On Tuesday afternoon, I’ll be giving evidence to the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee alongside Professor Mark Hart, Professor Monder Ram and Jordan Dargue. Our evidence will feed into the Committee’s new inquiry on how businesses get started in the UK.
Having already looked at small business strategy and at how firms access scale-up finance, the Committee is now turning to the earliest stage: how people actually go about founding a business, what conditions make entrepreneurship more likely, whether government policies are effective at encouraging it and how the newly reorganised department will fold innovation policy into that effort.
The Committee plans to assess the UK’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole, draw comparisons with other countries and weigh the parts played by education, finance, innovation and policy in getting businesses off the ground.
There are three ways you can help. First, I’ll be drawing on our latest Entrepreneurs Survey. If you fill it in before it closes on Monday, your answers will be part of the evidence. Have your say today.
Second, you can email me your ideas directly. I won’t be able to raise all of them on Tuesday, but they can also feed into our written response to the call for evidence, which brings me to the third way you can help. You could respond to the call for evidence yourself. There are lots of questions, but the most useful thing a founder can send is an account of what actually happened rather than a view. The strongest submissions are built around a comparison: having started a business abroad as well as here, having founded one a decade ago and another recently, or having considered starting another business after exit and decided not to.
It’s not just for founders, though. Those supporting founders will have their own insights based on their areas of expertise. You can respond to the call for evidence here. It closes at 11pm on Thursday 12 November 2026.
Sage Advice
As anyone who attended our event with James Wise back in January 2024 will know, James — now chair of the UK government’s Sovereign AI Unit — argued in his book Start-Up Century that the 20th-century model of working for a single large firm for most of one’s career is breaking down. Just as automation once shifted workers from farms to factories, AI and digital tools are now automating layers of corporate middle management and administrative work, pushing more people towards independent and entrepreneurial paths.
Policymakers are finally catching up. Just today, Pat McFadden revealed that the Department for Work and Pensions will spend £5 million over the next two years on mentoring benefit claimants in how to set up a business bank account, register for VAT and put together a business plan.
This great transformation is the subject of our new report, Starting Out and Starting Up, supported by Sage and launched in the House of Lords on Wednesday with Kanishka Narayan MP (Minister for AI) and Dr Ben Spencer MP (Shadow Minister for AI).
Drawing on Cebr’s economic analysis of Sage’s 2.2 million payroll records from 111,700 businesses, alongside official statistics, the report shows that the payroll route into work is narrowing. Since 2022/23, the number of employees aged 16 to 24 has fallen by 129,200, a drop of 3.7%, while the number of employees of all ages has risen by 1.7%.
At the same time, more young people are working for themselves. The self-employment rate among 16 to 24-year-olds in work rose from 4.5% to 5.4% over the same period. Around 193,000 are now self-employed, 27,500 more than in 2022/23, helped by AI tools that cut the cost and complexity of starting.
Support has not followed them. The Youth Guarantee is built around employee jobs, and there has been no dedicated self-employment route since the New Enterprise Allowance closed in 2022.
Cebr models what would happen if 5% of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) — around 50,000 — moved into self-employment between 2027 and 2029. It would add £4 billion to output by 2029, with every nation and region gaining.
We make three recommendations: a Startup Allowance pilot for under-25s built around mentoring, a £3,000 Youth Enterprise Grant inside the Youth Guarantee matching what an employer already receives, and a youth strand of Help to Grow focused on using AI to start and run a business.
Leading Questions
Following World of Work 2026 in September, we’re pleased to be supporting MHR and Telegraph Media Group again with their next Future of Work breakfast. The theme of the free event is “Transforming from the top: cultivating culture, resilience and growth in a rapidly changing business environment.”
Applied futurist Tom Cheesewright, who has worked with Google, Meta and Nasa, will chair a panel with three guests. Fiona Hnatow, Chief People Officer at the University of Portsmouth, led the university’s strategic reset. Harriet Molyneaux, founder of Intero, advises senior leaders at FTSE 100 companies. Yvonne Maher, Chief Growth Officer at Cognito, chairs the Women’s Irish Network. They will look at how leaders can move from reactive management to building clarity, trust and resilience in their teams. The panel is followed by a Q&A, and there’s a networking breakfast beforehand.
It runs on Tuesday 10 November at Telegraph Media Group’s offices in Victoria. It’s open to business owners, C-suite, directors and senior leaders. There are only 60 places, and Telegraph Media Group will pick attendees to give a balanced mix of industries. Register your interest before Friday 30 October. Register here.