Autumn Budget 2026

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the Budget. One of the advantages, if I can put it that way, of being so far down the list in today’s debate is that I can say with certainty that I have been able to listen to all the excellent maiden speeches. None of the maiden speakers are in their places at the moment, but I congratulate them all. They will enrich the House in the years to come, and I am sure they all feel much better for having made their speeches.

In the short time available, I want to concentrate on a single question: will this Budget succeed in helping science and technology businesses scale up in the UK? Why is that important? It is because it goes to the very heart of how we can get growth in the UK economy. As the House knows, we have many interesting committees, they produce many interesting reports, and we have many interesting debates. Top of the list of reports that have not yet been debated by this House is the report of the Science and Technology Committee from an entire year ago on the question of scaling up businesses. We entitled it Bleeding to Death because we wanted to make an impact and to make it hard-hitting.

One of the specific examples in our minds as we considered our report was the case of a quantum start-up—I do not know whether anyone remembers the name, Oxford Ionics—that was eventually bought out by an American company for £1 billion because it could not find the scale-up capital necessary to grow in Britain. We cannot allow this type of case to go on, time and again. We have to find better ways to allow businesses to grow and scale up in the UK, ending the endless talk about the valley of death, with which this House has been familiar all too often over the decades.

Today’s debate gives me an opportunity to make the case for the views of the committee, given that there were lots of positive messages about innovation in the Budget speech. I may as well say right at the beginning that I was encouraged to learn that an additional £20 billion is being allocated to the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank. My noble friend Lord Eatwell touched on this. However, I am discouraged to learn that it may take several years before this injection becomes a reality.

In addition, I am hoping that the Mansion House Accord will succeed in unlocking around £25 billion of additional investment into UK private markets. I believe I am right that about £2 trillion-worth of assets are managed by UK workplace pensions. Whereas 30 or more years ago pension funds invested 50% or more in UK equities, this figure has slumped to about 2%.

The challenge we face is to accelerate the deployment of capital into innovative S&T, scaling up businesses and supporting the UK’s scale-up ecosystem. On a smaller scale—I know the Minister mentioned it in his opening speech—I hope the planned pilot of a young entrepreneurs’ allowance proceeds as soon as possible.

In our Select Committee inquiry, we had occasion to discuss whether we need what you might call a concierge service that would enable and guide scale-up businesses through the different stages, from start-up to scale-up and beyond. Is this, in effect, the idea behind Scale UK, as mentioned in the Budget Red Book? If so, when will the Scale UK-Connect regional pilot programme, designed to help 200 high-growth firms, begin?

About a month ago, the Prime Minister made a speech at the Innovation Nation Summit in Manchester—where else?—in which he spoke of a

“globally significant cluster in every region”

of the UK. He sees devolution at the heart of a renewed growth strategy. For this to happen we need to nurture the creative sector, the advanced manufacturing sector, fintech, photonics, clean energy, space, automotive engineering, quantum, cyber, compound semiconductors and AI. AI has, after all, established itself as a foundational technology, and the UK’s presidency of the G20 and the G7 gives us a chance to advance the AI for Good agenda.

Can my noble friend confirm that the UK will press for a global code of standards and guardrails to safeguard the global economy and guard against the much-discussed risks of AI, the sheer scale of which we are only beginning to understand? When it comes to international co-operation, a collaboration that is absolutely vital to R&D, what will this mean for future relations with the EU? These questions may go beyond my noble friend’s brief at the Treasury, but they are vital to our future.

I want to briefly highlight one other point about the reallocation of capital budgets across departments, designed in part to pave the way for the defence investment plan. I ask the Minister, as does the Campaign for Science and Engineering, whether there is a risk that R&D budgets might end up being disproportionately targeted. Can the Minister give any reassurance on this point?

I commend the Government for their commitment to ensure that the immigration system supports a dynamic labour market and innovative firms, and, to that end, want to deliver the most pro-business migration system in Europe for high-skilled workers. I put it to the Minister that, when our visa policy is considered, I hope the Home Office will enable this to happen rather than hinder it. I hope that there will be joined-up government, because the visa system was described to us on the Select Committee as “insane”; we took the view that it was an act of national self-harm. I very much hope that the Minister can give us some reassurance that this will be a feature of the years ahead, in support of growth.