I joined the Prosper UK Business Council because, after nearly twenty-five years of building businesses, I feel more strongly than ever that the UK needs to become a better place to start, grow and scale companies again.

I started my first business at 24. Since then, I have been fortunate enough to found, build and sell several companies across different sectors. Looking back on that journey, one thing is very clear to me: for all the criticism we direct at ourselves as a country, the UK has actually been an extraordinary place to build businesses during my lifetime.

The ability to come up with an idea, take a risk and create something from scratch is something we should not take for granted. Along the way there have been genuinely smart policies that helped encourage entrepreneurship and innovation - from EIS and SEIS through to R&D tax credits and access to early-stage investment. Those things mattered. They helped create businesses, jobs and opportunity.

So I do not subscribe to the idea that everything is broken or that Britain cannot succeed. Quite the opposite. I think we have enormous strengths.

But I also think that, right now, this is one of the most difficult environments for business that I can remember.

Confidence feels fragile. Costs are high. Risk-taking feels less rewarded. And too often there is a gap between what politicians say about supporting business and what businesses actually experience in practice.

Being pro-business is easy as a slogan. Every government says it. But there is a difference between rhetoric and understanding what it actually takes for someone to hire people, invest capital, expand operations or start something from nothing. Those decisions are shaped by confidence, incentives, stability and execution - not just speeches.

Like many people in business, I have always tried to take a pragmatic rather than tribal view of politics. I have voted for all the major parties during my lifetime - Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour. I suppose I am what people would now call a politically homeless centrist. I voted for this Labour government two years ago because I believed there was an opportunity to balance economic growth and business confidence with tackling some of the deeper challenges facing society.

A successful country cannot just focus on markets and ignore social outcomes, but equally it cannot improve living standards or public services without creating the conditions for businesses to invest, grow and create jobs.

What I have seen since, unfortunately, has felt very different from that vision. Rather than building confidence, many of the signals and policies have felt actively unhelpful to businesses and entrepreneurs. At a time when confidence and investment should be encouraged, too often the environment has felt more difficult, more uncertain and less supportive of the people taking risks and building companies.

That is one of the reasons Prosper UK appealed to me.

What encouraged me was that it felt less focused on political theatre and more focused on practical action. There are people involved who genuinely understand business because they have actually built businesses themselves.

Prosper UK also recognises that sustainable growth is essential if we want to create opportunity, strengthen communities and improve living standards, which is why that practical focus matters so much.

But I also think we need to better communicate what we mean by growth. It is easy for the word to become abstract or meaningless. But growth, properly understood, means new companies being formed. It means investment. It means jobs. It means innovation. It means people having more opportunities and communities becoming more prosperous.

When businesses succeed, the country succeeds.

That is ultimately why I joined the Council. I want the next generation of entrepreneurs to feel the same optimism and possibility that existed when I started out. I want the UK to remain a place where ambitious people can build things, create jobs and take risks with confidence.

Prosper UK has an opportunity to help shape that conversation in a serious and credible way, and I am excited to be part of that journey.