National Wealth Fund

So Reeves came in and...

I won't get into the details, changed her debt rule and beefed up or created these bodies, things like the National Wealth Fund, which invests in infrastructure and critical minerals and supply chains and stuff like that.

And the British Business Bank, which loans to British startups or to venture capital funds.

And she basically put money behind them.

So it allows for more investment.

That's maybe the primary reason for using it, if you're Rachel Reeves and now John Healey.

But the other official justification is a body like the National Wealth Fund serves a really useful economic purpose because it can underwrite unproven technologies, it can make loans to critical national infrastructure where the private market might not, like size well see, it can do things that the private market won't, and in the process crowd in more money to go into those important sectors.

So they would argue this is doing good, important work, A cynic might say you're letting the accounting treatment govern the policy choice.

Sometimes it's just a reiteration of a commitment previously made.

But there's real funding that's going towards the National Wealth Fund.

So

would you sum up, Eileen, with all of that, that would you come out of the budget feeling like the country was more of a place for entrepreneurs than it was before?

I do think, again, I'm an optimist, and I do think what they've tried to point to today does try to underscore that.

So I'm happy that there was no increase to capital gains tax.

I'm happy that some things that are working, they decided to try and incrementally improve, whether it was founders relief, EMI schemes, EIS tax relief, the Mansion House Accord, recommitting to the British Business Bank, more money for the National Wealth Fund, doing away with non-compete clauses, for example, helping with talent visas.

I think those are all directionally the right thing to do and sort of suggesting, listen, maybe we're not the party or the government that's going to be investing in business, but we're definitely not going to penalise it.

That could be a pro-growth policy in itself.

There was a boost to the big sovereign investment funds that we have, the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank of around 20 billion to their spending power, which starts in a couple of years' time to be gradually ratcheted up.

They can invest a bit more, and that might be seen as a pro-growth policy.

But frankly, there wasn't much on growth, really.

If you're going to be having an election pretty soon after that, after you announce all your spending cuts for departmental budgets, you may be doing a lot on investment because the fiscal rules allow you to do that.

It's going to be all this extra money supposedly for National Wealth Fund and for the British Business Bank, all these things off balance sheets, by the way.

And that will help perhaps regions and you're going to be doing all this rewiring, you know, the state and so on for the future to make more sort of regional growth happen in every postcode, all that sort of stuff.

But in reality, it's going to be very, very difficult to square what is there now with your ambitions on defence and in all the other areas.

And is it going to achieve it? Well, we've said, yeah, you've put some interesting notes in here to our doc about this, including referring to some of the stuff we haven't actually talked about already, actually.

We didn't talk about the National Wealth Fund.

No, I was going to bring that up here.

So I think the thing is, yeah, is it going to work? I think it will have achieved breathing space for the government.

So that just means transport investment.

So there's nothing there.

There was some stuff about the National Wealth Fund more money going into it which is a good thing and more money being available for infrastructure and as we said earlier different ways of of accounting for infrastructure projects in regions but it's all still quite what i say wonkish i don't like wonkish as an insult because being on policy detail is a good thing but it's quite arcane and sort of hard to know exactly how it will play out in public consciousness

I agree.

In today's Budget, I'm boosting investment through our public financial institutions.

A further £20.4 billion for the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank over the coming years, supporting 140,000 jobs.

And I'll work with pension providers, with asset managers and with the wider industry to accelerate more private investment into Britain's innovative, fast-growth firms.

We will prevent regulation from holding back investment by removing regulation and tariffs worth £800 million to business.

And that's what's actually happening with this budget.

I mean, just briefly before I just ask kind of, you know, maybe a little alternative budget, but the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank get a beast 20 over just over 20 billion for clean energy, technology and defence.

I'll actually just separate about defence.

But what what's it is? What are they doing? What is that? Is that ending? It's not ending nebulism.

The spending review that's supposed to happen now will magically resolve all of this.

There was some talk about some accounting fiddles that he was going to try and do.

There's a little bit of one, it seems, in the budget, around five billion pounds going to the Energy Wealth Fund or the National Wealth Fund, excuse me.

But really, it's another big problem pushed off into the distance, not actually addressing the thing now.

And it doesn't limit them in terms of the fiscal rules in the same way as it used to.

So what we've seen is them expanding the capacity of our public financial institutions, but particularly the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank by around 20 billion in order to kind of support business investment, so support private investment.

And we think that that could be, you know, I mean, it's a really welcome measure.

It's something that we kind of called for.