Richard Harpin

speaker

914 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 12 Jan

Richard Harpin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

James Reed: all about business · 61. The email that saved HomeServe and sparked a £4bn business | Sir Richard Harpin · 12 Jan 2026 podcast

That is an obvious gap.

I mean, why do you think that is?

Because I think we think short term in the UK compared to our American counterparts where it's longer term investment, bigger companies prepared to take patient capital and longer term return.

And we're just looking at those.

Well, how many new businesses have been set up in the UK?

The stats that I have back for 2023, 316,000 start-ups.

and 309,000 closures.

Not really.

So actually... There's not a big gap.

We've got to be focusing on the 100,000 mid-sized businesses and helping them to become the next large companies.

And we only have 7,500 large companies in the UK, like HomeServe, like Reed.

That's interesting.

So you're saying from your gathering conference that access to finance was a very obvious issue that was shared.

Do you see any new developments that give you...

hope or reason to hope in that space?

I do, but the availability of finance compared to the year 2000 is there's £15 billion a year less in term loans and £15 billion less in overdraft facilities.

They've diminished down to only £3 billion a year.

So we've got to get more money lent.

That's a big drop.

That is a big, big drop.

Showing 361–380 of 914 · page 19 of 46