Harnessing the potential of high-growth business

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This write-up brings together ideas generated at a Re:State breakfast roundtable led by Chris Curtis MP and James Johns, Head of UK Corporate Affairs at Workday, exploring why a country with so many advantages still struggles to help its best companies grow, and what policymakers can do about it.

A small number of fast-growing firms account for a disproportionate share of new jobs and productivity growth, which is why they matter far more than their numbers suggest. Britain is unusually good at the early stages of innovation, ranking sixth in the 2025 Global Innovation Index. However, in many ways it fails to capture the benefits, with UK productivity growth having never recovered to its pre-2008 trend, and the gap between the most and least productive firms having widened.

Participants agreed that the UK remains in a strong position, and that most of the barriers are ones the country has imposed on itself. Time and again the conversation returned to the same diagnosis: government gets in the way of the growth it says it wants, and the fixes are matters of political choice rather than fundamental constraints.

The roundtable that helped to inform this write-up was held under the Chatham House Rule and was kindly supported by Workday.