UK Start-up Companies

Lord Popat Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

My noble friend raises the equally important point that, as well as supporting start-ups, we need to support scale-ups. One initiative that the Government have taken is the entrepreneurship prospectus, which takes action on four important areas that create the ecosystem for companies not only to establish themselves but to thrive. That includes: on R&D, focusing public research firepower on priority sectors; changing the procurement rules and approach so that the Government are a better customer for innovative businesses, which is something that scale-ups often raise with us; the changes to tax reliefs, which I mentioned; and strengthening the ability of public finance institutions to invest at series B and beyond.

[Lord Popat (Con)]

My Lords, many SMEs and start-up businesses are facing a challenging time, not just because of high taxation but because they are heavily regulated as well. To open a bank account can take as much as three months, registering VAT takes time and a contract with a lawyer could be as much as 60 pages. Can the Minister give us an assurance that the Government will look into all this? We should genuinely be celebrating wealth creation and help our GDP.

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The UK has an extremely strong track record as a vibrant ecosystem for start-ups and scale-ups, and that is something the Government are committed to building on—hence, as I mentioned, the entrepreneurship package. Specifically on regulation, we are not sitting still on that either. We have announced, as part of our regulation action plan, a commitment to reduce the administrative burden on all businesses by 25%. We have already announced several specific measures to ease the regulatory burden for smaller companies. For example, we announced in October 2025 that we would exempt tens of thousands of companies from producing strategic and directors’ reports. We are looking carefully across all departments at how we can optimise regulation. In addition, through the Regulatory Innovation Office, we are looking at how to regulate new technologies that perhaps do not fit within the existing regulatory purview, such as drones or novel foods.