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Philip Stafford Newsroom Reporter
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Alex Depledge, who was appointed by Rachel Reeves, says her attempt to hire an external chair to overhaul procurement was blocked
While the hand-wringing continues about how to get more British companies to “stay and scale” in the UK rather than sell up or ship off, one former government adviser spent yesterday letting off some steam about the issue.
Alex Depledge, the government’s former business adviser, appeared at the ScaleUp Institute’s annual conference where the lack of domestic financing for British companies was a recurring theme.
Their figures showed that despite 17 big pension funds signing up to the Mansion House Accord, some names such as Royal London and Phoenix were falling behind. Meanwhile, Series D financing rounds are dominated by overseas backers.
The pension funds offered a “litany of excuses”, Depledge said. “It’s just criminal. We just put all of our money in the US stock market instead of investing in the UK.”
She went further, accusing the government of not really understanding scale-ups and railed against their procurement policies, saying that all the incentives were misaligned, which led to the government giving “95 per cent of contracts for technology to American primes”.
Depledge did, however, defend the Founders Relief scheme she helped design — which offers a 10 per cent rate on lifetime gains of up to £10mn and has been described as a “dreadful policy” by the IFS.
She said she was delighted about the debate because when “you get that level of kind of public discourse, it’s because you’ve hit a nerve” and that while a narrower pool of businesses could qualify, the government was putting its lever behind those with a higher chance of growth. This will undoubtedly continue to be debated.
Meanwhile, if any further proof were needed of the cut-through of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy, Raspberry Pi co-founder Liz Upton brought up the scandal’s impact on the tech sector, saying on stage: “I do hope Jensen’s wandering penis doesn’t bring down my share price.”
There are so few tech companies on the London Stock Exchange, Raspberry Pi would always be sheltered and while Nvidia lost hundreds of billions of dollars, Raspberry Pi’s shares rose yesterday.
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