas the current process for getting a drug approved might typically cost $2 billion and take 12 years to complete.”

If it works, it could fundamentally change the economics of personalised medicine — and the UK is leading it. Murat also makes a strong case for open data mandates on publicly funded research, protecting SEIS and EIS, and closing the persistent seed-to-Series A funding gap. Read the full interview here.

Deep Impact

Innovate UK wants to hear from you. As we covered last week, the agency has published a new prospectus under Executive Chair Tom Adeyoola, signalling a major strategic reset — narrowing its focus to deep and hard tech, introducing specialist Growth Sector teams, and building a connected investment pipeline linking its deal flow to the British Business Bank, the National Wealth Fund and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund.

It’s now running a short feedback survey and we’d encourage founders in our network to respond. The more Innovate UK hears directly from the companies it’s trying to back, the better the final model will be.

Branching Out

The Cedar Review — on whose board I sit — has launched its survey on refugee entrepreneurship. The review is gathering evidence on the experiences of refugee entrepreneurs in the UK: what support was available to them, what was helpful and what’s still missing. If you’re a refugee entrepreneur yourself, or you work with or know someone who is, please consider filling in or sharing the survey.

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Three Big Ideas #57

Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

This week, Philip Salter analyses the findings of Anthropic’s bumper survey about AI use, Eamonn Ives explains why we need to act now to future proof our regulatory landscape for a potential wave of innovation, and Mann Virdee wonders how society can better quantify the positive impacts of scientific spillovers.

Engineering the Key

In our latest interview for our UK AI Fieldbook series, Eamonn Ives speaks to Murat Tunaboylu about how AI is accelerating novel drug discovery and could bring about the era of personalised medicine.

Making Waves

Wave after wave, our Entrepreneurs Survey makes headlines. Just yesterday, following the release of our latest instalment, journalists from Sifted, The Telegraph, and City A.M. all reported on our findings. We don’t measure our success by headlines and quotes (encouraging as they are), but by our ability to impact policy, and — ambitious as it sounds — change the hearts and minds of the country.

To that end, each quarter, we reserve half the survey for questions to dig into a thorny policy issue. This time around we focused on tax breaks for founders, with the results feeding into our submission to HM Treasury’s call for evidence around Tax Support for Entrepreneurs.

I won’t bombard you with every stat, but it’s fair to say that these schemes are seen by founders as essential to unlocking early-stage investment. Huge majorities of those who’ve used the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), and Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) say they would have struggled to raise capital without them — 84%, 86%, and 78% respectively — and even more believe the schemes helped their businesses scale.

That said, founders don’t think the schemes are flawless. While fees and terms are broadly considered fair for SEIS and EIS, VCT users feel differently — 41% of founders regard VCT terms as unreasonable compared to just 33% who find them fair. Opinions on size limits and eligibility were also mixed, particularly for SEIS, where 39% of founders feel the criteria are not appropriate compared to 36% who think they are.

On capital gains, the founder consensus is clear: over seven in 10 believe Capital Gains Tax (CGT) relief drives startup creation, and when asked what they’d do with the proceeds of a more generous Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR), 72% say they’d invest in someone else’s startup and 70% would use it to launch a new venture of their own. Only 7% say it wouldn’t change their behaviour.

We aren’t claiming this is the only evidence that HM Treasury will need to decide whether and how exactly to reform these tax breaks. But it does add data where previously there was little — and as our panel of entrepreneurs grows and grows, we’ll be able to get more granular with our questions and findings. If you want to have your say next time round, join us.

On the topic of what next, get in touch with Eamonn Ives to share your thoughts on what policy area we should dig into next time around.

VC on VC

The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Entrepreneurship — for which we’re the Secretariat — is launching a series of Evidence Sessions, starting with one led by Victoria Collins MP, a former tech co-founder who sits on the Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee, on female spinout founders. It’s on Monday at 12pm and we may still be able to squeeze in a couple of people if you’re quick.

APPG Evidence Session: Female Spinout Founders
🗓 Monday, 23 March 2026
🕐 12pm to 12.45pm
📍 Online
ℹ️ An evidence session for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Entrepreneurship, on how the UK can better support women turning academic research into successful businesses — chaired by Victoria Collins MP
⏩ Request a place

The sessions will be held virtually, so location is not a barrier, and over the coming months and years we aim to cover a wide range of policy areas around entrepreneurship. Each session will be led by one or more Officers or Members of the APPG, and following each session we will publish a concise write-up of the discussion.

Sign up to the APPG’s Substack for invites to future evidence sessions, including with Lord Marks of Hale CBE on R&D Tax Credits and Lord Kamall on supporting local communities.

Vernal Velocity

Innovate UK has published its new prospectus this week. Under Executive Chair Tom Adeyoola, the agency wants to make sure British breakthroughs result in globally scaled companies.

It’s narrowing its focus to deep and hard tech businesses and introducing a framework to identify high-potential companies. New Growth Sector teams will bring genuine working knowledge of their portfolios. A new Velocity service will provide ongoing account management for founders throughout their scaling journey. And a connected investment pipeline will link Innovate UK’s deal flow directly to the British Business Bank, the National Wealth Fund and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund. As Adeyoola puts it:

“Our vision is a UK where breakthrough ideas — from research, from labs, from anywhere in this country — can become industry leaders. Industry giants. Where those with potential, realise the potential.”

We’ve long argued that the gap between research excellence and commercial success is one of the most consequential challenges the country faces. This prospectus shows Innovate UK agrees. The direction is right — founders in deep tech should pay attention.

Sunday Best

Over at LinkedIn, Richard Tyler reminded me that today is the deadline to enter the Sunday Times 100, their annual ranking of the UK’s fastest-growing private companies. You’ll need four years of accounts, £5 million plus in sales, and to be in profit to be eligible to enter. Finalists get a networking event at the British Museum in September. Enter here.

Sterling Work

Another week; another publication. On Tuesday, we released A Sterling Opportunity, which makes the case for the UK to implement a pro-innovation regulatory regime for stablecoins, bringing benefits to entrepreneurs, consumers and the government.

For the uninitiated, I’ll hand over to the authors, Hugo Okada and Osian Guthrie, to explain what stablecoins are:

“Stablecoins are, at their core, remarkably simple. The most widely used versions are fiat-backed stablecoins, which are digital tokens representing existing currencies and backed one-for-one by safe reserve assets such as cash or short-term government bonds. If a user holds a dollar or sterling stablecoin, they are effectively holding a digital claim on reserves held by the issuer. Stability comes from the promise that the token can be redeemed for the underlying currency at par.”

As the paper argues, and as Hugo and Osian set out in a CapX article, stablecoins enable near-instant, low-cost international payments around the clock, bypassing the delays and expense that plague traditional banking. They also support programmable finance, allowing payments to be embedded into software and automated contracts. Furthermore, stablecoins can boost financial inclusion by giving people in volatile economies access to stable currencies. And for governments, because stablecoins are typically backed by sovereign debt, their growing adoption increases demand for government bonds — which in the case of sterling-denominated stablecoins could help lower borrowing costs, as well as reinforcing London’s position as a global financial centre.

The paper argues that we should avoid overly prescriptive regulation that risks stifling stablecoin innovation before the market has had a chance to develop. We’re particularly concerned by three current proposals: universal redemption obligations, which misunderstand how stablecoins actually circulate on secondary markets; stringent capital requirements, which could shut out the smaller innovators who have historically driven progress in digital finance; and paltry holding caps, which would undermine some of the most valuable stablecoin use cases, including large-scale B2B payments and corporate treasury management.

Instead, we advocate for principles-based regulation focused on transparency, solid reserve backing, and robust custody arrangements — giving the technology and market room to evolve while maintaining credible oversight.

If this is still feeling a bit esoteric, it won’t for long. The total market capitalisation of stablecoins now stands at around $300 billion, with projections of this hitting between $1.9 trillion and $4 trillion by 2030. Lord Holmes of Richmond MBE wrote the foreword, and as former Chancellor George Osborne argued last year in the Financial Times:

“We became the world’s financial centre because we weren’t afraid of change. On crypto and stablecoins, as on too many other things, the hard truth is this: we’re being completely left behind. It’s time to catch up.”

The report was fed into the Financial Services Regulation Committee’s stablecoin inquiry.

Copyright and Wrongs

In our latest UK AI Fieldbook interview, Mann Virdee caught up with Hanna Celina, founder of Kinnu, a London-based educational technology startup with over 1 million users.

The challenges of the UK’s copyright regime feature prominently in the chat, with Hanna describing the UK’s current position as “wilfully shooting itself in the foot.” She argues:

“If you look at British copyright laws, you realise you really cannot do anything. It’s insane how high the level of protection is for copyright holders compared to the US, where companies have the freedom to innovate faster.”

“It goes deeper. We could be making strides in supporting A Levels or IB [International Baccalaureate], but the exam scores and question banks are just not public, even though they are often government-set exams. And if you look at learning standards — what a learner should know for a GCSE — it’s a bunch of poorly formatted Word docs that are completely not LLM-friendly. It was impossible to build a consistent ‘National Knowledge Graph’ from this data the last time we looked at it, which would be like a digital map where every concept is linked to its prerequisites and its real-world applications. That would enable a learner to zoom in and out of topics and understand how concepts relate to other disciplines. But, with recent AI improvements, turning that kind of data into a National Knowledge Graph might just be possible now.”

The interview covers a lot more besides, including how Kinnu uses A/B testing to validate learning interventions at scale; the human-in-the-loop requirement for zero-error tolerance in legal and financial education; how vibe coding is turning writers into product builders; and why Hanna thinks R&D tax credits are better than government grants for agile startups.

Opportunity Knocks

Does your business focus on defence technologies and robotics? If so, you can use the Front Door pilot to tell the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) about any regulatory barriers you have.

The Front Door is an experimental, business-led pilot by the RIO to collect and address regulatory challenges. It aims to make it easier for businesses to highlight barriers, helping RIO target reforms where they are most needed and to support innovation and growth.

The trial closes in a week. Share your experience here.

Message from our Partner

Join us for an exclusive deep dive into the sale of Cadcorp, a leading geospatial software provider, to NEC Software.

In this live panel discussion, the sellers of Cadcorp will join our Head of Corporate Finance, Matt Katz, to take you behind the scenes of their journey, from shaping a growth story in a specialist market, to navigating strategic conversations with a global buyer, to completing a deal that secured the next chapter for their team, product, and customers.

• When? Tuesday, 24 March 2026, 8.30am to 11am

• Where? Buzzacott offices, 130 Wood Street, London, EC2V 6DL

Three Big Ideas #56

Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

This week, Philip Salter examines new research on the returns from collaboration between SMEs, Eamonn Ives argues that stablecoins could help bring down Britain’s debt burden, and Mann Virdee asks why the prioritisation of legislative process over purpose all too often leads to distorted outcomes.

Total Recall

In our latest interview for our UK AI Fieldbook series, Mann Virdee speaks to Hanna Celina about how combining learning science with generative AI can overcome the cognitive forgetting curve to optimise human memory

Stiffed Competition

Ambitious entrepreneurs face a panoply of risks between ideation and exit, some of which can stop them in their tracks. One such risk that gets overlooked all too often is the web of regulations that constitute our approach to competition policy. As we argued in Better Together, these rules can have a chilling effect on investment, and thus entrepreneurial activity overall.

On this note, busy founders will be easily forgiven for not digging deep into the recesses of GOV.UK to find the Department for Business and Trade’s paper Refining Our Competition Regime.

It covers a lot, but let me highlight one proposal. Specifically, the paper proposes giving the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) the power to compel companies to hand over the source code behind their algorithms. It would also be able to intervene in how products operate during an investigation — for example, by altering how content is displayed or how a pricing engine behaves — before any wrongdoing has been proven. The CMA could even run its own tests on an algorithm under conditions it specifies, with its in-house experts observing how the system behaves.

These are investigative powers rather than penalties. In practice, that means they could be deployed during a review — most likely a merger investigation — prior to any conclusion being reached. These powers would expand the surface area of regulatory risk, increase the burden on businesses subject to them, and send an unwelcome signal about the UK’s regulatory culture that investors around the world will notice.

The Department for Business and Trade’s call for evidence on these proposed changes to the CMA closes at the end of the month. You may wish to respond. And please feel free to reach out directly to me with your thoughts on this.

Easy As

This week, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Entrepreneurship released the A to Z of Entrepreneurship. I appreciate that many of you will have heard about this via the APPG’s newsletter or my email, so I’ll keep it brief.

In short, through the APPG, we’ve helped to create an evergreen resource for politicians, policymakers, researchers and anyone looking to better understand the landscape of entrepreneurship policy.

If you have any feedback — including suggestions for new entries — let us know.

Local to Global

International Women’s Day is on Sunday. You’ll already know about all the work we undertake with Barclays through our Female Founders Forum — including most recently Ideas to Impact, in which we looked at the experiences of female academic entrepreneurs in Britain’s spinout ecosystem — so today I want to draw your attention to two separate endeavours supporting female founders I found out about this week.

First, we hosted our latest Ecosystem Builders event in Birmingham with Tara Attfield-Tomes. Among other things, Tara is the founder of The 51% Club, which is building hubs across the country. Second, this week the equally wonderful Pip Jamieson announced the launch of the UN Women UK community app. Both come highly recommended.

Relatedly, do get in touch with recommendations for resources or organisations which have supported your business growth. We may add them to our Support for UK Entrepreneurs page.

Inside a Deal

On the morning of Tuesday 24 March, Buzzacott will be hosting a deep dive into the sale of Cadcorp, a leading geospatial software provider, to NEC Software. The live panel discussion will take you behind the scenes of the journey. You can request a place here.

For the Trees

I’m delighted and honoured to have joined the board of The Cedar Review, a national, independent review exploring how to better support refugee entrepreneurs to start, sustain and grow successful businesses in the UK.

As part of this work, refugee entrepreneurs are being asked to take part in paid research to share their experiences, the opportunities, the challenges, and what would make the biggest difference.

Find out more here, and sign up to take part in the research here.

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Permission Control

Today’s newsletter comes from our Research Director, Eamonn Ives. Normal service with Philip resumes next week!

While I’m hardly the world’s most sentimental person, there are a handful of things I routinely look forward to each year: that first sunny day of spring, the return of Premier League football, and Patrick and John Collison publishing Stripe’s annual company letter.

If you think you have better things to do with your time than read some corporate musings, think again. Far from the inane platitudes that give ‘corporatese’ its deservedly bad name, their annual stocktake is always worth your full attention.

In their latest letter, the pair examine several trends that should interest each and every entrepreneur. Among other things, they show how income concentration among top firms is approaching record levels, how stablecoins are already reshaping B2B payments, and how agentic commerce might transform both professional and personal life.

Like all good writers, the Collisons save the best for last. Invoking the work of Joel Mokyr, one of the winners of last year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, they note:

“In The Political Economy of Technological Change, Mokyr also observed that new technologies have in the past often failed, despite their economic superiority, because technological decision-making implicates not only suppliers and customers, but also a broad variety of nonmarket “aggregators” (regulators, committees, courts) that influence what is adopted. As AI and the internet expand the scope of what’s possible, synthetic impediments to adoption and adaptation will become increasingly costly. Our bifurcating economy shows that growth is contingent on the application of useful knowledge and not some preordained result of its abstract availability.”

The point is worth dwelling on. It’s not enough to invent something better. Whether it actually gets used — at scale, and quickly enough to matter — depends just as much on permission from regulators as it does on consumer demand and entrepreneurial guile. We’ve seen this play out already with nuclear energy and drones — and we’re watching it unfold again with advances like AI and GLP-1 agonists. An increasingly pertinent question for innovation policy now is not whether we can invent miraculous new technologies, but whether institutional environments will give them the oxygen they require to breathe.

Here at The Entrepreneurs Network, we can’t promise to crack cold fusion, engineer room-temperature superconductors, or invent any other technological marvels. What we can try to do, however, is to ensure that when society’s innovators make progress, the policy landscape stands ready to facilitate rather than frustrate them.

After decades of relative stagnation, it’s patently clear that we are now at a juncture in human history. Readers of my Big Idea this week will know that new technologies appear to be diffusing into the economy at an ever-quickening pace. It is incumbent on policymakers to ensure that regulatory barriers to socially useful innovation do not put that trend into reverse. Before us awaits an abundant society — if we can permit it.

On the Hunt

On Tuesday, we hosted Sir Jeremy Hunt MP for a fireside chat, adeptly chaired by our Patron, Steve Rigby. In the audience were around 50 entrepreneurs, all armed with incisive questions to pose to the former Chancellor.

As it was held under Chatham House Rule, I can’t divulge exactly what was discussed, but we covered a lot of ground. I mentioned on LinkedIn how one of the most interesting parts of the evening was Sir Jeremy’s reflection on the similarities between being a top politician and leading entrepreneur.

Since then, I’ve also spent more time thinking about his observation of how we need to get better at embracing risk — both in business, and, perhaps more importantly, in politics. This wasn’t a paean for recklessness, but to acknowledge that too often our political system rewards ‘not doing wrong’ far more so than it rewards ‘actively doing good’.

Many of Britain’s thorniest problems have festered for decades. Rather than always trying to stave off the worst-case scenario, perhaps civil servants should be empowered to experiment more boldly with novel solutions. When venture capitalists allocate investment, they do so in the hope that a handful of winning bets cover many multiples more losing ones. Gains may stand to be made if we could develop a similarly healthy tolerance for failure in policymaking too.

We’ll be organising more fireside chats with other political leaders in the near future. To receive invitations directly, you can join as a Member for free here. If you’re in a position to support us financially, you can use the same link to join us as a Supporter or Adviser (for those who already do — thank you).

Last Call

If you haven’t got around to it yet, there’s still time to respond to our latest Entrepreneurs Survey. Whether you’re optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between — we want to know what founders really think about Britain’s current state of affairs. It only takes 10 minutes to complete, and you’ll be joining hundreds of fellow founders who have made their voices count.

Three Big Ideas #55

Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

This week, Eamonn Ives discusses new research that suggests the pace at which novel technologies diffuse into the economy is accelerating, Mann Virdee ponders whether we should copy the Chinese when training new engineers, and Jessie May Green takes stock of Britain’s approach to critical minerals.

Work Out

This week we learned that the UK’s unemployment rate hit a near five-year high in the last quarter of 2025, climbing to 5.2%. Among 16 to 24-year-olds, unemployment rose to 16.1%, the highest in more than a decade — and above the EU average for the first time since records began in 2000. Ouch!

Entrepreneurs in our network knew this was happening in real time. As reported by Bloomberg:

“One in four founders have made fewer administrative hires, and 19% recruited fewer juniors in response to AI technological advancements, according to a survey conducted by The Entrepreneurs Network in November. Only 2% said they increased headcount.”

(Incidentally, this is one reason you should complete our latest Entrepreneurs Survey. Your views on tax breaks will be submitted to the Government’s call for evidence, and you may like to know that strategists in all political parties are on tenterhooks to find out which outfit — or none, if you prefer — entrepreneurs say best understands their needs.)

Friend of the network Rachael Twumasi-Corson identifies the dual challenge in the same Bloomberg article:

“It’s scary to hire people, the minimum wage is so high and there’s so many additional protections”...“I would much rather have a team, celebrate wins and figure out ways to solve problems together, but at the moment, my team is ChatGPT and Gemini.”

It’s not just the minimum wage though. While the Government thankfully ditched its pledge to give day-one protection from unfair dismissal, the impact of the Employment Rights Act will still be brutal — here are no fewer than 55 reasons why. As our Research Director Eamonn Ives told Bloomberg:

“Before, the mindset might have been: we’ve got this idea and we’re going to quickly recruit as many people as possible to pursue it.”...“Now startups are thinking twice about taking on new hires who they might not be able to keep on if things don’t pan out.”

The cost of this direction of travel is clear. In a brilliant article for Works in Progress, Pieter Garicano argues — convincingly — that labour laws go a long way to explaining the innovation divide between the US and Europe.

This is seen most obviously when companies like Bird, Grammarly and Hugging Face move explicitly for this reason. But most of the damage is done below the surface. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off workers in Germany and France than in the US — a difference arising entirely from regulation. As Pieter writes:

“If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.”

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Pieter argues that Europe doesn’t need to choose between innovation and worker protection — it can have both, as Denmark and Austria show.

Denmark’s ‘flexicurity’ model lets employers fire almost at will, while the government catches workers with generous unemployment insurance (up to 90% of prior income for two years) and heavy spending on retraining. Austria uses portable severance accounts funded by employers, so workers keep their safety net when they change jobs.

Britain doesn’t have to choose between a safety net and a dynamic economy. But right now, we’re getting the worst of both worlds.

Our Adviser Anton Howes has created an employment cost calculator, which you may find useful. We’ve also compiled some useful links on our Support for UK Entrepreneurs page, including the Government’s new Employment Changes guidance on workplace rights reforms.

Value Judgement

This week, we joined 18 other business organisations in calling on the Government to consult on extending VAT liability rules for online marketplaces. As things stand, some overseas sellers exploit gaps in the current system to avoid charging VAT, giving them an automatic 20% price advantage over British businesses who play by the rules. For entrepreneurs who rely on marketplaces to grow, this is a serious competitive threat.

As well as levelling the playing field, reform could recover an estimated £700 million a year for the Exchequer. What’s not to like?

Leading Light

I’m delighted to share that Gaurav Chawla has joined us as an Adviser. Gaurav is a deep-tech founder, angel investor and university mentor focused on strengthening the UK’s science-to-scale pipeline.

As well as leading Lumirithmic, an Imperial College London spinout, he invests in and mentors early-stage founders emerging from Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and UCL.

Gaurav is bullish on the UK:

“The UK combines world-class universities with global capital markets and a strong legal framework. The opportunity lies in strengthening risk appetite and improving the pathways between research institutions and commercial markets. With better alignment between policy, capital, and execution, the UK is well positioned to lead in deep-tech commercialisation.”

He also describes our quarterly Entrepreneurs Survey as “invaluable”:

“Policy debates often rely on theory; those surveys surface the lived experience of founders navigating tax policy, capital constraints, hiring, and regulation in real time. If we want to fix the commercialisation gap in UK deep tech, we need to listen to operators and study where companies stall, not just celebrate research output.”

Hear, hear! Now is your chance to do something invaluable (in under 10 minutes).

XOX

Our new buddies at SXSW London have asked us to share two opportunities I think will interest many of you.

First, the London Venture Spotlight: a university-affiliated pitch competition designed to platform emerging startups developing technologies that felt like science fiction just a few years ago. First prize is £100,000 in investment and an on-stage slot at SXSW Pitch in Austin. Find out more here.

Second, SXSW London is also looking for mentors to deliver pre-booked 1:1 sessions with festival attendees, matched by industry expertise. Mentors contribute 100 minutes in total — five focused 20-minute conversations. They’re also seeking roundtable leads for intimate, facilitated group discussions of 10–15 delegates, lasting one hour. Register your interest here.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Speech at the Launch of Job Creators

Anne-Laure Le Cunff — neuroscientist, Founder of Ness Labs and Adviser to The Entrepreneurs Network — spoke at the launch of our latest Job Creators report:

I'm the founder of Ness Labs, a science-based platform helping knowledge workers be more productive and creative without sacrificing their mental health. It's work that grew directly out of my research as a neuroscientist at King's College, London where I study curiosity, among other things. And I think curiosity is actually the right word for tonight.

When I read the report, the finding that jumped out at me wasn't just that more than half of the fastest growing companies in the UK have a foreign-born founder. It was the list of countries those founders come from. Twenty-nine nations, six continents. And the most common country of origin? France.

As a French-Algerian person born in Paris, I feel a certain personal pride in that statistic. But more than pride, I feel gratitude. Because the UK gave me something I'm not sure I would have found anywhere else.

I first moved here in 2013. I left for the US in 2015, came back in 2017, and it's now been almost a decade that I call this country home. In that time, I've gone from working in tech, to doing a PhD, to building a company. And the reason I could do all of that here is precisely what makes the UK special: this is a country where you can wear many hats. Where reinventing yourself isn't just tolerated — it's encouraged.

The UK is cosmopolitan, diverse, and creative, combining world-class research institutions with a thriving startup culture — which, for someone building a science-based business, is the perfect combination. Our proximity to Europe also matters to me; I consider myself European at heart and I deeply value the exposure to different perspectives and talent. The UK has a long tradition of intellectual curiosity and exploration, and given that I study curiosity for a living, I can't think of a better place to be.

Now, I want to be honest. I've been fortunate. I moved here before Brexit, which meant I didn't face the visa hurdles that many brilliant people face today. But increasingly, when I meet talented researchers and founders from abroad — people who would be extraordinary additions to our economy — I hear the same story. The processing delays are unpredictable. The costs are steep, especially for early-stage companies. And too often, as a result, these people decide it's simply easier to go somewhere else. That's real talent, real companies, and real jobs that the UK will never see.

So I want to highlight two recommendations from tonight's report that I think deserve real attention.

First: protect fast-track settlement for exceptional talent. When someone already has a proven track record, forcing them onto a ten-year settlement track sends the wrong signal.

Second: design a selective Spinout visa for graduates and academics. I've seen firsthand, at King's College, London and across UK universities, how much world-class research never contributes to the economy, sometimes simply because the researcher doesn't have the right to stay and build a business.

The UK has something genuinely rare: a combination of intellectual curiosity and entrepreneurial energy that draws people from all over the world. Let's make sure we don't close the door on the very people who help make this country exceptional.

Divide Intervention

I hope you’ll forgive another push, but our Entrepreneurs Survey is now open. If you’ve already completed it — thank you. If not, we’d value any founders who are reading to give just ten minutes of their time to do so.

We know your time is precious, so we wouldn’t ask you to spend it on us if we didn’t think it was worth it. Your responses will form the basis of our submission to the Treasury’s call for evidence on tax support for entrepreneurs, which closes soon. And while I can’t promise that the Government will do everything necessary to make the tax system perfect for entrepreneurs, this really is an opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

I’ve used Margaret Mead’s quote before and will do so again: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Have your say

If you’re not a founder, you can help us by forwarding this to entrepreneurs in your network and reposting this LinkedIn post (also feel free to connect with me while you’re there).

It’s Not Me

The Liberal Democrats have proposed breaking up the Treasury and replacing it with a new Department for Growth based in Birmingham if they were to enter government.

The proposed department would set taxes, design growth strategy, oversee major infrastructure decisions and shape spending rules. The Department for Business and Trade would be merged into it, while a separate Department for Public Expenditure would oversee spending.

All the way back in 2014, Giles Wilkes and Stian Westlake (an Adviser to us) argued for a similar idea. As with many Nesta papers from that period, it is still worth reading — not least because it explains how the reform could fail if poorly implemented.

The main risks are weaker fiscal discipline, the loss of the Treasury as an internal challenger to departmental spending demands, and coordination problems between tax, spending and growth policy. It would also shift power toward the Prime Minister and would rely on a politically strong growth department — without that, the old behaviour likely re-emerges informally.

Nevertheless, it’s a bold idea worthy of serious consideration from all parties. It also shows the long arm of influence that top quality research can have.

Still Believe

This week, Tim Shipman claimed in The Spectator (paywall) that even loyalists think Keir Starmer lacks a ‘philosophical worldview’. If the Prime Minister is on the hunt for one, we have one ready and waiting. The clearest articulation is in our statement of What We Believe, namely that:

“Entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful engines of productivity and progress. Throughout history, entrepreneurial ventures have transformed societies, lifting people from subsistence to prosperity.”

Our first signatory was Adviser Richard Browning — Founder, CEO and Chief Test Pilot of Gravity Industries. But the idea isn’t limited to entrepreneurs (or Prime Ministers). If you share our worldview, add your name to our website here.

Rise Up

Barclays is working with Female Founders Rise on The Rise Report of Female Entrepreneurship 2026. You can sign up here to receive a copy in your inbox. Women’s Health Horizons is inviting female healthtech founders and senior leaders to apply to speak at its conference on 10 March.

Rally Round

Bradley Jones, Founder of ThatRound, has joined us as an Adviser. A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Bradley is focused on improving how UK-based startups raise capital.

Bradley sees the UK as one of Europe’s strongest places to build a company: deep financial services, strong early-stage incentives, leading universities and growing regional hubs. He believes founders need a stronger policy voice — “entrepreneurs on the front line should help shape the rules of the game” — and values our role translating founder experience into reform.

You can learn more about joining our growing ambitious band of Advisers here.

Message from our Partner

At Fora, we create flexible workspaces that empower ambitious businesses to thrive. With over 70 locations across London, the UK and Germany, our spaces are designed to fuel productivity, creativity and growth.

Now, we’re bringing that vision to The Jellicoe at King’s Cross — a dedicated hub for founders and fast-growing companies. Here, flexibility meets opportunity: scale at speed with agile workspace solutions, connect with a curated community of entrepreneurs and investors, and enjoy all the perks of a Fora membership, from wellness spaces and hospitality-grade service to events that open doors.

Surround yourself with innovators and global tech giants in one of London’s most exciting neighbourhoods.

If you’re building the next big thing, this is where you want to be.

Three Big Ideas #54

Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

This week, Eamonn Ives ponders the productivity impacts of a pledge to end working from home, Mann Virdee discusses how and when institutional reform is required, and Jessie May Green argues innovation will be essential if Britain is to strengthen its defences against ecosystem degradation.

Power of Ten

The Government needs you. Specifically, they want your views as part of a call for evidence into the future of tax for entrepreneurs, which closes soon. This is your chance to influence it by completing our latest Entrepreneurs Survey.

Investment tax reliefs, employee share schemes, and the tax treatment of founder exits are all under consideration. Your responses will directly shape the evidence we submit.

Beyond this, your answer will inform how the Government, political parties and the media understand entrepreneurs. Your views will also set the agenda for what we work and campaign on.

It only takes around 10 minutes to complete, but will be felt in the policies that impact you and your business for years to come.

Master Stroke

Time entrepreneurs spend on administrative compliance is time they don’t spend growing their companies. Fragmented and opaque processes also enable fraud and slow down access to finance. There is a solution: The Master Key.

In our latest paper, published with Enterprise Nation and Xero, we make the case for a Unique Business Identifier combined with Verified Credentials — a “Master Key” that puts entrepreneurs in control.

Countries like Singapore, Australia and New Zealand already use this model, and the UK has laid much of the legislative groundwork. The final steps could deliver a productivity boost for Britain’s 5.7 million SMEs.

It’s time for Britain to beat bureaucracy.

Cool Operator

Our latest UK AI Fieldbook interview (supported by OpenAI) features our formidable Adviser Rodolfo Rosini of Vaire Computing.

As well as explaining Rodolfo’s audacious aim of near-zero energy computing, Mann Virdee draws out policy lessons from the frontline of building a foundational hardware company: use the state as an early customer rather than grants, fund measurable outcomes not academic approaches, and fix the UK’s scaling gap by improving capital markets and easing entry for top technical talent.

Read, like and subscribe here (especially if you need a clear explainer on reversible computing).

STEM the Flow

The Government is considering a Migration Advisory Committee recommendation to remove the PhD salary discount under the Skilled Worker visa. Today, firms can hire immigrant STEM PhDs from £33,400, but this would rise to £41,700 absent the discount. If you’ve hired — or are considering hiring — STEM PhDs via this route, please complete this short form.

Stamp it Out

As every economist (worthy of the name) knows, Stamp Duty Land Tax acts as a major barrier to mobility, discouraging moves for work, limiting firms’ ability to recruit across regions and reducing labour-market flexibility. That’s why we’re backing our Adviser Andrew Dixon OBE’s petition calling for a full Independent Review of Stamp Duty. You might want to as well.

Good Advice

As our WhatsApp Community already knows, we’ve soft-launched a website page directing founders to support. Support for UK Entrepreneurs (SEO rules everything around me) does exactly what it says on the tin — but it’s still a work in progress, and we’d like your help building it out.

We’d especially welcome suggestions from: entrepreneurs who’ve benefited from great advice, investors who share useful resources, public sector teams running overlooked support, operators who see recurring founder problems, advisers who help navigate complexity, ecosystem builders who connect people to the right help, and providers offering something special to our community.

Onyertrain

Are you plugged into Birmingham’s or Exeter’s entrepreneurial ecosystem? If not, here’s your chance to meet (nearly) everyone who matters locally — and others like you.

Our Ecosystem Builders events are deliberately light-touch but designed for deep connections. If you’re travelling in, you can also work from the space for the day, so it won’t interrupt your workflow (and you get to spend the day with us).

Birmingham is on 5 March (find out more here), and Exeter is on 24 April (find out more here).

Cool Runnings

In our latest interview for our UK AI Fieldbook series, Mann Virdee speaks to Rodolfo Rosini about how reversible computing can overcome the energy bottleneck to power the next generation of AI

Ideas to Impact

One of the best things about running The Entrepreneurs Network is meeting genuinely extraordinary people at our events each week — people building incredible businesses that restore my faith in human ingenuity and our ability to tackle the world’s most pressing problems. It’s a privilege to spend time among people like this.

That was certainly true on Tuesday, when we hosted the launch of our latest Female Founders Forum report, Ideas to Impact, in partnership with Barclays. To pick just three examples from a room of 150 phenomenal female founders: Wenmiao Yu of Quantum Dice is building cryptographic infrastructure for a post-quantum world, using quantum mechanics to secure everything from financial networks to national systems. Di Gilpin of Smart Green Shipping is cutting emissions from global shipping through wind-assisted propulsion. Magdalene Ho of Traxion Biotech is developing breakthrough therapeutics for neurological conditions. I could go on (over one hundred more times).

Victoria Collins MP, Science, Innovation and Technology Spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, speaking at the launch

Policymakers would do well to tap into that ambition. On current trends, women may not reach parity with men in founding university spinouts until 2060. I won’t rehearse all ten recommendations here, but I will briefly summarise the three I set out today in Forbes.

First, the report argues that time — not talent — is the binding constraint, and that universities need to grant academics credible ways to de-risk career pauses. We propose Commercialisation Fellowships: time-limited buy-outs that allow academics to build companies without jeopardising publications, promotions or REF outputs. With no formal mechanism to pause an academic career, entrepreneurship can feel like a one-way door — particularly for women, who even today still shoulder the majority of caring responsibilities. A recognised, reversible pathway would make spinning out feel less risky.

Second, we argue for scaling what already works instead of endlessly piloting new schemes. Programmes such as Innovate UK’s ICURe show that salary-supported time and structured market discovery increase both spinout success and female participation. ICURe replaces informal, network-driven entrepreneurship with evidence-based customer discovery, yet remains heavily oversubscribed. Expanding proven programmes would do far more for access than creating a proliferation of small initiatives.

Third, the report calls for better data to expose hidden barriers. Current spinout statistics are patchy and over-aggregated, masking where women drop out. Requiring universities to publish gender-disaggregated data on equity, leadership and survival rates would allow much sharper diagnosis. The HESA Spinout Register is a step forward, but without demographic detail it cannot show who truly benefits.

As Juliet Gouldman, Director at Barclays Business Banking and a member of the Invest in Women Taskforce, wrote in her foreword:

“If we get this right, the UK wins: more world-class research translates into businesses, more high-quality jobs across the regions, and a stronger pipeline of diverse founders building solutions the world needs.”

I’ll end with a quote from the foreword of Seema Malhotra MP, Minister for Equalities: “If we are to deliver on our Mission for Growth, we cannot afford to leave any talent sitting on the sidelines.” Hear, hear!

Data Intelligence

James Titcomb at The Telegraph has given the Government’s £4.1 million AI Skills Hub a fairly robust kicking (paywall). You can make up your own mind by signing up here, but after having a look myself, I’m left wondering what exactly that £4.1 million was spent on.

By contrast, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, working with Number 10 Data Science, has just released an excellent public tracker for delivery of the AI Opportunities Action Plan. It clearly breaks down each commitment and shows which have been met — with progress currently standing at 76%. The Government should do this as standard for every major policy announcement.

Crossed Wires

Subscribers to our Policy Updates received a briefing on the back of a private roundtable dinner with the Rt Hon Claire Coutinho MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, which we hosted with Mishcon de Reya.

The overwhelming feeling around the table was not hostility to decarbonisation, but frustration with a system that has lost sight of cost, speed and integration. Britain has ended up with some of the cleanest electricity in the world, but also some of the most expensive — and that cost is increasingly incompatible with building and scaling companies here.

Expect more insights from these events. I think it’s the least we can do given that demand for these events often outstrips supply by a factor of fifteen.

Three Big Ideas #53

Three Big Ideas is our fortnightly roundup of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.

This week, Eamonn Ives unpacks a new economics paper on doing industrial policy better, Philip Salter discusses the economic impacts of entrepreneur mafias, and Mann Virdee argues that policymakers need to think hard about Britain’s grid connection conundra.

Re-Energising British Businesses

At our roundtable with Rt Hon Claire Coutinho MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, founders warn that high costs, slow institutions and a fragmented grid are undermining Britain’s ability to build and scale energy-intensive businesses

Fee Movement

Year after year after year — report after report after report — we have made the case that Britain’s exorbitant visa fees are a false economy: raising little compared to the economic damage caused by deterring talented individuals who would otherwise be contributing to the country’s coffers.

It was therefore pleasing to hear Rachel Reeves announce in Davos this week that the Government is planning to “reimburse visa fees for select trailblazers in deep tech sectors and those joining the most promising UK companies in priority sectors.” Some like to quote the line that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” but in the battle of ideas, persistence can pay off.

At our last count, we found it costs nearly seven times as much for a skilled worker to come to the UK for five years with a spouse and a dependant compared to Australia, more than 12 times as much as Canada, and over eighty-six times — yes! Eighty-six — as much as Germany.

As friend of the network Lauren Gilbert explained in a brilliant article last month, Britain’s visa fees reduce welfare and revenue because they are misaligned with the elasticity of migrant supply across income groups. Put simply, high-skilled workers have a lot more choice on where to move to, so fees matter more to them. This means the current system raises little revenue, fails to deter the migrants policymakers claim to worry about, all while discouraging those who generate the largest fiscal surplus.

For those paying attention, this has been trailed for months. While there is always an element of playing to the crowd, Rachel Reeves has repeatedly stated that she understands that access to talent is a big deal for entrepreneurs when addressing them.

The Chancellor, of course, is right to trade in a little income on fees so the best and brightest aren’t put off coming to the UK. It can’t be said enough that 54% of the UK’s fastest-growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder or co-founder.

Now there’s just the small matter of the four other policy recommendations from our most recent Job Creators report. Namely: protecting fast-track settlement for exceptional talent; reforming the Global Talent visa to attract world-class operators; making the Innovator Founder visa more functional; and designing a selective Spinout visa for graduates and academics.

Simons Says

It was recently revealed that the Government dropped its plans for mandatory digital ID in the UK. Regular readers will be all too familiar with my views on the potential of Britain as a digital state (the uninitiated might want to read this).

To be clear, a digital identity system doesn’t need to be mandatory to succeed. Instead, we just need to make it so useful and compelling that only those with particularly strong ideological objections choose to opt out. That strikes the right balance for the UK between being both a liberal society with an efficient state that actually works for people. (Critically, for those with fundamental concerns, a well-designed system offers stronger protections, clearer oversight and greater control over personal data than the status quo.)

This week I discussed this directly with Josh Simons MP, Minister for Digital Government and Data, and have since been approached by several people who have followed our work on this. This is a policy area we will now return to in earnest. If you are an expert, entrepreneur, or simply have a serious interest in digital identity, please do get in touch.

Get on Board

Over the next month we’ll be adding some new names to the Advisory Board of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Entrepreneurship. This is made up of business groups, trade bodies, advocacy groups, ecosystem bodies and research institutes. If that’s you and you want to get involved, drop Eamonn Ives an email.