Lord Young: Investing in a start-up is the most rewarding thing I’ve done

Over the past few years we’ve all been living through a revolution — not one where crowds gather in Trafalgar Square and face water cannon, but a quiet revolution that has changed the way we work and live. When I first came to what was then the Department of Industry as an adviser in 1979, a ‘small firm’ was a company employing fewer than 500 people. Today we consider a small firm to be one that employs fewer than ten. As the size of companies has reduced, so the number has increased. There were just 800,000 in the whole country in 1979, there are about 5 million today; but of the five million, more than 95 per cent are firms employing fewer than ten.

How did this come about? Well, there was no doubt that the confiscatory level of taxation in the post-war era did not encourage new small firms, to put it mildly.