The British Business Bank will commit up to £150m capital to support a fund aimed at high-growth businesses across the North of England.
The proposed Northern scale-up fund will provide larger scale investment to innovative scale-up businesses seeking capital to accelerate their growth and expansion. The fund is expected to back university spinouts and other innovative, high-growth companies across the North West, North East and Yorkshire and the Humber.
The fund is expected to make investments of between £5m and £15m, complementing the bank’s existing programmes in the region, including the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II and Regional Angels Programme.
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The fund’s investment approach will reflect the sector strengths, including creative industries, clean energy and space and technology within the area it covers, supporting ambitious businesses with the potential to scale and contribute to regional growth.
The announcement comes in the same week the bank brings together regional stakeholders in Brighton to launch the adjacent £210m South East Investment Fund, underlining its wider commitment to increasing access to finance for businesses across the UK.
In his speech later today (7 September), Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey is expected to say: “Today I can announce a new £150m allocation from the British Business Bank to lever in more capital behind the most innovative and fast-growing firms in the North of England.”
Leandros Kalisperas (pictured), chief investment officer, British Business Bank added: “This new Northern scale-up fund reflects the bank’s commitment to addressing regional equity gaps and helping ambitious, innovative businesses in the North of England to have the same opportunity to access the capital they need to grow and thrive as other parts of the UK.
“The proposed fund would provide an important new source of scale-up capital building on the success of our Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, which continues to deliver support to smaller businesses of up to £5m of capital.”
Keith Griffiths, founder of REiFF and founder and CEO of The Entrepreneur Festival, which next takes place in Leeds next summer, was broadly supportive of the news, although not without reservations:
“£150m is welcome but it won’t create Northern growth if the government gets the allocation of the funds wrong,” he warned.
“Backing fast-growing Northern businesses is absolutely the right ambition, but government shouldn’t confuse writing cheques with creating growth. If this money simply follows the best-known names or whatever happens to be labelled ‘innovative’, we risk missing the businesses with the real potential to become the North’s next major employers. Devolution only works if local leaders listen to the people who actually build and scale businesses. Experienced founders should be shaping where this money goes, not sitting on the sidelines while others decide what success looks like.”
He concluded: “The North needs the power to back entrepreneurial talent wherever it is – including the businesses nobody has heard of yet. Give the North the money and the powers but trust the people who know how to grow a business to help decide where that investment goes.”
The British Business Bank is the UK government’s economic development bank. Established in November 2014, its mission is to drive economic growth by helping smaller businesses get the finance they need to start, scale and stay in the UK. In 2025/26, the bank supported UK smaller businesses to access £9.4bn of finance, including £1.3bn of public funding, £4.3bn of private capital crowded in by the bank and £3.7bn of lending the bank guaranteed. The funding benefited 38,000 UK businesses, including around 30,000 businesses the bank had not previously helped to fund.
