Harnessing Local and Global Talent with Sarah Haywood, Managing Director of Advanced Oxford

Introduction to Oxford Plus

[00:00:00] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford Plus, the podcast series that takes you deep into the myths and truths of the Oxford investing landscape. I'm your host, Susannah de Jager and I've spent over 15 years in UK asset management.

Meet Sarah Hayward: A Wealth of Experience

[00:00:18] Susannah de Jager: My guest today is Sarah Hayward. Sarah is the Managing Director of Advanced Oxford, a membership organisation with a goal to promote Oxfordshire, its innovation businesses and create one coherent voice for the region at a policy level supported by grassroots research. Our partner Mishcon de Reya are a member of Advanced Oxford and have contributed to their upcoming funding report, as well as supporting the work Advanced Oxford are doing in the region, on real estate policy and impractical issues with contributions from their real estate investor and developer clients. Previously Sarah was CEO, then a NED of MedCity, a life sciences cluster organisation for London and the southeast of England. She started her career in the NHS, has worked in the pharma industry and as a senior civil servant on a number of policy teams within the Department for Business. She's also a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford's newest college, Rueben College. I'm really pleased to have Sarah here today because, as you can hear from her slightly long winded bio, she's got a wealth of experience that is applicable to Oxford and the ecosystem here and will be able to bring many perspectives as well as from her current role at Advanced Oxford. Sarah, thank you so much for joining today.

[00:01:30] Sarah Haywood: It's a pleasure, thanks for inviting me.

[00:01:33] Susannah de Jager: Wonderful.

Understanding Advanced Oxford

[00:01:34] Susannah de Jager: So, initially, so that listeners can really understand Advanced Oxford, I'd love to hear about the genesis of the organisation and how it integrates within the ecosystem.

[00:01:45] Sarah Haywood: Well, I should start by saying that hopefully people will know that Oxfordshire is a fantastic place for science and technology. Not only is it a fantastic place for research and development, which takes place within the academic setting or even within our hospitals, but it's a really great place for companies to get started and to grow and we have a fantastic pipeline of ideas that are being used to form new companies and that's happening all of the time. I guess Advanced Oxford is in the position of saying how can we improve that and how can we make the environment in Oxfordshire even better, so that process of companies forming that system, if you like, for them growing is smoother, is easier, works well for them and in so doing how can we try and ensure that they stay within the region. So, as they are developing new products and services and they go through that process, more of those are actually produced here and at the same time, how can we retain companies and attract new ones in, particularly maybe larger companies from outside of the UK? And to your question as to why Advanced Oxford was set up, why it exists, it's really important that we get the perspectives and insight from the business community around what this region needs to be, how it needs to work, what's the infrastructure, what are the support mechanisms, do we have enough laboratories, for example? Are they in the right place? All of those questions are really important and they'll determine the success and the growth of this region as a place for science and technology to be commercialised. So very simply, we were set up as an organisation in order to bring together that business perspective and to be the voice for the science and technology business community within the region and beyond, so that hopefully we can influence how Oxfordshire develops as a place for science and technology to be commercialised.

[00:04:01] Susannah de Jager: Amazing, thank you. That was very clear, and there's quite a lot to cram in there, so you did well.

Membership and Innovation Ecosystem

[00:04:08] Susannah de Jager: Just for a further bit of context for anyone listening, it would be great to hear a little bit about the shape of your membership. You obviously spoke about smaller companies there, larger companies. I know that you have service providers as well within your membership. If you could just give us a bit of a shape of the cohorts within it, I think that would be really helpful context as well.

[00:04:27] Sarah Haywood: Yes, absolutely. We are, as you say, a membership organisation, so we are a business leadership group, and the golden thread that runs through our membership is that everybody is part of what we term, it's a bit jargonistic, I'm afraid, but the innovation ecosystem. So we have within our membership, which is representative of the region as a whole, small companies, so companies that maybe have only been going for a couple of years, not long since they took that scientific idea and started on the research journey, right through to quite large companies, companies that have started in Oxfordshire and grown to be quite sizable. I suppose a good example is Immunocore, which is now a commercial biotech company, but started as a University of Oxford spin out over 20 years ago, to large multinational companies that have R&D activity, within Oxfordshire. So a couple of examples would be Abbott Diabetes Care in Whitney and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which is based on Milton Park. We then have other important organisations and institutions who were all vested in making this region work. So we have the two universities, both University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes, we have the NHS represented through a body called the Health Innovation Network, we have Oxford Science Enterprises, a huge funder of science spin outs from the University of Oxford and then also place based members, Harwell Campus, Bedbrook, Bicester Motion and finally, none of this works without important companies that support that ecosystem. So we have a very small number of professional services firms, but they really capture, if you like, the people, the organisations that are absolutely pivotal to supporting companies, throughout the whole life cycle. So, Mishcon de Reya as our law firm representative, James Cowper Creston as our accountancy representative, Mathison Squire as an IP specialist firm. So everybody has got a vested interest in making this work.

[00:06:47] Susannah de Jager: Really interesting and I suppose when I hear you talk about that, what's evident is that's a very powerful group of members to have and your voice should and I know does, lend a lot of weight to the policies or the research that you produce. I imagine it can be quite hard sometimes to get agreement from that group. Is that a problem, or actually do you find that so often the goals of all that collective are sufficiently aligned, that actually that's easier than one might think with various stakeholders?

Challenges and Opportunities in Oxfordshire

[00:07:18] Sarah Haywood: Interestingly, there's actually a lot that people can agree with. I think because we've all got this shared mission of seeing Oxfordshire develop as a place which can be world leading for translation of science into companies and supporting economic growth. So that's a common thread, it's something that everybody feels really committed to. Of course, we do have some of our members that are in competition with each other. It's inevitable. So particularly if we think about some of the place based members that are developing new science parks, new campuses, they inevitably are chasing after the same occupants, the same tenants. But nevertheless, there are still issues that are pre or non competitive that they can all agree with, such as the challenges of the planning system, a very hot topic at the moment, as we have a new government that's very focused on that. So it tends to be that we have more agreement than we have disagreement, but actually I think it's very healthy that we have different perspectives. Diversity of view is really important and we can use that and reflect that into different things that we do.

[00:08:34] Susannah de Jager: And so picking up on what you just said, we do have a new Labour government. Everyone is hearing one of the main things they're putting out there is that they're going to break down barriers to planning locally. How are your members up to date? Asking you to represent their views with that new government, what are the main things that you would push for Oxfordshire that you really think there's an opportunity, hopefully, to deliver on what that government is at the moment promising, I suppose, but we haven't necessarily seen the detail.

[00:09:03] Sarah Haywood: I think there are a number of things.

Planning and Infrastructure Needs

[00:09:05] Sarah Haywood: The first thing, I've just referred to planning and that is a key issue. It relates both to planning for infrastructure and then there are different kinds of infrastructure, so we are clearly very interested in support to develop places for science to take place, so new laboratories, for example. Increasingly, we're seeing science campuses be much more mixed development. So they're not just about putting up sheds for companies to go into, but they do need really quite sophisticated laboratory spaces, but they need amenities. People work there at the end of the day and there's a huge part, fight for talent, so they need to be great places to work. So you need social spaces, you need cafes, you need, you know, nice places that people feel that they want to work in. So, we need a planning system that really supports that. One of the things that we've been calling for particularly in the context of the development of the Oxford to Cambridge region is for science infrastructure to be taken out of the planning system and to be a special category of planning so it becomes more strategic infrastructure. So that's something that we would like to see and that's something that we've been working on. We desperately need new housing. I know that can be a very touchy issue, it's a very sensitive issue because there are clear questions about where that housing development takes place. But it's a huge bottleneck and a huge barrier to economic growth within the Oxfordshire region. So having a more permissive system in terms of supporting housing development is something that is incredibly important, we think and we'd like to see the district councils across the whole of Oxfordshire working together in a much more collaborative way to support that. I certainly hope that the changes that the Labour government are signalling in terms of planning will encourage that kind of collaborative working across regions and then the final piece is around key pieces of infrastructure and the one I would point to immediately, because it's one of the highest priority issues for us as an organisation, is around transport. So, we really want to see investment into East West Rail, we are greatly encouraged to see that scheme is back on government's agenda and we need the current government to support that and if they can to expedite it so that you can get from Oxford to Cambridge, joining up the top of what we would refer to as the golden triangle and you can do that easily and quickly. That's incredibly important in terms of flows of labour around the region and attracting talent and having a really vibrant exchange between companies, so it supports collaboration as well and the other scheme that is really important to many of our members is the Cowley Branch Line, which is the extension of the line that would join up the Oxford Science Park, the new Ellison Institute for Technology through into Cowley, into BMW, MINI, ARC Oxford. etc. and we really need government support those projects. So I'm hoping that the growth agenda that the government is pursuing will support projects like those.

[00:12:55] Susannah de Jager: I couldn't agree more. I think it's so important that there is a statement of intent from this government that carries through the rhetoric and that they really action, particularly the transport side of things and it's incredibly important because I'm always blown away when people talk about the Bay Area in America as one area and yet the Golden Triangle is sort of seen as three distinct places, yet geographically we could fit in their pocket and I think some of that's a perception, some of that's probably a slightly overloaded motorway network, but the roads between here and Cambridge really are shockingly bad. I went the other day, and it's just a good two hours and there's no good way to slice it and that's on a good run, and it's a dreadful journey too, truthfully. It's too many roundabouts, or it's the M25 and the idea of that being just one railway line is like a breath of fresh air.

[00:13:43] Sarah Haywood: I completely agree with you. So last week I had to be in Cambridge as well and I went into London and back out on the train. So a journey that ended up being probably three times as long as it would be had I been able to get the train across the top of the triangle and you're absolutely right, is that we sometimes lose sight of the fact that we're talking about, from a global perspective, really quite small geographies. So the idea that Oxford, Cambridge, London are all distinct and separate places makes no sense whatsoever if you think about it in the context of places like Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts and that life sciences cluster, which is actually about a 200 square mile area, or the Bay Area on the West Coast, or San Diego, stretching up through La Jolla, etc. So we do have, unfortunately, a tendency to be a little bit parochial and maybe a bit small island focused and we think that these geographies are really very separate, They're not.

[00:14:56] Susannah de Jager: And I think from a slightly different perspective, there's an interesting overlay in the UK, and I've had people on this podcast, Dave Norwood in particular, say that the conflation of science and technology clustering onto the leveling up agenda and every university town can have a cluster. Clearly there are some specialisations, it's really wonderful to see that and yet there's a sort of a sense that to connect Oxford and Cambridge is to further the South and that it's somehow detrimental to the whole and I think that's a very damaging rhetoric that somehow has been perpetuated within the UK when ultimately businesses staying here, clustering here, even if it is initially southern most focused, they then can penetrate further into other university towns, Irene Tracy was very vocal on this. People outgrow places, they do move to other, more specific clusters, to other places that have space and I guess we need to realise it's not a north versus south, it's us holding on to great companies who may otherwise most likely relocate to the U. S. and if we can't keep them here by making it appealing, actually that's where we lose out to, and the whole of the UK is poorer if that happens, which is a statement, not a question.

[00:16:17] Sarah Haywood: But it's a statement I agree with! And you're absolutely right because it's deliberate that in some of the work that we have done, which is called Oxfordshire's Innovation Engine, that's deliberate that we're talking about Oxfordshire as an engine room for innovation and an engine room that is powering the UK and we have to continue to invest in our centres of excellence and it needs to be as well as investing importantly into other parts of the UK.

[00:16:54] Susannah de Jager: So taking the potential things that the government could really help move the needle on and that are policy agendas, one of the things that we often hear talked about and you've inferred it through housing because obviously that's related to where people live, but are there particular focus areas for you as an organisation in terms of bringing talent into the region, policies you'd like to see, and if so, where do you focus your efforts there?

Talent Retention and Education

[00:17:19] Sarah Haywood: You're absolutely right that the issue of skills and talent, both attracting and retaining people within this region, is absolutely essential for our science and technology companies. The people are the companies at the end of the day and you need fantastic talent for ideas generation and to move the, Innovation Agenda Forward. So that's why we're very interested, as you say, in issues like housing, but also we're really interested in issues around science education, around the flows of people and the ways that will encourage people to come into science and technology. Interestingly, we're not that great at retaining our student population within the region. We're producing all these fantastically talented people out of both of our universities, but we're not very good at retaining them at all and I think, dare I say, we're even worse when it comes to our business schools in terms of letting people go and not taking advantage of the fact that we're training these really great strategic and business thinking people and mopping them up into our companies. At the other end of the spectrum, there's still a lot I think that needs to be done around apprenticeships. We've seen, I guess over the last few years, some really great developments in apprenticeships and I think we're starting to shift the dial a little bit on presenting the apprenticeship route as being a good alternative to going into higher education for some reason students. But actually, there's still a lot to do to educate school aged children about the opportunities within science and technology and I can give you a great example, which is through our further education system within Oxfordshire. So we've got a really fantastic couple of further education colleges within Oxford, one within the centre of Oxford, the other one in Blackbird Leys.They have an institute of technology that's focused on training students to be ready for data rich digital roles, etc. and their barrier is persuading students to go and do those courses because they don't realise what fantastic roles there are available and what amazing career opportunities there can be if you have those skills, because every company needs them, every company wants them and so you can have a really amazing career. But if we don't help school aged children to see that this is a route for them, we're going to continue to struggle to educate them in the right way. I think there are some other issues as well just about freeing up some of the rules about apprenticeships around the apprenticeship levy, about looking at ways in which that can be shared across companies, particularly in terms of supporting companies in the supply chain for larger companies. It's still the case that lots and lots of companies are paying the levy and not using it. So there's got to be something wrong there with the system, which we need to fix.

[00:20:45] Susannah de Jager: And actually I've heard this from a number of people and it's both really encouraging because everyone's similarly wants to see the impact that these amazing spin out companies can have on our local school leavers. Particularly, and most people listening may know this, but Blackbird Leys that Sarah referenced there is one of the poorest UK which just doesn't intuitively fit in Oxford and you've got these extremes in very close proximity and if we can make it more joined up and more of a virtuous cycle, I think everyone agrees that's to the better and clearly helps with other policy agendas that we want to move where it benefits the whole. So I think when you're trying to persuade the council about these developments, clearly that's a reinforcing point for that. So coming back to what you said about talent retention here, it really resonated when you said we're not good at keeping hold of our students because somebody said the other day that if you study in the States, they give you a visa for I think it was five years where you can stay and people then just do. Is there anything really specific like that you think the government should be looking at?

[00:21:51] Sarah Haywood: I certainly think there are things that should be done about the visa system. You've just mentioned student visas and the amount of time that they can stay in the UK to work after they finish their degrees. I think that's something that we should be much more open to, particularly because I really see that students these days are incredibly excited by enterprise and the idea of starting their own businesses. So if they've done their degrees here and they've got great ideas, why wouldn't we let them stay and form those businesses here in the UK? I think we also need to ensure we're really attracting in talent. We've had some very good schemes in the past, we need to look at how we continue to develop those, it's certainly the case for businesses of all sizes that if they're trying to attract talent in from outside of the UK, it takes a long time, it's expensive, there's a huge amount of process to it, and it risks losing good candidates and the fact of the matter is, in the most scientific and technical roles, we're not ever going to be able to satisfy all of the talent needs from people who are within the UK so we do need to attract people in from outside. That diversity of thinking is a positive thing, but unfortunately, at the moment, the immigration system is quite a considerable burden on businesses, and particularly if you're a small business and you haven't got the infrastructure in place of HR teams, etc. you have no choice but to have to incur a lot of cost in terms of bringing in external expertise to help you manage it.

[00:23:48] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, which is a huge expense, as you say, or it ends up taking the founder's time or something completely ridiculous, which I've also heard examples of.

Navigating the Oxford Ecosystem

[00:23:57] Susannah de Jager: So coming back to something that you and I have discussed a number of times, there is sometimes this perception that Oxford is not that easy to penetrate into, I've heard that on this podcast from various people that it took a bit of time and I suppose one of the things that you're really there doing is, it's trying to create networks and collaboration between people, but if people were listening to this and saying, right, what is the best vector in to go and meet some companies or to go and have some meetings, some just initial meetings in Oxford to understand how it works and how I might either invest or engage or move there and move my company there. Obviously yourselves, so let's call that one out, but who would be the other people that you would recommend, you know, if there were five websites or even three that people should really look up and make sure they pick up the phone to if they want to engage?

[00:24:45] Sarah Haywood: The first one...

[00:24:45] Susannah de Jager: Oxford+ obviously.

[00:24:46] Sarah Haywood: Of course, absolutely, absolutely. Listen to this podcast, look at the information on the Oxford+ website. It's a great question and thank you for asking it because it's something that we hear again and again, even from people who have been part of one of the universities, who are living here, who maybe have been living here for quite some time and yet still they don't feel that they know what is going on and they don't know how to break through and just to say, I think one of the reasons for that is because we are quite a distributed system within Oxfordshire. So we haven't got everything in one neat place. So there's one physical place that you can go to and it's all there for you. I've already mentioned, you know, some of the places where there's fantastic things going on, but actually, lots of people just don't know that they're there, whether it be Harwell campus that's got big walls around it, or Milton Park that you wouldn't necessarily drive through unless, you know, you were going there for a meeting, or Bicester Motion, I mean, I trot out a whole list. So what are good places to start? Well, there are a couple of places that I always direct people to. The first is Enspire, so E N S P I R E, which is the University of Oxford's enterprise team and enterprise activity. There's a website for it, which is part of the University of Oxford website, but it's all of the activity that the University of Oxford is doing to support entrepreneurialism and enterprise for their students, for their faculty, for alumni, but for everyone else as well. So they have lots and lots of things that are going on, programs of, training, but events. So there is nothing that beats coming along and meeting people and networking. So Enspire is a great place to look because they curate a lot of material from different people and different organisations across the whole of Oxfordshire, so it's not just their own events that are there that you can look at. So, that would be my number one place to start. The next place that I would look is something called the BIPC. We love an acronym, don't we? Which is the Business and IP Centre. It's actually located in the library in the Westgate Centre, but it was set up by the British Library as one of their centers that they have spread around the UK to act as a business support center and a place that people can go for advice, support, access to materials, advice about intellectual property, etc. and they've got some really nice space, they hold lots of meetups. Again, they're really good at helping advertise what other people are doing and hosting events and the third place that I would probably look is the Oxford Trust, which is a charitable trust that was established by Martin and Audrey Wood, who were the founders of Oxford Instruments, which was the very first University of Oxford spin out back in the 1950s and one of the things that they realised from their own journey as entrepreneurs and plowing the furrow for commercialising research out of the University of Oxford with no support and no infrastructure at all was that there needs to be support, so they endowed the Oxford Trust. It's a charity, it has a number of innovation centres, but they also hold events and are supportive of many ways of trying to bring communities together and networking. The other thing I would say is go and have a look at websites and sign up for newsletters from some of the big science campuses, so I've already mentioned Harwell Campus, I've mentioned Milton Park, Begbrook does a big science open day every year in the summer. These places actually really want to invite people in and most of them have newsletters that you can sign up to so that you can find out when they're running events and also when they're hosting events. So, in fact, there's loads of ways that you can get in but it's just about finding those, but those are the places that I would start.

[00:29:36] Susannah de Jager: Wonderful, thank you. I think that's really good to have some sort of practical tips, because I wonder that sometimes we discuss these problems and not the solutions. So thank you for that.

Investment and Funding Challenges

[00:29:45] Susannah de Jager: We've obviously spoken about the Advanced Oxford research and we spoke about specifically the Innovation Engine Report that you produced. But you and I have also been working closely with a wider group of people on an investor focused piece of research. I know that it's not published yet, but it's obviously coming up this autumn. I'd love to hear a little bit about what you're looking for within the data, if you're happy to share and what you hope some of the action out of that will be.

[00:30:14] Sarah Haywood: Well, let me start by saying why we're doing this piece of work. I guess we probably would look at a place like Oxford and Oxfordshire and think it's flush with money and it's an easy place to raise investment if you are a company that needs to raise investment and it's probably worth flagging for the lots and lots of science and technology companies, they do require investment. They look to bring in risk capital in exchange for equity in their businesses and they use that much more than debt is used. So it's quite unusual for R&D intensive, science intensive companies to use debt, particularly in the early stages. So we need a really good pool of capital available to those companies and we also need them to be investable. It would be totally unreasonable to think that anybody would invest in a company that wasn't being well run or had good ideas, etc. So companies need support, they need support in order to become investable propositions and they need money and surprisingly we don't have enough of it. We don't have enough of it locally and our companies unsurprisingly need to go elsewhere to look for it. They will frequently go to London, they will go to Cambridge, they'll go anywhere, frankly. But they will...

[00:31:48] Susannah de Jager: West-coast of America.

[00:31:50] Sarah Haywood: Absolutely. So that was what I was going to say is that they then look overseas and you might say, well, is that a problem? Not necessarily, but it can be a problem because I said right at the beginning, one of the things that we want to do is ensure that we can retain companies in the UK. As they bring on more investors and they diversify investors, particularly if they're bringing in overseas investors, there becomes increasing pressure for them to relocate activities out of the UK and proximate to the investors. There could be other reasons why they're needing to do that as well in terms of access to markets. But what we don't want is to lose companies because the investors are insisting that they go elsewhere to do the research development, the commercialisation. We know that we've got some very specific issues that need to be addressed. If I were talking in the language of government policy or the fundamentals of why government policy is created, I would say that one of the issues is that we have something called information asymmetries, which is an economist's way of saying you don't know what you don't know. So if you are an investor and you're interested in investing in science and technology, but you've just never come to Oxford, you've never been to Oxfordshire, you don't know, as we were talking about earlier, how to get in. How do you come and find companies that you might like to invest in? So that's one information asymmetry and another is that companies, particularly those that are getting started, just don't know how to find money. They don't know where to look and they can do an enormous amount of knocking on doors and often knocking on the wrong kind of doors looking for money. So we've got some very specific issues about how we support, have we got enough money? Have we got enough investors? Are we open to investors coming in and being able to engage in this ecosystem? And it extends right from the very earliest stages. So getting that first little bit of money to test whether an idea will work and whether it's likely to be commercialisable, right through then to our companies that are looking and needing to raise much larger pools of money because perhaps they need to do a clinical trial for something in the health space and I guess there are a couple of issues when I say we look at the system and go, Oh, it's all fine in Oxfordshire, their sorted, they don't, we don't need to worry about them. The first is that we incredibly lucky to have Oxford Science Enterprises, which is a huge venture fund, but it's a venture fund for science and technology coming out of the University of Oxford. It has a remit also to invest in companies coming out of the Harwell campus and Culham, but actually its focus entirely to date has been on University of Oxford activity. So it's been great in the almost a decade since it was set up in supporting spin out activity from the University of Oxford. But it cannot and it never will be able to invest in all of the investable companies coming out of that university and if you're setting up your company as, nothing to do with the machine of what we call technology transfer within the University of Oxford, or you're based in Oxford Brookes University, or you're working in a science company, you've got a great idea to set up a company. None of that capital is available to you, you don't qualify. So we've got lots and lots of people who are effectively excluded from that big pool and for various reasons, some of which are to do with the macroeconomic environment, it can be extremely difficult to get hold of those first early stage pools of money, what we refer to as pre seed or seed funding. Many people will go to angel investors. We have an angel network, we've actually got a couple of angel networks, working within Oxfordshire, but we need more angels to support companies, we need more recycling of money by which, I mean, people who've been successful in business reinvest into other businesses and more generally, as I said, we just need support to help companies get it right and get it right first time and then if finally, if I go right to the other end of the spectrum, there are some things around government policy that we need to see change, again to encourage flows of money to come into companies in order to support economic growth through science.

[00:37:00] Susannah de Jager: And actually, you and I have spoken before about some very effective policies that are in place. So obviously we spoke about angel investors who benefit from SEIS and EIS, which is Enterprise Investment Schemes, which are effectively tax breaks on things you invest in and if you lose your money, which sometimes you do, it means you get even more tax relief. There's also great Tax Credit Schemes, but something that only in a conversation earlier this week, somebody proposed was effectively to be extending some of those schemes further up the capital scale.

Future Policy and Recommendations

[00:37:31] Susannah de Jager: So not just for seed round or pre seed round as you identified, but actually for companies that are looking for scale up capital where there's a bit of a gap in the UK and I'd be interested to get your view on that because I'd never heard anyone say that and I can think of reasons why a government might baulk at some of that, but if it were for pension capital, potentially, rather than, dare I say, venture capital or private equity, which might be seen as giving a tax break to an already very successful cohort of society, do you think that's something that could appeal and would have a marked impact?

[00:38:06] Sarah Haywood: I do, I think it's certainly an interesting idea. We know that SEIS and EIS and the S at the beginning of SEIS stands for Small, have been incredibly successful schemes that's seen as being one of the really good policy interventions that exists in the UK and we're quite unusual in having these schemes which de risk investment for early stage investors. I certainly think that exploring how they could be extended is a really good idea. I'm not entirely sure whether I think that we should go as far as extending them to pension schemes, but I do think that there are pools of capital that they could be extended into, to try and encourage people to use that capital more freely. So family trusts, for example, might be an example where they could be extended, which are really about, as I said, tapping into pools of money that, are not being used, just taking that issue of pension schemes, however, it's something Susannah, you and I have talked about a lot outside the context.

[00:39:19] Susannah de Jager: Chewed your ear off on that one!

[00:39:20] Sarah Haywood: Absolutely outside the context of this conversation, but it's something I know we both really want to see. We think it's absolutely essential to this point of keeping companies in the UK and encouraging them to do the later stage research in the UK, from the UK, but also if they're here and they're getting the funding, they might be a bit more inclined to do some of the actual research here as well, for example, within our NHS rather than going to other jurisdictions to do it. So, I think there are things that definitely need to be looked at. It is something that was on the previous government's agenda and was being looked at through something called the Mansion House Compact. We need to see that taken forward, but we need to see it taken forward with pace, because I think there's a real risk that the intent is good, but the execution will take a long time and I think also there are some other things emerging from our research, which we'll be exploring with our advisory group, which you sit on, but with others before we make our final recommendations. But one of the things is how can we encourage local pension schemes, such as local authority pension schemes, to support flow of money into local companies, so that there is this sense that the tiny bit, really, we're only talking about a tiny bit of institutional money, like pension schemes, is going into risky investments, but risky investments which are also generating economic good and economic benefit locally. So I think there are definitely some things that we will be looking to propose that flow into national policy rather than things that, you know, we're trying to sort out in our own backyard in terms of, how we operate within Oxfordshire.

[00:41:22] Susannah de Jager: And I think that's a really good point that with the innovation engine, you mentioned it, it's very much looking outward just as much as inward and all of these learnings from Oxford, Cambridge, London and indeed from other jurisdictions outside of the UK are such good frameworks for us to look at, adopt or not adopt and see what's working and what's not and so I think that point around it's not just inward looking, you know, I've got a podcast called Oxford Plus, but hopefully it reaches further, Advanced Oxford also applicable in a broader context.

Conclusion and Farewell

[00:41:54] Susannah de Jager: Sarah, thank you so much, this has been a really interesting and broad ranging conversation. I hope those listening have been able to follow our many thoughts on it, but thank you for joining today.

[00:42:05] Sarah Haywood: It's been a pleasure, I've really enjoyed it, thank you very much for the opportunity to talk a little bit about what we do!

[00:42:11] Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford Plus, presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford Plus, please visit our website, oxfordplus. co. uk, and sign up to our newsletter so you never miss an update. Oxford Plus was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya, and is produced and edited by Story Ninety Four.