Plugging the scale-up gap: How to ensure UK startups flourish

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Drawing on the recommendations from Scale-up UK: Growing Businesses, Growing our Economya report from Barclays on the future of UK scale-ups, I’ve outlined three steps the government could take to have real impact, yet which remain largely under-exploited:

  1. 1. Loosening regulation on venture debt – a source of funding which plays a significant role in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, yet is subject to regulatory obstacles not faced in the VC sphere;

2. Working with industry to attract foreign companies and investors to the Alternative Investment Market, which lags far behind the highly-successful Nasdaq;

3. Boosting the marketplace for secondary shares by removing stamp duty on secondary purchases of unlisted shares; including private, unlisted companies in Isas and other tax wrappers; and setting CGT on secondary unlisted shares that align with Entrepreneurs’ Relief at 10 per cent.

Read my article in full here.