This week, the Science and Tech Committee revealed their report ‘Bleeding to death: the science and technology growth emergency’, a report into financing and scaling UK science and technology. The report cautions the authorities that the UK’s incapacity to retain and develop its science and technology companies has grow to be critically pressing, severely damaging the nation’s financial well being.
You can see the complete report here.
techUK welcome the experiences recognition that the UK has many of the foundations in place for to scale the ‘next trillion-dollar technology business’. But we recognise the urgency for the federal government to act to repair the blockers to scale, retain the financial advantages of R&D within the UK, and to seize alternatives for this authorities’s crucial to ship on financial development. Just this week, techUK explored this very subject with our members at our Tech and Innovation Summit listening to from modern scale-ups together with Pragmatic Semiconductor and Genomics.
We additional welcome many of the suggestions productive visa insurance policies, better threat urge for food and reforms to public procurement. Many of these align with techUK’s suggestions for the federal government forward of the Autumn Budget.
The scale of the problem
It is properly documented that the UK has world-class universities, sturdy early-stage enterprise capital, and a thriving ecosystem of innovators and start-ups. However, the UK continues to be caught in what the report calls a ‘doom loop’ with shallow capital swimming pools, risk-averse institutional buyers, and undervalued technology corporations that creates an ideal storm pushing promising tech companies abroad.
The statistics are additional alarming. Companies trying to scale up battle to discover late-stage capital from the UK; pension funds now allocate lower than 5% to home equities, down from 50% in 1997. In the US, 72% of enterprise capital comes from pension funds whereas within the UK, that is simply 10%. Alongside this, of the high ten world universities, solely three of the highest 100 industrial R&D spenders globally and none within the high ten.
Meanwhile, the UK’s capital markets should not working in addition to they need to be. Companies checklist abroad with the notion that increased valuations can be found there, which reduces exercise and capital within the UK market, perpetuating a vicious within the first eight months of 2025, solely seven UK corporations listed on the London Stock Exchange in contrast with 129 within the US.
During the inquiry, Lord Mair (Chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee) highlights that a number of important corporations together with Oxford Ionics, Deliveroo and Wise have relocated or expanded overseas.
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