Autumn Budget 2025

Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I will focus on the Government’s support for start-ups and scale-ups, as outlined in the entrepreneurial prospectus published with the Budget, and on the work needed beyond investment to fulfil the Chancellor’s promise to become a better customer to innovative procurement. That promise, aimed at achieving revenue for companies for exports and growth to boost the economy, will remain an illusion until we eliminate Whitehall’s four horsemen of the apocalypse—pestilence, war, famine and death—rampaging deep within our procurement and innovation systems.

Pestilence commandeers intellectual property in grants and contracts, stripping innovative tech businesses of their competitive edge and deterring investors. War forces indemnities, demanding that fledgling companies shoulder risks that are impossible for them to bear. Famine blocks procurement, as in the new Department for Transport’s technology programme, which excludes the very innovators it claims to champion. Death is delivered by exercising the harshest terms in innovation loans, compelling the wind-up of viable companies, refusing flexibility and extinguishing enterprise. These are not abstract flaws: they are lived realities.

Last Wednesday, the Times exposed the strangulation trap that Innovate activated against Wootzano, with a government agency looking more like an asset stripper. It is not the only example. Crown Commercial Services publications show that the new transport technology framework rejected every single start-up and scale-up applicant. Companies such as Vivacity Labs, with nearly $20 million raised to optimise traffic networks with AI, were rejected. Caura, backed by £4 million from Lloyds Bank, and contributing to the National Parking Platform, was rejected. Liftango, advancing shared mobility with $10 million raised, was rejected. Each rejection is not only lost contracts: it is a lost opportunity for Britain’s future. Many others have given up applying, knowing they will be assessed by big-company criteria—by EBITDA—when they do not yet have revenue. That is what they need the procurement for: the Government’s role is to be first mover, not a follower.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, for his valiant efforts to reform the IP-grabbing terms in Innovate UK contracts over this last year since I first raised the matter. But it shows the uphill task, and there are all the procurement departments yet to tackle. Therefore, in line with the prospectus promise, I appeal to the Minister to meet with me, examine the evidence and bring the Treasury’s weight to bear in all departments to bring rapid change. The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, the ScaleUp Institute, which the Minister referenced in his opening remarks, and countless companies have all sounded the alarm on these issues. We are not all wrong, whatever the Government are being told. Will they stop the rampage of these horsemen?