Barclays’ Group Policy Development team has enjoyed a busy start to 2025, publishing six reports to date. Kitty Ussher, Managing Director, and Group Head of Policy Development at Barclays, explains the thinking behind each report and how each one focuses on a crucial area of economic and societal policy…
A busy start to 2025 with six new reports
The remit of the Group Policy Development team at Barclays is to use our expertise, data, and insights to inform the design and application of public policy solutions in response to pressing economic and societal challenges.
Though 2025 is only five months old, my team and I have already published six reports and covered a huge breadth of subjects. We’ve explored how to transform the UK’s corporate bond markets so retail investors can access them, and analysed the UK’s underinvestment challenge and what policy recommendations could be implemented to stimulate private sector investment in the UK.
My team and I have big plans for the rest of 2025, but we’re hugely proud of these six reports and we’re delighted to share them with you.
Kitty Ussher, Managing Director, and Group Head of Policy Development at Barclays
We marked the 13th UK-India Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD) - co-chaired by the Chancellor and India’s Minister for Finance - by assessing what a deeper economic partnership between the two nations could mean. We looked back at some of the historic mass retail investing campaigns, like ‘Tell Sid’ in the 1980s, and asked what might be needed for the UK government to spearhead a campaign to recruit new investors today.
As well as this, we’ve examined the future of farming and how a revolution in agricultural technology could shape the future of food production, and we explored what needs to be done to decarbonise the physical premises where so many of the UK’s small and medium-sized enterprises operate.
My team and I have big plans for the rest of 2025, but we’re hugely proud of these six reports and we’re delighted to share them with you.
Retail access to Corporate Bonds
It is in all of our interests for the UK to have vibrant capital markets and how we might enhance those markets was the subject of our first report of 2025. Shares, even for those new to the world of investing, feel easily available, but corporate bonds are much harder to invest in directly for UK retail investors.
In our report, 'Retail access to Corporate bonds', we have combined our experience as an advisor to corporates issuing bonds, our role supporting the placement of those issuances and our position as a provider of retail investor solutions and wealth management advice and services to explore the barriers for retail investors in buying bonds, and what an alternative solution could be.
Business attitudes to investing: How to unlock a growth mindset in the UK
Our second report of 2025 sought to shine a light on business attitudes towards investing, and, as part of that, to understand what might be holding the UK back.
We know that the UK is facing an underinvestment challenge. In 2023, private sector investment in the UK was around 10% of GDP, which is much lower than the OECD average of around 13-14% for the rest of the G7 economies. If you look at the years between 2006 and 2021, based on private investment figures for the median country in the G7, this has cost the UK economy as much as £354 billion in lost opportunity.
This figure is of concern to us all, and any solutions will need to include a public policy dimension.
Our report ‘Business attitudes to investing: How to unlock a growth mindset in the UK,’ found that the main barriers to investment in the UK included: (1) the economic climate and high interest rates; (2) political uncertainty; (3) business size: in particular, small businesses who feel like they have less capacity to invest and (4) a lack of skills availability in the employment market.
Incentivising investment: Driving decarbonisation of SME-occupied premises
Small and medium-sized enterprises represent 99 per cent of all businesses and account for 60 per cent of UK employment. As a financial services provider to both SMEs and commercial landlords, at Barclays we see first-hand where the major barriers to enacting energy efficiency improvements to business premises are.
Commercial premises are estimated to represent nearly a quarter (23%) of built environment carbon emissions and achieving their decarbonisation will be critical to the UK’s Net Zero efforts.
Combining a review of Barclays’ insights from previous market research with new quantitative data from the Barclays Business Prosperity Index, our report ‘Incentivising investment: Driving decarbonisation of SME-occupied premises,’ offers policy recommendations to expedite progress, including on improved data availability and reducing cost barriers.
Agritech: supporting the future of farming
UK farming and agriculture stand at a critical juncture. The sector’s commercial viability is under constant pressure. The farmers of the future will need to increase food supply, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to protect and enhance nature and biodiversity - all the while improving productivity and efficiency.
Agriculture technology (“Agritech”) has the potential to address these challenges, safeguarding farming’s future and in turn the UK’s long-term food security – but only if it can be supported with an enabling policy environment. We explored what policy changes are needed to spearhead its development and adoption, in a new report, ‘Agritech: supporting the future of farming.’
Batting for Growth: The UK-India Economic Corridor
Launched alongside the 13th UK-India Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD), which was held in London in April and led by UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves and India’s Minister for Finance Nirmala Sitharaman, ‘Batting for Growth: The UK-India Economic Corridor’ explores how a deeper economic partnership between the UK and India is now more important than ever.
Leveraging Barclays’ extensive operations in India, and Barclays’ role as a facilitator of financial flows across the UK-India economic corridor, the paper looked at how economic links between both countries are evolving and posed the question: How can UK economic and trade policy towards India strengthen the UK-India Economic Corridor and contribute to the growth mission of the UK Government?
A New Message to Tell Sid
In late 2024, we released a report titled ‘Empowering retail savers to engage with investing', which explored the different attitudes of potential investors and how their behaviour compared to those who were already investing.
The report included testing different messaging material for potential investors, and, as part of its findings, we made some observations on the different attitudes of potential investors versus those already investing. We found that potential investors were much less engaged than existing investors by concepts such as tax incentives as a reason to start investing.
Reflecting on this, we wanted to do further exploration and set our questions the question, ‘What is needed to make a mass investing campaign effective in creating an engaged, investing public?' The result is a new report, 'A New Message to Tell Sid'.
The report explores how to enable new investors, what an effective mass investing campaign might look like and explores three historic mass retail investing campaigns, including the titular ‘Tell Sid,’ the UK government’s campaign around the 1986 privatisation of British Gas.
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