Crysp CEO at Downing Street meeting a number of other business owners, with Rt Hon Rachel Reeves and Advisor Alex de Pledge MBE.

No this wasn’t me staking a claim for No. 10. It was something far more surreal and far more humbling: an invitation to join the Rt Honourable Rachel Reeves at Downing Street, as a guest of her advisor, Alex De Pledge MBE to celebrate UK entrepreneurship. And, in my admittedly biased opinion, Alex is someone who has genuinely stuck her neck out to support this government’s drive to help more people start and scale businesses.

Before anyone jumps to political conclusions, let me say this: my responsibility as a business leader is not to play pundit, but to recognise moments of opportunity. It’s to represent our community, to feed back what we’re seeing on the ground, and – as my team will tell you – to seize the chances that unexpectedly land at our feet. So when I blurted out to the train conductor that I was off to Downing Street (and no doubt he assumed I was making it up), it struck me how rare it is for a Bradford business owner to be invited to the Prime Minister’s home.

True to form, I couldn’t help adding, “I wish my Dad and grandparents could see this.” That pretty much tells you everything about what matters most to me in life.

The event itself was about celebrating entrepreneurship in the UK—and if we tune out the doom-mongers for a moment, there is genuinely a great deal to be proud of.

Alex De Pledge MBE, who extended the invite, is herself a Bradfordian. She attended what is now Tong Leadership Academy – hardly the easiest school in the 90s – before forging a successful consultancy career, launching her own business, and ultimately securing a multi-million-pound exit.

Alex has been busy since stepping into her role with Rachel Reeves: parenting, scaling her own business, and navigating a high-profile position at the heart of government. Despite all this, she hasn’t forgotten her roots. She hosted three roundtables across the North, choosing Bradford as one of the locations – and I had the privilege of taking part.

I had actually seen Alex speak years earlier, in 2017, at the Venture Capital Awards in Leeds. She was incredibly impressive then – brutally honest, authentic, and unafraid to admit just how thin the line was between a “failed startup” and her eventual success. It’s a line many of us know all too well.

At the Bradford roundtable, Alex was refreshingly direct. She didn’t pretend she could solve everything. But she homed in on a structural issue that has held UK innovation back for decades: the lack of deep capital for scaling technology companies – particularly those trying to raise a Series B round.

In the UK, we simply don’t have the investment markets that can support businesses at that stage. The result?

• Promising companies hit a ceiling.
• Many get acquired before reaching their full potential.
• And as a country, we struggle to produce the global tech leaders we see emerging from the US or China.

For anyone who has tried to scale beyond the early stages, this will sound painfully familiar.

This is why the commitments in the UK Budget 2025 feel so important—and, frankly, encouraging. The government has signalled a clear intention to close this scale-up gap, with measures designed to:

• Unlock more patient capital, including reforms aimed at getting pension funds investing in high-growth UK companies.
• Expand support for regional innovation, ensuring places like Bradford aren’t an afterthought but a focal point for new funding and accelerator programmes.
• Strengthen the pipeline for Series A and B funding, helping ambitious founders access the capital they need without looking overseas.
• Cut red tape for small businesses, making it easier not just to start a business here, but to grow one.

In short, the Budget acknowledges what entrepreneurs have been saying for years: that talent is evenly distributed across the UK, but opportunity – and investment – have not been.

And that’s why this trip from Bradford to Downing Street meant so much. It wasn’t about political fanfare. It was about being part of a conversation that finally seems to be shifting – one where the lived experiences of founders outside London are being brought directly to the tables where decisions are made.

If the commitments in this year’s Budget turn into real, tangible action, then the UK has a genuine chance to build a stronger, fairer landscape for entrepreneurship – one where the next generation of global tech leaders might just come from places like Bradford.