Hammond's £400m for venture capital funds is no joke – unfortunately

Chancellor's cash to help startups grow to scale is welcome, but it's a mere drop in the ocean - especially after Skyscanner sale

The best joke in Philip Hammond's autumn statement was the line about how he is injecting 400m of venture capital funding into the British Business Bank "to tackle the longstanding problem of our fastest-growing technology firms being snapped up by bigger companies, rather than growing to scale". A day later, one such UK pioneer, Edinburgh-based Skyscanner, is being bought by large Chinese travel group Ctrip for 1.4bn, a sum that makes Hammond's 400m fire-fighting fund look like a water pistol.

The Treasury might argue that it has smaller, earlier-stage companies in mind for its 400m and that Skyscanner, boasting 60 million users a month for a service that scans the internet for cheap flights, had already achieved scale.

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