Chancellor pledges backing for 'brilliant' North East female founders

The North East has a strong female founder community, but it is too often let down by a lack of meaningful financial and practical support. Those were the headline themes from an exclusive roundtable discussion featuring business leaders and Chancellor Rachel Reeves at the Government’s Darlington Economic Campus. Here, Bdaily editor Steven Hugill assesses the event’s key points and the steps needed to action meaningful change. 

The North East is a hotbed of female business founders – but their success is being stymied by significant growth hurdles.

That was the dominant message of an exclusive roundtable discussion featuring Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Showcasing a diverse cross-section of the North East’s female business community, the event heard founders are being held back by a “fractured” support ecosystem.

Benefiting from the knowledge and experience of leaders behind advances across sectors including bioscience, HR, technology and more, the discussion spotlighted issues from a gender-imbalanced funding and investment landscape to struggles around accessing talent.

The roundtable, held at Darlington Economic Campus, also highlighted a frustrating scarcity of role models and called for greater support to help women balance work with parenthood.

Led by Sophie Milliken, founder and chief executive of Newcastle-based PR and communications agency Moja – who is working with the North East Combined Authority on a female founder growth programme – the roundtable heard women business leaders remain at the mercy of a disparate financial support network.

Participants cited a lack of access to – and appetite for risk therein – among regional and national funding programmes as a key barrier to growth, which they added is being compounded by a similarly frustrating lack of awareness around the wider investment environment.

Highlighting the complexities of the Government-backed Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and Enterprise Investment Scheme, business bosses urged Westminster to add the venture capital programmes to the education curriculum to fill knowledge gaps from an early age.

This would be pivotal in laying foundations for future success, they added, with present-day funding restraints affecting growth blueprints, not least founders’ ability to recruit new talent to sufficiently effective levels.

Describing the latter as a missing piece of the ecosystem, the discussion heard how greater Government support to finance employment strategies such as internships would give businesses scope to expand teams and plan for growth with much more certainty.

These moves, said roundtable members, would help mitigate another growth challenge – the lack of female role models.

While the discussion attested to the continuing nascency of the North East’s female business founder network, participants said more must be done to “inform and educate” those leading ventures across the entire commercial spectrum.

By showcasing success stories to a much larger degree, members said this would deliver a uniting effect, producing paradigms from which to learn, grow and ultimately flourish.

This, they added, should include a commitment to understanding and supporting female founders’ personal lives.

Rather than idly placing females into sectoral siloes, roundtable members called for greater consideration of their dedications beyond the office and factory floor.

Advocating the creation of collaborative sub-communities, they said the move would better enunciate founders’ responsibilities while fostering emotional and employment connections capable of catalysing growth.

Furthermore, the discussion highlighted the difficulties faced by female founders around tax paid on maternity and nursing clothing, which have a demonstrably negative effect on budgets helping to grow businesses.

Acknowledging female founders’ frustrations “loud and clear”, the Chancellor pledged to “continue championing the issue” during her time in office.

Speaking after the event, she told Bdaily: “The North East is home to some of the most innovative and determined entrepreneurs in the country, and these brilliant female founders epitomise the huge potential and talent in the region. 

“When we unlock the talents of women, we don’t just create successful businesses, we raise living standards and strengthen local economies.

“That’s exactly what our plan for renewal is all about.”

Sophie, who is also chair of Smart Works North East, the charity that supports unemployed women with interview clothing and coaching, said the roundtable had provided much stimulus for meaningful change.

She added: “The North East has no shortage of brilliant female founders, but too often their voices aren’t heard at a national level.

“Hosting this roundtable with the Chancellor and such an impressive group of women was a powerful reminder that real economic growth happens when policy is shaped by the lived experiences of the people building businesses on the ground.

“It also strongly complements the female founder project I’ve been asked to lead by North East mayor Kim McGuinness, working alongside colleagues at the North East Combined Authority, ensuring these voices continue to inform decision-making at a regional and national level.”

• The roundtable was held under Chatham House Rule. However, Bdaily was invited as a media partner – with Government and participants’ consent – to cover the discussion’s salient points.

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