£83bn boost to UK economy over the next decade if Britain’s SME manufacturers achieve their growth ambitions

05 March, 2025

This would in turn propel the UK from our current 12th placed to becoming the 7th largest manufacturing economy in the world having recently dropped out of the top 10.

A new Make UK/Civitas report, The Growth Mission: A Blueprint for Scaling up SME Manufacturers recommends that Government must ignite growth by introducing a super-growth allowance (150% capital allowance) and create an enhanced Growth Enterprise Scheme (GEIS) to turbocharge Britain’s small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs.) Such tax reliefs would encourage SME businesses to reinvest in their growth, improve productivity, and adopt new technologies, helping them scale-up, create jobs, and boost progress towards the government’s growth goal.

Today’s scale up report reveals that a very large proportion of manufacturers are unaware of key support schemes designed to help businesses to grow. 33% of SMEs do not know about the Business Growth Fund, while 37% are unaware of the British Business Bank, amongst others. Were those SMEs who currently do not engage with these government support bodies to access them at the normal rate, investment by Britain’s manufacturers would go up by £9.2billion.

In the drive to turbocharge economic growth through AI, Estonia is the world-leader in e-government, providing all government services through an AI enabled online portal. The UK Government should learn from this example by creating an Estonia-style British business Bürokratt software to streamline supports in one place. It would also allow of leverage the data collected by HMRC and ONS to micro-target companies with relevant information about these schemes at the exact point it is most relevant for their growth.

The scale-up report further reveals that four out of five SMEs say they struggle to access finance during the ‘make or break’ seed to early growth stages of investment. Solving the challenges to accessing finance could increase UK manufacturing investment again by £9.2bn annually.

Current support for SMEs comes in the main from The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS). Both government initiatives are intended to encourage investment in small and early-stage companies by offering tax reliefs to investors, but businesses must be less than 7 years old to access them. However, setting up a factory and recruiting and training staff takes more than 7 years, so most start-up manufacturers are never in a position to access the funds aiming to help them grow. Removing the age limit would open-up the potential for investors to consider manufacturers with genuine scale up potential to access capital that was not previously available.