Our Director, Sarah Mackintosh, writing in Mace Magazine, on why the UK's cleantech funding gap is not a money problem, it's an accountability problem.
If you work in British cleantech, you know the feeling. A company with proven technology, a credible team, and a clear market opportunity spends months, sometimes over a year, in funding conversations that go nowhere. Meetings are positive. Interest is real. Then the process slows. Decisions are deferred.
In her piece for Mace Magazine, Sarah argues that what looks like a funding gap is in fact a coordination failure baked into the architecture of British capital markets. Pension trustees carry full liability for losses but face no corresponding accountability for the cost of excessive caution. Public institutions like the British Business Bank and the National Wealth Fund exist precisely to address market failures, but the incentive structures they operate under reward inaction over bold investment.
Britain has, on paper, built a serious cleantech financing architecture: the Mansion House Accord, the National Wealth Fund, a scale-up agenda at the heart of its industrial strategy. But as Sarah writes, institutions without aligned incentives are not a system, they are a set of actors who can each point credibly at the others when capital fails to flow.
"The funding gap is real, but it isn't a shortage of money. It's a shortage of accountability for not deploying it." Sarah Mackintosh, Director, CleanTech for UK
Read Sarah's full article in Mace Magazine to explore how this coordination failure works at every level of the system, and what needs to change.
