Government should also pick up the loudhailer to promote the UK’s regional strengths.
How many people in the UK realise the options available for investing in British businesses? How many entrepreneurs know about the advantages of protecting their IP? How many businesses realise that they can apply for funding through the regional growth fund, or that they can tender for public sector contracts through G-Cloud? Government should seek to maximise the impact of existing measures by shouting much louder about everything that is already available for the benefit of the UK tech sector. What is arguably lacking is not so much the right policies but awareness about them. To name just a few: the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) provide some of the world’s best tax incentives for investors the patent box enables companies to pay a lower rate of corporation tax on profits earned from patents there are enterprise zones to attract businesses to specific areas and Local Enterprise Partnerships to spur regional private sector growth. We should start by acknowledging that the UK already has many of the essential policies in place. So what more could be done to promote their growth in other parts of the UK? Be grateful for what you’ve got Technology clusters, companies and jobs are disproportionately concentrated in the South East. For whilst the government’s ambitions are national, there is a gap between rhetoric and reality.
Two years on, Policy Exchange believes the time is right to review the effectiveness of current measures, and to ask what more needs to be done in order for technology to bring prosperity to “every corner” of the UK. They ranged from tax incentives for investors to entrepreneur visas and from opening government procurement to SMEs, to investing in Catapult Centres. This is the path we need to take to create new jobs, new growth and new prosperity in every corner of our country.” In the same address he outlined more than a dozen policy measures designed to nurture the creation and growth of technology companies and tech clusters. The British government has not been immune from admiring glances towards Silicon Valley, nor coy about its aspirations to emulate the region’s success.Īt a speech marking the launch of Google Campus in March 2012, George Osborne unequivocally stated his ambition for the UK technology industry, saying: “We want nothing less than to make the UK the technology centre of Europe. This article first appeared on TechCityInsider on.
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