We’ll have a new Prime Minister next week. It’s looking like Liz Truss has it sewn up. She’s been very supportive of The Entrepreneurs Network over the years, speaking at lots of events, inviting us in to discuss ideas, and writing the foreword for our Resilience & Recovery and Here & Now reports.

On the face of it, it’s an unenviable time to become Prime Minister, with biting inflation, the cost of living crisis, a looming recession, and only two years until an election. But all political reigns come with mammoth tests. It just happens that this time – unlike with Covid or the financial crisis – we already know what’s on the horizon.

The new Prime Minister will be necessarily focused on the short term, but I think some commentators are overplaying the need to have every idea show fruition before the election. In the words of the Old El Paso advert turned meme: why not both?

Consider an issue like the visa system, which my colleague Aria Babu co-wrote on for City AM this week with Coadec's Frances Lasok, drawing on a section of our recent Tech Startup Manifesto. There is low-hanging fruit which, if implemented, could deliver results before the next election.

Currently the Home Office makes an 800% profit on some applications, which is absurd. Some have argued that it’s good to see the government making money on them. But this would only make sense if these people were an economic burden to the UK (they are not), or if there was no competition from other countries for talent (there is).

The article also recommends opening up the High Potential Individual visa beyond the current “top university” rankings, which aren’t getting at what we want. As Aria and Frances write: “A better ranking would look at the human capital of graduates, which you can calculate using graduate earnings. If the visa was reformed in this way it would include more specialist STEM institutions, small but elite American Liberal Arts Colleges, and top business schools.” Perhaps most importantly, it would open up the UK to India’s IIT’s, many of whose alumni have built and increasingly run Silicon Valley.

Luckily for the government, we have done the hard work of producing the criteria for a better ranking that would allow graduates from approximately 100 universities spanning 13 different countries to access the visa. This would have a slower effect than reducing the fees, but would still have an impact before the next election.

In an earlier paper, we called for the UK government to proactively identify and persuade leading scientists and innovators to settle in the UK. This idea may sound kind of wacky, but it’s something we do on a small scale through the Global Entrepreneur Programme (GEP), and something we did on a larger scale historically. This policy isn’t going to pay off in anything like two years, but we should still do it.

Many future crises could have been mitigated with proper planning. Whether that’s pandemic risk, which we’re still being incredibly blasé about, or the energy crisis – watch and weep as Nick Clegg opposes nuclear power in 2010 because it would only come on-stream by 2021 or 2022.

And even if some long-term policies aren’t yet bearing fruit, the act of genuinely tackling long-term challenges won’t be lost on people. After all, we humans literally (and metaphorically) plant trees knowing we’ll never sit in their shade. A government doing the same would be recognised as such.

Investment Culture
The Tech Sector team in the Department for Digital, Culture and Media and Sport (DCMS) has asked us to ask you to share the challenges you face – particularly when raising investment. If you would like to help inform their policy and communications strategy, please fill out this short Google form.

The survey aims to gather Insights into what further support founders need to scale their businesses, how the regional equity financing gap could be decreased, and insights about diversity within the sector.

Please provide responses by the 14th of September. If you would like a discussion, DCMS will be setting up feedback calls. You can get in touch with them about this by dropping them an email.

SME Productivity Call for Evidence
We’ve extended the deadline for the SME Productivity Call for Evidence briefing paper until next week. We’ve had some great responses, but a few people have asked for a few more days, so it’s only fair to open this up more widely. You can read the questions here. There is no expectation that you answer all the questions – short responses focused on specific issues are often the most useful.

Fermenting Female Ambition
We are hosting a Female Founders Forum roundtable on Wednesday. We will be talking about the barriers that the UK’s most ambitious female founders face and what can be done to help them out. If you’re a female entrepreneur, trying to build a billion-dollar company, get in touch with Aria.