Fastest Growing Firms: Government Support Package

The Government are today announcing an ambitious new package to provide support for the UK’s high potential scale-ups to grow and stay in the UK.

Scale-ups contribute £2.2 trillion to the UK economy and employ 3.9 million people, despite making up just 0.8% of businesses, yet not enough scale into global leaders.

This Government have taken steps to address the scaling gap through recent measures including the modern industrial strategy, the plan for SMEs and the tax incentives and measures announced in 2025’s autumn Budget.

Now we are going even further, in a sustained cross-Government effort to close the scale-up gap and make the UK the first choice for our top scaling talent as we strive to produce the UK’s first trillion dollar firm.

For high growth, strategically important scale-ups with the potential to be the UK’s first trillion-dollar company, the UK Government will act as the strategic partner, offering a concierge service that will act quickly and decisively to help these companies tackle barriers to growth, whether that is accessing talent or markets—either overseas or HMG procurement—or regulatory barriers.

To strengthen the UK’s pipeline of high growth firms, I have launched an external tender for an expert third party provider to run an 18-month pilot from autumn 2026. As set out in the industrial strategy, I want to broker new relationships with businesses and use the expertise and experience of those partnerships to our full advantage. This will establish tangible and robust 12-month intensive support for scale-up founders that are facing critical tipping points in their growth journey. Companies will receive tailored action plans with the focus of support on networking, markets, investment and talent.

Delivering the growth agenda in lockstep with industry is critical, and I am grateful for the input from my Industrial Strategy Advisory Council and industry experts as we have developed this offer for scale-ups. We will continue working closely with industry to identify where the UK can go further in boldly backing scale-ups. That is why today I have appointed Penny Verbe—who has founded and scaled global companies—as my scale-up adviser, to ensure our support reflects what businesses need and to champion the sector.

[HCWS95]