Treasury adviser Alex Depledge quits days before Budget, warning ministers treat entrepreneurs as a 'sideshow'

Alex Depledge, the Treasury’s entrepreneurship adviser, will leave her role on Thursday, the day after Chancellor John Healey delivers his first Budget, warning that ministers treat entrepreneurship and innovation as a “sideshow” (The Times).

“Keeping scale-ups on the fringes underestimates the contribution of our greatest companies, and we need to support and develop them on British shores at all costs,” Depledge, 45, told The Times. “We treat them as a bit of a sideshow. It’s a nice to have over here and no one really understands what they’re building.”

Depledge, the serial founder behind Resi and Hassle.com, was appointed as the Treasury’s first-ever entrepreneurship adviser in June 2025 by then-chancellor Rachel Reeves, and was reappointed by Healey in August 2026 after he took over as chancellor, Dealroom reported. She said her arrival at the Treasury had been “like organ rejection” and that after the change of chancellor she had to “relitigate all the arguments I had already won.”

“Entrepreneurship can’t be seen as a good news bonus on the margins of economic policy,” she said. “That mentality is really dangerous for British business as a whole because it puts a cap on our ambition and it erodes confidence at every level — from investors and founders, from the media discourse, right through to workers.”

She also warned that Britain is “in grave danger of not having a seat at the table” on artificial intelligence, with a window of about 18 months, and called for more of the roughly £3 trillion in UK pension capital to back high-growth companies. She helped secure an extension of the enterprise management incentive share-option scheme at last year’s Budget.

Her warning came despite Healey’s insistence, in an interview with The Times this week, that his forthcoming Budget will be pitched at Britain’s “bloody-minded entrepreneurs.” Healey has said he wants to be “a chancellor who backs business in Britain making a profit.”