There are lots of first-rate Members of Parliament – including, of course, the many MPs reading this to keep abreast of what entrepreneurs need to succeed. But as I’ve argued for a long time, we could do better. In fact, there are strong arguments to suggest that things have been getting worse. But beyond diagnosing the problem and suggesting we pay them more, I haven’t heard of any practical solutions. Until now.

This week, Munira Mirza, the former director of Boris Johnson’s No 10 policy unit (until she resigned), launched Civic Future. She thinks that too few of our most capable citizens aspire to enter public life, and Civic Future is her non-partisan answer to that problem.

Munira set out her stall in The Times and on the Today Programme (50 minutes in). Civic Future will be launching a fellowship next year: a one-year programme to provide participants with the knowledge, skills, and support needed to become great public leaders – regardless of their politics. (People from Labour and the Liberal Democrats are also involved.) Through evening seminars, weekend residential events, and overseas trips, fellows will discuss the most important moral, technological and governance issues of our time and meet senior figures in government, industry, and society. The programme is designed to be conducted alongside a full-time job.

This isn’t just about becoming a politician – public life is much broader than that, including those chairing and sitting on the board of public bodies. I know many of you reading this are incredibly civic-minded. Despite the mischaracterisation in too much of our media, entrepreneurship isn’t red in tooth and claw, but a collaborative endeavour.

Entrepreneurs aren’t the only group who Munira is targeting, but I think they should be a key one. She agrees, so we will be hosting a dinner with her soon. I have a long list of Advisers and wider entrepreneurs in my head who will want to attend this, but do let me know if you’re interested. You should also take a look at their website for more public events and sign up to be kept updated.

Getting good policies is more than just good ideas. We also need leaders in public life who can put them into practice. Both through Civic Future and other mechanisms, we want to ensure that some of the UK’s latent entrepreneurial talent is applied to the public sector.

Crisis of Care
The cost of childcare in the UK is prohibitively expensive. As Aria Babu explains in an article today, this is due to a number of factors:

“We force children into excessively regulated, formalised care; childminders and nursery teachers face a heavy-handed and bureaucratic curriculum that requires taking several weeks out of paid employment to learn; and we have the strictest adult to child ratios in Europe. Considering these factors, it is unsurprising that we face childcare shortages and spiralling costs.”

This is a problem that disproportionately impacts women, which is why we hear about it so often from the many of the female founders in our network. It’s a tough nut to crack. Childcare suffers from Baumol's cost disease (the rise of wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labour productivity), but that shouldn’t leave us hopeless. Instead, we need to redouble our efforts to find sensible policy changes – such as those Aria maps out.

Western Front
We got a shoutout in Parliament! In a debate on the contribution of international students, Matt Western MP cited our research which found that half of the UK’s fastest growing companies have an immigrant founder. This report was kindly sponsored by a successful immigrant founder: Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia. I think it's time we updated the statistic, so if there are other similarly civic-minded entrepreneurs or companies who want to support an update, do let me know.

In related news, a new paper provided yet more evidence of the benefits of immigration to an economy – the authors found that immigrant-founded startups in the US are 35% more likely to hold a patent than those founded by US natives.