With the Budget now just nineteen days away, regular readers will know we put out a letter to entrepreneurs making the case for why the Chancellor should extend and enhance the Enterprise Investment Schemes, SEIS and EIS, and Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs).

This isn’t a big ask. After all, at the Autumn Statement last November, Jeremy Hunt confirmed the Government would be expanding the generosity and availability of SEIS, and the government “sees the value of extending” EIS and VCTs. But legislation needs passing and the longer the Government delays the more uncertainty entrepreneurs and the investment community face.

Many of you have already signed the letter, which is why The Telegraph reported on it this week. The article notes the support of some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs – like Hiroki Takeuchi of GoCardless, Giles Andrews OBE of Zopa and Chris Hulatt of Octopus – but the letter is for entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey.

We have some heart-warming quotes. For example, Catherine Bedford, the CEO of Dashel Helmets: “My company which manufactures solely in the UK, in areas of economic deprivation, has only managed to raise funding due to the SEIS and EIS schemes. The schemes are crucial to the survival of viable start ups.” I know where I’ll be buying my next cycling helmet from!

There’s still time to sign the letter and tell your story for the press release, which will be released alongside a report from the APPG for Entrepreneurship next week. Join us as a Member, Supporter or Adviser if you would like me to email it to you when it launches.

Union Busting
This dovetails nicely with a debate that my colleague Aria Babu took part in at the Cambridge Union yesterday. As is the way with these things, the motion was purposely provocative: “This House Would Prioritise Economic Growth Over Everything Else”.

While I’m sure we can all think of higher priorities, economic growth is often aligned with these – whether that’s ending poverty or protecting the environment.

We’re true to our policy priorities: “Entrepreneurial endeavours have taken humanity from subsistence to relative affluence and it is entrepreneurs who will raise long-term living standards of future generations.”

You can watch the debate here or read Aria's arguments on our blog.

Upon A Time
In David Cameron’s first ever appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions, he quipped to the then Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair: “He was the future once”. It is therefore ironic that this week Blair, with Cameron’s predecessor William Hague, offered a more coherent vision of our political future than many of our present politicians seem able to.

The Tony Blair Institute’s (TBI) A New National Purpose covers some familiar ground, integrating some of our research – including Way of the Future, our joint report with them.

Chris Haley’s essay on using public procurement more effectively to drive innovation is referenced in relation to the requirement for a significant cultural change towards risk tolerance, as well as greater diversity in “alternative” procurement processes. (Read our Procurement and Innovation report and our Access All Areas: Government report with Enterprise Nation for further reading.)

But the TBI report adds another idea that the government should explore, suggesting government departments “publish and maintain a ‘Request for Startups’ list, like that used by American tech startup-accelerator Y Combinator, to signal to and incentivise innovators to work on relevant product ideas.”

In our Honour for Innovators report, we suggest that new public honours for innovators should be considered. It would be an easy (and cheap) win for the new government. John Petrie OBE, who has helped design national honours and decorations for other countries, even mocked up some potential designs, which you can see in the report.

The TBI report also recommends including the earning potential of graduates in the selection criteria for the High Potential Individual visa, as we did in True Potential. In addition, it calls for the creation of a High Potential Student visa for those studying in strategic science and technology priority areas: “This should count as time towards an individual’s indefinite leave to remain while also being more lenient in terms of working restrictions to enable these students to more easily work for innovative companies or build their own startups.”

This latter point about getting indefinite leave to remain is a critical point that many non-immigrants, including politicians, fail to prioritise. How can we expect people to take on the risk of starting and growing a business with the additional risk of being chucked out of the country? This is something we will be exploring in an event with Lord Bilimoria next month.

There is a lot more to unpack. If you’re time poor, I would just search the document for “Technical recommendation”, read all forty-three and let me know which you think we should be helping to push.

For my part, I particularly like the idea of creating a new ministerial position to attract expert leaders to run programmes in an executive fashion, similar to how the Vaccine Taskforce was run. Anything that convinces more elite figures, like Kate Bingham DBE, from the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem into public service can only be a good thing – or more like an absolutely necessary thing according to Bingham in last year’s Romanes lecture.