Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2025
I agree with Liam Kerr—and I have discussed this with Daniel Johnson in the past, too—that the rates system often does not take into account the fact that some of the most profitable businesses are the smaller ones. A start-up can be launched from a cupboard, where there are no rates, while a large and perhaps less profitable business has to pay them. I do not think that Murdo Fraser is listening to me at the moment, but I might have found a point of consensus with him—we might agree on those points. The rates system is based on an older version of the economy, in which the size of properties was linked to profitability, and that is just not the case in our new, tech-driven environment.
I see that the member has a quizzical look. I think that he agrees with my point—I was just giving him a little bit of ground there, in response to his question.
Although it is right that we celebrate successes, we acknowledge that there is more to do if we are to match the performance of our best competitors. That is why the budget made provision for a record investment of £30 million to accelerate Scotland’s emergence as a leading start-up nation, and I want to take this opportunity to highlight some of the key programmes that the funding will support.
I will begin with the implementation of “Pathways: A New Approach for Women in Entrepreneurship”, Ana Stewart and Mark Logan’s groundbreaking review of how we can support more women to start and scale businesses. Women remain significantly underrepresented in entrepreneurship; alarmingly, only 3.7 per cent of Scottish companies have an all-female founding team, and start-ups founded by women receive only 2 per cent of total investment capital. It is clear that deep-rooted societal barriers continue to limit women’s full and equal participation and “Pathways” describes that, correctly, as
“a denial of opportunity on, literally, an industrial scale.”
We have a duty to meet those challenges head on. Under the leadership of Ana Stewart, our newly appointed chief entrepreneur, we will invest up to £6 million in the report’s key recommendations, with a particular focus on pre-start support and associated early stage grant schemes. That will be a powerful package of interventions, which will create best-in-class programmes to help women start and scale businesses, offer targeted financial incentives to back the most promising ideas, and ensure that support is delivered flexibly in ways and at times that work best for them.
Our universities are another source of untapped entrepreneurial potential. They are among Scotland’s greatest national assets—hubs of innovation, creativity and enterprise. However, despite their global reputation, we have yet to unlock their full economic potential. Sweden offers a compelling example: by placing universities at the heart of its economic model and investing heavily in research and development, it now ranks second in the global innovation index and leads in generating university spin-outs.
Scotland needs to be just as ambitious. As a result, we are working closely with our universities on developing a new support package that will transform our ability to take innovative ideas from the lab bench to the business world by de-risking new technologies, accelerating commercialisation and attracting follow-on investment.