If Britain really wants growth, stop punishing the people who make money, writes James Reed

Brilliant ideas will always succeed, no matter what the environment, and this country has a long track record of producing some of the best in a wide range of sectors.

That said, we should all be doing everything we can to make Britain the best place in the world to set up and build a business.

It's one thing to say that, but another thing to make it happen. My sense is that the entrepreneurial community feels a bit unloved at the moment.

The Government says growth is its number one priority, and entrepreneurs are the people who create jobs. But the only place we have really seen jobs go up over the last year is in the public sector.

Pay rises in the public sector are almost double those in the private sector. We've all heard about businesspeople upping and leaving for places like Dubai - though that now looks like less of a good idea than it might have been.

There is still a substantial entrepreneurial class in the UK. It can burst back into life and grow further with a few encouragements.

We need to look at what I call the 'three Cs' - curriculum, costs and culture.

In terms of what our young people learn, many employers I know complain that people coming out of school and university are ill-equipped for the jobs market.

I hear all the time about young people who haven't got the first idea about finance, or whose degree subjects have little relation to the real world and the jobs market.

We need better financial education in schools, and we need to encourage more people down potentially lucrative vocational routes. The Government's new V-levels, replacing BTECs and hundreds of other piecemeal vocational qualifications, are a good start.

We need classes in schools educating people about the cost of credit and how a sole trader operates. More broadly, a problem-solving approach to learning, rather than one that involves regurgitating facts, would be helpful.

When it comes to costs, we need to consider the cost of hiring. Everyone wants to see people paid a proper wage, but once pay and taxes are taken into account, the cost of hiring someone on minimum wage is now approaching £30,000 a year in Britain - far higher than in the US. Young people are being priced out of the market and businesses are being restricted from growing. Taxes and energy costs are also too high.

Government can help create the right culture for entrepreneurs to succeed and grow their businesses. That means the right incentives - we need to have a proper look at the tax breaks offered for those building fast-growth companies.

Instead of taxing family firms more heavily, as the Government is doing, we should ease the tax burden on good employers. One thing I would like to see is an inheritance tax waiver for anyone who works up to and beyond retirement age. You would create an incentive for entrepreneurs to keep working and creating jobs and wealth because their legacy would be protected. We would see fewer businesspeople move abroad or retire early, and the Government would collect more tax overall.

I would also put the new Employment Rights Bill in the bin. Yes, some of its provisions have been weakened, but we had a perfectly functional labour market with appropriate protections for workers before. As it stands, the legislation has put people off hiring.

More broadly, I'd like to see Britain celebrate failure as happens in the US. Most prominent businesspeople will have at least two or three failed enterprises behind them - and this should be seen as a path to success.

There is so much potential in the British economy. If we get behind our entrepreneurs in the ways I have suggested, we can achieve even more.

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James Reed is the chairman and CEO of Reed.

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