Conclusion 10

The Department accepted that much less capital investment is available to British companies looking to grow than is available to their US counterparts. However it believes that the venture capital funding gap is much smaller if expressed as a percentage of the two countries’ respective GDPs – which would represent a considerable improvement on the position ten years ago.20 The Department told us that a cross-government review into support to scaling businesses is in progress, and that it is looking to strengthen links between UKRI’s grant recipients and government-funded sources of capital such as the British Business Bank and the National Wealth Fund.21 The rewards of public investment in research and innovation