This week we launched Funding to Flourish in the House of Lords, with well over 100 entrepreneurs and investors listening to speeches delivered by Lord Leigh, the Shadow Business Minister Bill Esterson, and Will Fraser-Allen from the Venture Capital Trust Association (VCTA). As many of you will know – particularly if you signed our letter in The Telegraph backing it – the report was released last month, but this was an opportunity to take stock of what has been achieved in the interim, and what more needs to be done.

Most importantly, following our report the Chancellor committed to maintaining the Enterprise Investment Scheme and Venture Capital Trust relief past 2025, although we need the Government to set out a timeline and details of how it plans to implement the extension of the scheme.

Also, as the report recommends, the financial health requirements are still not fit for purpose. HMRC are increasingly rejecting exactly the sorts of companies these schemes are designed to target: loss-making companies with growth prospects. This needs addressing as a matter of urgency.

There is also an ongoing issue with SAFE Notes not benefiting from these tax breaks. SAFE Notes are commonly used by early-stage startups to raise capital from investors. A SAFE is a contract between an investor and a company that provides the investor with the right to receive equity in the company at a future point in time, usually when the company raises its next round of financing. Y Combinator invented them back a decade ago, but the regulators haven’t caught up.

While this report was driven by the views of entrepreneurs, it was also informed by conversations with investors, as well as the VCTA, EISA and others. That’s why alongside our friends at Fieldhouse Associates we’re launching an Investor Forum to ensure that the views of investors feed into policy in a more systematic way.

Fieldhouse is a public relations and communications agency working with many angel and venture capital investors, as well as with many fast-growth tech startups and scaleups. Many of you will know its founder Cordelia Meacher, who is one of our Advisers.

We’re joining forces to provide a free forum for investors to have an impact on UK policy, ensuring investors are able to input into government through both The Entrepreneurs Network and APPG for Entrepreneurship, as well as established groups like the VCTA, EISA, BVCA, BAA and anyone else in this space.

It’s for investors in the broadest sense – both individual and institutional. The way this forum develops will be driven by you. So sign up today to let us know how we can work together – and please forward the opportunity on to any investors who you think might want to be involved.

The 25%
While some policy areas are oversaturated with ideas, others remain remarkably unexplored. The intersection of disability and entrepreneurship is very much underexplored.

That’s why it’s pleasing to see a new report from Small Business Britain.

This isn’t a niche issue. The FSB estimates that 25% of entrepreneurs are disabled or neurodiverse. For its report, Small Business Britain surveyed 500 disabled entrepreneurs from across the UK, specifically those with a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities, as defined by the Equality Act.

Key findings include that: 37% report they have been discriminated against because of their disability; 33% of disabled entrepreneurs followed the entrepreneurship route out of necessity; 60% did not get any support when starting their business; 59% are worried to take on debt, whilst 48% don’t know the right type of funding; 70% lack appropriate role models; 84% feel that they do not have equal access to the same opportunities and resources as non-disabled founders; and 35% say their disability has positively impacted them as an entrepreneur.

I recommend reading it in full – or, at least, dropping it into Chatpdf (other software is available) and interrogating the paper through chat.

This should be a catalyst for more policy work in this area – including, I hope, through the APPG for Entrepreneurship. It’s something we touched upon in this webinar with Lisa Cameron MP during Covid, but it remains a hugely neglected area of research.

Operation Innovation
Next week we'll launch a new essay collection that will make the case for the power of innovation to make us all richer, healthier and happier. It something of a manifesto on topics we plan to undertake more research. Eamonn Ives, our Head of Research, has an article out today to give you a taste for what to expect:

“The effect of accumulated innovations has transformed the world at a pace that would have been unimaginable to our not-so-distant ancestors. Even a rate of 2% growth per year – what is now considered slow – if sustained year after year, results in a doubling of measured living standards in just 35 years. The gap in living standards between 1423 and 1723 may have been noticeable to a typical fifteenth-century person, but the gap between 1723 and 2023 would have been beyond even an eighteenth-century person’s wildest imaginings.”

Join us to get a copy in your inbox on Tuesday.