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Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right on the importance of capital for start-ups and how we can enable them to scale up. It is why in the industrial strategy and the spending review we significantly increased the funding available to the British Business Bank to help innovative small companies to do exactly that. They now have record amounts of capital. We have increased the capital available to our funding streams in that way by 40% since the election, and I think that is exactly what my right honourable friend is seeking to do.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of the London Stock Exchange. In addition to the pull of US investors, does the Minister recognise that there are push factors making the UK a hostile environment for innovative, high-tech growth companies? There are neither public nor private sector customers, as the chair of GSK told our Science and Technology Committee recently. Excessive government retention of IP exploitation rights in procurement and grant contracts undermines companies’ growth prospects.

We are 45 years behind the US, which ended such emasculating IP contract terms in the Bayh–Dole Act, leading to the boom in revenue-producing high-tech companies and university spinoffs. Will HMT put its weight behind the economic benefit and long-term value for money that growth-friendly licensing contracts would have? Will the Minister meet to discuss these and how the UK can get its own Bayh–Dole effect?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her question. I do not necessarily share the overall pessimism that she started her question with. Of course, reform is necessary and that is why next week at Mansion House the Chancellor will publish the 10-year strategy for financial services, which I hope will cover some of the things the noble Baroness is talking about. We need to rebalance our system towards growth in the way she described.