'We don't need any more restaurants', says adviser to Chancellor

Alexandra Depledge, who advises the government on entrepreneurship, said there was too much emphasis on slow and steady SMEs and professional services.

She said: "We don’t need any more restaurants. I’m not anti-hospitality but that’s not where my efforts are.”

In an interview with the Insider business magazine, she said it was “quite incredulous that people are agog” taxes have gone up, given the levels of government financial support offered during Covid.

She said: “You don’t inject the level of support into an economy that we did during Covid, and not expect that something has got to give. We have a high debt ratio. The third largest item on our P&L is servicing our debt. 10p in every pound goes to paying down debt. I’m not sure this government had much choice.

"You have to make trade-offs but people want easy answers so they turn to the likes of Jeremy Corbyn or Nigel Farage and it’s misguided and dangerous. By and large the government didn’t have much choice."

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Ms Depledge dismissed a notion that Labour are causing companies to flee the country and says entrepreneurs who have moved to Dubai "would have gone anyway."

She added: "On the question of Dubai, we can’t compete with a zero tax environment and I don’t think we should try. But we should try to compete on being the best place to scale a company. We have some of the best universities in the world, a large venture capital pool, incredible talent, fair and judicious laws.

"I don’t think it’s as simple as, ‘Labour has come in and billionaires have fled.’ They’d have left anyway. But there is more we can do for commerce and trade which is what I’m doing with government.”

Ms Depledge said the UK had to stop focusing on established SMEs and pay more heed to newer startups in fast-growing sectors.

She added: "We could do more that’s pro-growth, I got the BBB to create ten new growth funds. We are really good at starting businesses [in the UK] but we are really bad at scaling them.

"In order for the United Kingdom to win, a couple of things have to happen.

"We need to change public discourse on what is the engine of growth. Startups and scaleups are completely different from corporates and SMEs.

"SMEs play a massive role in the economy but they have played the same size role for the last 50 years. Corporates are happy with 2 per cent growth year on year. That won’t grow the size of the UK pie. It’s going to be our high growth, high innovation scale ups and startups."

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She said edgy tech scale-ups held the key to growth.

Ms Depledge added: "We need to talk about them properly. You wouldn’t put the same tyres on a McLaren as a Ford Fiesta. These companies are different. That’s where the best paying jobs are going to come out of.

"We need to place bets. Everyone thinks a rising tide elevates all ships and we need to be fair to everybody. I don’t believe that."

"The UK can play in six or seven spaces and be number one. We should put all our research and capital into that.

"Things like photonics and quantum computing, things in advanced manufacturing where we are head and shoulders above everything else. The time is now, it’s five minutes to midnight, “If we don’t get a move on, we will miss this window. Nvidia will come and poach all our AI talent out of our universities. The great British public don’t understand that urgency."

The founder of Resi, an architectural service helping UK homeowners renovate and extend their homes, Ms Depledge is also a non-executive director of Persimmon Homes plc. In June, she was appointed as the first entrepreneurship adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer having collected an MBE in 2016.

She met Reeves in 2022 when the then-Shadow Chancellor hosted a dinner in London.

"I was not, and never have been, a Labour supporter or voter. Neither am I a Tory. But I do like sensible politicians," Ms Depledge said.