Britain must invest in itself – and stop building companies for other countries

Will Hutton

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Britain is beginning an overdue gear change that until now it has only half-heartedly accepted. It is to recognise that the great companies of tomorrow, the key to delivering growth, are not going to emerge spontaneously as creatures of the marketplace, but from an ecosystem of publicly created support. And once they are built, we have to work much harder to keep them here.

That's why a news item last week that didn't attract much notice really should have. Cambridge-based CMR Surgical, a fast-growing British life sciences company that makes a mobile robot capable of guiding minimally invasive surgery, and which could have been the next AstraZeneca or GSK, announced plans to sell itself, almost certainly to an American buyer, for up to $4bn. Whoever ends up the owner will be able to cornerstone its transformation into a company with global reach and create a de facto monopoly. But it won't be British.

From CMR's perspective, this is a passport into the lucrative US market. But it is not alone. Last year a string of Cambridge-based life science companies - over $12bn worth - were sold to the US, including Abcam and Darktrace. The US market is a magnet and for some companies American ownership is a fair trade-off for market access - but surely not so many. As the British Business Bank chairman Stephen Welton warned 18 months ago, the UK is in effect becoming an incubator of great companies - for other countries. In particular, to help the US grow more $1tn behemoths and therefore its growth rate.