Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of sector-specific industrial clusters on the number of high-growth start ups.

Making the UK the best place to start and grow a business is central to the Government’s growth mission. The UK has a deep start-up talent pool and according to Dealroom’s European Spinouts Report 2025, the UK has half of the top ten universities in Europe for spin-outs.

The Industrial Strategy focuses on eight growth-driving sectors and the city regions and clusters across the UK where they concentrate, as detailed in its Technical Annex. We are supporting sectoral strengths such as in the Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor, including with a £20m Local Innovation Partnership Fund award focused on autonomous vehicles, high-performance engineering and space technology.

The Strategy included a significant uplift in the British Business Bank’s financial capacity to £25.6bn. Annual investments of around £2.5bn each year will crowd-in billions of additional private capital and support UK businesses to start, scale and stay in the UK.