The reason I care so much about this subject, is that I’m one of the few MPs who has taken a high growth business right through the cycle from foundation to flotation. As many of you know, before I became an MP I co-founded YouGov. We took it from two guys in a shed to an IPO on AIM. Throughout the first 7 years of its life it would have exactly fitted Octopus Capital’s definition of a High Growth Small Business. After that we had the growth, but our turnover would have been considered too large for us to be included in this excellent report. So when we debate the kinds of issues raised by this report I like to think I bring some real world experience to the table. For a long time there’s been a lot of anecdotal evidence that High Growth Small Businesses have been the driver of our recovery and it’s great to see some hard evidence to back this up. In my limited time I thought I’d just touch briefly on a few of the challenges raised by this document and what the government is already doing to address them. Firstly the issue of improving access to funding. A lack of access to bank lending is something that as politicians we hear quite often from businesses like those surveyed. However, as the report identifies, for most high growth small businessess bank lending is not the best fit. Part of the challenge is how do we get businesses to consider alternatives and in particular equity funding approaches. Why aren’t they considering them already? There is undoubtedly a cultural issue for founders, the old “but I don’t want to give up ownership” issue, but there’s also a challenge for advisors and accountants to better communicate the alternatives available and of course for funds such as Octopus to sell themselves. My own experience of this is probably typical, we talked to the banks who weren’t interested - although strangely after we had floated they wanted to lend us as much money as we wanted - we talked to some VC’s, who wanted too much in return, and then almost by accident we ended up talking to someone about AIM. The rest was history, but for all too many businesses it’s these accidental conversations that result in them finding out about what’s right for them, rather than any formal mechanisms. Another area identified in the report is the clear north south divide. The fact that a third of high growth small businesses are in either London or the South East is of concern but is no doubt part of the wider challenge of rebalancing our economy. This Government is absolutely committed to resolving this and to producing a Northern Powerhouse. £600m extra is going into northern rail routes already, a future HS3 set to connect Manchester and Leeds, and a new elected mayor for the Greater Manchester region are just the start. But already we’re seeing rebalancing, with the fastest rate of economic activity growth coming from the North East, and people joining the labour market at the fastest rate in the country in the North. There’s more to go, but this government is committed to the North and ensuring it can act as an incubator for all businesses and particularly high growth small businesses. On skills, we’ve invested more in higher apprenticeships than ever before and our changes to university tuition fees are ensuring that our universities can afford to stay world class. At the same time our reforms to schools are transforming educational opportunities for all. These are all changes that will take some time to show results. Education reforms are a long term process but I’m confident we’ve got it right. Finally encouraging exports. The fact that only 50% of high growth small businesses export at present and only 19% of them intend to expand to new markets in the next 12 months is surprising. On the one hand, it’s positive that our long term economic plan has meant that so many have been able to obtain rapid growth from the UK alone, but on the other hand just imagine the growth they could have seen if they’d been exporting as well. When it comes to help to export there has never been a better time to get support from government, whether it’s from UKTI here in the UK or from our embassies overseas. Perhaps though for this specific group of companies we need to be doing more to communicate this. I suspect that one of the challenges for us, is there is no body representing high growth small businesses, they’re not a perfect fit for something like the local FSB or Chamber of Commerce, but neither do they fit into an organisation like the CBI. So I’ll leave you with this question, do we need an organisation to represent these important businesses, someone that can talk to government about their challenges and needs and to be a conduit back to those business with solutions and information?