A Conversation with Investors Across the Western Gateway

I was delighted to take part in our Roundtable last month, in partnership with the British Business Bank, to discuss with the area’s investment community how we further develop our plans to increase the amount of investment coming into the area and make sure it supports the full diversity of businesses operating here.  

The Western Gateway is highly innovative. Wider Southwest England and Wales both outrank the UK and EU average in the EU Innovation index, and the Western Gateway area hosts 52.5% of the high growth businesses within South West England and Wales. 

Despite this, we know that access to finance is an issue for many businesses across our area.  Improving this is a key mission for the Western Gateway as we look to support innovation and improve productivity to add £34bn to the UK economy by 2030. 

As a pan regional partnership that spans the English and Welsh borders, we are in a prime position to advocate and assist business growth across our geography, bringing together the best of innovative and creative industries from both countries to achieve more.  

The round table highlighted several questions we need to address in order to do this: 

• How do we quantify what demand there is for investment finance, particularly to scale up businesses and how can we ensure we are being ambitious enough to fulfil our potential by making the case for larger regional funds? 

• What mission do we want investment funds to deliver and how do we link the mission to our sector strengths? Our narrative about what we want these funds to focus on needs to link to our overarching ambitions for the area. 

• How do we attract more angel investors to create new funds? 

• The diversity of businesses getting investment is poor. Around 99% of investment goes into businesses run by men, so how do we connect investors to a more diverse range of businesses, both in terms of who leads them but also geographically? Also, understandably, investment is centred around areas like Bristol and Cardiff - how do we use our networks to promote existing regional funds across the whole geography? 

We know that the Western Gateway is home to some of the UK’s highest value-add sectors and, with better support we believe they can help consolidate the UK’s role as a scientific super-power. We will be working with our partners to develop an action plan to drive more investment into the area alongside our other programmes, which together aim to make us the UK’s green energy powerhouse.