Small Businesses

Lord Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freeman (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Risby on securing this debate. He is a former colleague of mine with a long and distinguished record for East Anglia in the other place. I think your Lordships owe him a debt of gratitude for the time to discuss this very important issue. I want to concentrate on advisory support for high-technology companies, particularly small technology companies, for which the failure rate in this country is far too high. It is not about the absence of finance, but about experience and knowledge being passed on, in particular from government. That is the burden of my brief comments.

My experiences in high-tech small companies stem from my chairmanship of Cambridge University’s technology transfer office and my chairmanship of the Security Innovation and Technology Consortium, which has more than 100 members of small firms in the high-technology field. I am pleading on behalf of that small but important proportion of small high-tech companies that fail because of a lack not of finance but of guidance and help concerning their ambitions and the direction of travel that they have chosen. In some cases it may be correct—it may result in substantial benefit to the United Kingdom—but in others it can be misguided.

The burden of my comments is that we need better to capitalise on the tremendous wealth of experience and knowledge of some of our smaller high-technology companies and make sure that they do not end up in a blind alley. I have great admiration for the American Research and Development Corporation in Massachusetts, which over the years has nursed and encouraged smaller firms which have grown to very large entities in the United States. It has a very good track record.

My plea to the Minister is: can he please communicate with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and suggest that it might create and sponsor a group of technology experts drawn from many industries, but those that particularly depend on high technologies, to act as advisers and guardians of the technology—not of the wealth of those individuals? They could provide a bit of sober advice to say, “Have you thought about this technology, which might now proceed at a pace in Japan, the United States or on the continent?”. Some of these small companies, which might have a tremendous future in front of them, might fail and fail badly, simply because of that lack of advice. We should emulate not only the United States but Germany, which has the right institutions to cover the point I made: not only financing but the intelligence network of experience in particular fields. We have the brains in this country, but in this case we need a few wise uncles—some from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, I hope.