Public Equity: Investment
The question
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether she has assessed the potential merits of public equity investment in frontier artificial intelligence companies in encouraging those firms to list or dual-list on UK capital markets.
Answered by Lucy Rigby
The British Business Bank’s Five Year Strategic Plan, published in November 2025, sets a clear focus on improving access to finance for smaller and high-growth businesses, helping crowd in private capital and ensuring more UK companies can reach scale and ultimately access public markets. A strong early‑stage and scale‑up ecosystem is essential to the long‑term depth and competitiveness of the UK’s public equity markets.
In 2025, the Government increased the British Business Bank’s financial capacity to £25.6 billion, marking a major step change in its ability to support UK businesses to start and scale.
The Government have also delivered an ambitious set of reforms to boost the UK’s capital markets and make it easier to IPO in the UK through an ambitious modernisation of the UK’s listings rules. Taken together, these reforms make it easier to start, scale and list in the UK.
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