Question:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what definition of scale-up businesses her Department uses; and what steps she is taking to support those businesses.

Answer:

We define scaleups using the OECD definition of high growth, i.e. an enterprise with a cumulative average annual growth in employees or turnover greater than 20 per cent per annum over a three-year period, and with more than 10 employees at the beginning of the period.

Scaleups play an important role in the UK economy: they generate around 20% of all turnover in the economy and around 15% of employment, and Scale Ups can play a role in driving innovation. The number of scaleups has risen overall by 25% over the 5 years to 2018 to 33,860.

We have taken a number of actions to create the right conditions for businesses to achieve their potential to grow to scale, including:

• Supporting over £7bn of finance to over 91K smaller businesses through the British Business Bank (as at June 2019).
• improving the support available through local Growth Hubs to help businesses to overcome the challenges they face in scaling up; and
• using cutting edge data science techniques to identify high potential firms and connect them the right help at the right time.