Why founders are leaving the UK and how to keep them

Founders do not leave a country because they have stopped loving it. They leave when the place that once fed their ambition starts to drain it. It begins with frustration: another tax change, another hiring risk, another promise of stability that does not survive the next political week.

Then comes the harder conversation at home: where life might feel more secure, where capital might move faster, where the rules might hold long enough to build something, and where your children might still have a future. For many founders, this is no longer only about tax or regulation. It is about looking at the employment crisis facing young people and wondering whether Britain will still be a country that can offer their children work, confidence and a fair chance.

By the time a founder moves, the decision has often been made months before. The paperwork is the last part. The loss of belief comes first.

That is the crisis now facing the United Kingdom. We can still produce entrepreneurs. We are losing the ability to persuade them to build their lives, their payrolls and their next companies here.

The founders I speak to still love this country. Many built here, hired here, raised families here and took pride in calling their companies British. What has changed is their belief that Britain is on their side.

They look at the tax burden, the cost of hiring, the churn in Westminster, the delays in visas, the strain on capital, and they ask a blunt question: why am I fighting this hard to grow here? That question belongs at the centre of the national debate. Founders create the jobs, pay the wages, take the risks and carry the losses before anyone else sees the gain.

When they leave, they take future payrolls. They take apprenticeships. They take suppliers.

They take confidence. The UK needs more than another speech about growth. It needs to make growth feel possible again.

On 22 June, Keir Starmer announced that he would resign. Andy Burnham has entered Downing Street. He is the seventh prime minister in ten years.

No founder could run a company like that and expect staff, investors or customers to plan around it. Politics has consequences in the real economy. A founder thinking about a factory, a second office, a research team or a hundred new hires needs to know what kind of country they are building in.

They need to know that a tax promise will last longer than a reshuffle. They need to know that employment law will hold long enough for a hiring plan. They need to know that ministers understand the difference between taxing success and killing the impulse to try.

The numbers tell the same story. The Institute of Directors has reported business morale at record lows in recent months. The Federation of Small Businesses found that, for the first time in its Small Business Index, more small firms expected to shrink, sell or close than expected to grow.

Henley & Partners estimates that the UK faced a net loss of about 16,500 millionaires in 2025. The exact count can be argued over. The signal is clear.

Capital is moving. Founders are moving. The next company can be incorporated elsewhere in a morning.

This began long before one prime minister, one Budget or one policy. Since the 2016 referendum, business investment has lagged. Researchers at King’s College London, Stanford, the Bank of England and Nottingham estimate that UK business investment is 12 to 18 per cent lower than it would have been without the Brexit shock.

A decade of uncertainty has taught founders to wait. Waiting is the enemy of enterprise. The damage reaches the labour market.

Around one million people aged 16 to 24 in the UK are outside education, employment or training. Behind that number are young people waiting for a first chance at the same moment companies are being told to think twice before taking hiring risks. So why are founders leaving the UK?

They are leaving because the deal has changed. The old deal was simple. Come here.

Work hard. Take risk. Build something.

Hire people. Keep enough of the reward to make the sleepless nights worth it. Trust that the state will take its share without treating ambition as a problem to be managed.

My own family is proof of what that deal once meant.

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