Dear Mr. Prime Minister: Helen Crisostomo, VP Businesses Development At Novo Solutions

“Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

“Founders do not need more noise; they need the confidence, consistency and conditions to build, hire and scale in Britain.

– Helen Crisostomo, VP of Business Development at De Novo Solutions

The first thing you need to know about running a business in Britain today is that…

The first thing the Prime Minister needs to know is that running a business in Britain today demands resilience as much as ambition. Founders are not short of ideas, energy or appetite for growth. What they are short of is certainty. Every change to tax, regulation, procurement or employment policy shapes decisions on hiring, investment and expansion. If the Government wants businesses to scale here, it must create an environment where long-term planning feels possible, not risky.

The biggest challenge facing UK founders that politicians don’t completely understand is…

The biggest challenge is the gap between political intent and day-to-day business reality. Most founders can cope with pressure, but uncertainty is much harder to manage. When policy shifts quickly, costs rise without warning, or support schemes are difficult to access, it affects confidence. It can delay a hire, pause an investment decision or make a founder think twice about scaling in the UK. Politicians often talk about enterprise in principle, but founders need practical consistency in practice.

The promise I would most like to see your government keep is…

I would most like to see this Government keep its promise to make Britain a genuinely pro-growth economy. That means backing the businesses that create jobs, deliver innovation and support public services, not just through announcements, but through stable policy, better procurement, stronger digital skills and smarter investment in technology. For companies like de Novo, which work closely with the public sector, the opportunity is clear: the Government can be both a better customer and a more effective enabler of growth.

Please don’t…

Confuse activity with progress. Businesses do not need constant reinvention of policy, new slogans or short-term initiatives that disappear before they make an impact. They need the Government to follow through, simplify where possible and remove friction from the system. Stability is not dull to a founder; it is what gives them the confidence to take risks.

What would make the UK a more attractive place to build and scale a company is…

The UK would be a more attractive place to build and scale a company if it made growth easier at each stage: easier to access talent, easier to invest in innovation, easier to win public sector work, and easier to navigate the tax and regulatory system. There is huge potential in using digital transformation to improve productivity across both business and Government. But to unlock it, the UK must make it simpler for ambitious companies to adopt technology, invest in people and compete with confidence.

What gives me confidence in Britain’s future is…

What gives me confidence is the quality of British entrepreneurship and the appetite for meaningful change. Across the UK, there are founders building practical, high-value businesses in technology, data, AI and public sector transformation. There is also a growing recognition that productivity, digital adoption and innovation are not abstract policy themes – they are essential to better services, better jobs and stronger communities. Britain has the talent and the ambition. The task now is to create the conditions that let that ambition scale.

What worries me most about the next five years…

What worries me most is that the UK talks itself into caution when it should be backing ambition. Over the next five years, other economies will be competing hard for investment, talent and technology leadership. If Britain becomes too complicated, too expensive or too slow to do business in, founders will still build, but they may choose to build elsewhere. The risk is not a lack of ideas. It is that we fail to convert those ideas into long-term economic value here in the UK.

If you take one thing from this letter, let it be this:

Founders do not need the Government to remove all risk, but they do need it to stop adding avoidable uncertainty. Give businesses consistency, make the system easier to navigate, and back the people building for the long term. That’s how confidence turns into investment, and investment turns into growth.

 My hopes and dreams for 2030…

By 2030, I would want to look back and see that the Government had made Britain simpler, faster and more confident as a place to grow a business. That would mean clearer and more stable policy, stronger routes to finance, better access to skills, procurement that genuinely enables innovative SMEs to compete, and public services that use digital transformation to deliver better outcomes. Success would not be measured by the number of initiatives launched, but by whether more companies chose to start, scale and stay in the UK.