British Business Bank funding of £150 million will be used to provide investing to fast growing scale-up businesses in the North of England.
Chancellor John Healey made the announcement during a visit to the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry where he delivered a speech outlining the government’s “direction for good growth built in more places”.
The fund, from money already allocated to the British Business Bank, will provide investments of between £5 million and £15 million to university spinouts and other scaling businesses in the North.
He also announced the “Northern 500” which will bring together 500 of the North’s mid-sized businesses into a single community led by Northern England mayors and supported by the private sector and central government.
In addition, Healey said the government has set a goal to double the number of unicorn firms (companies valued at over £1 billion) in the UK, with the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade planning to “identify the next generation of high-growth companies and help them overcome regulatory barriers, access capital, and win government contracts as an early customer.”
The UK currently has 80 unicorn businesses, the third highest number globally.
Other announcements included delivering new powers to oversee ‘sandboxing’, the term for how companies and regulators can work together to test new models or features in safe and controlled environments.
The government said the new powers, to be delivered through the Regulating for Growth Bill, will let businesses “test cutting-edge products and technologies safely, establish what works and scale more quickly”.
Potential use cases include patient access to innovative treatments, rollout of delivery robots, defence technologies or maritime autonomous vehicles.
John Healey pledged to “take an axe to the thicket of consultation, litigation and administration that has a stranglehold too often on private investment”.
He said under the current system, decisions have been held back. An example is despite 99% of respondents to a consultation supporting microchipping cats in the same way as dogs in 2019, it took nearly five years to make it happen: one call for evidence, two further consultations, legislation through Parliament and then finally enacted in June 2024.
From today, he said ministers have been told that public consultations are not always required and they have been encouraged departments to find other ways to get views from the public and experts when developing policies.
During the the speech, ahead of the Budget on 28 October and the prime minister’s announcement of a 10-year plan for growth in the UK, Healey said:
“Ask an economist what growth is and you’ll get a number. But ask the country and you’ll get a different answer. A young person getting a new job in a company that’s on the up. A sole trader winning a new contract that pays for a holiday with their kids. A business winning a new export order, giving the community around it a new lease of life.
“The prime minister laid out a clear diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the past. The solution is a fundamental shift that starts with putting power in the right places.
“The next chapter of Britain’s growth story will be written in more places.
“Instead of getting in the way with complexity and red tape, we need a strong, strategic centre wired to enable local leaders and their ambitions.
“That’s why we created No10 North, working on a dual mission with the Treasury, removing obstacles so that local leaders and businesses can pull together to drive growth and productivity.
“I want to see wealth creation in this country. I want to see businesses make a profit. And to create the conditions for that we need an active, accountable state at all levels to remove blockages and create the conditions for more investment.”
