Autumn Budget 2026

The Employee Share Ownership Centre welcomes the Budget measures rewarding entrepreneurial risk-taking and widening individual participation in wealth creation.

The new Founders' Relief, offering a 10 percent CGT rate on up to £10 million of lifetime qualifying gains for founders of high-growth, innovative companies, complements the recent expansion of EMI and the use of growth shares to align founders, investors and employees in creating and sharing enterprise value. We particularly welcome the expansion and rebranding of CSOP as EMI2, doubling the individual option limit to £120,000, extending the exercise period to 15 years and removing the interaction with EMI limits. These reforms reflect the Centre's longstanding advocacy of closer alignment between the schemes, while bringing greater coherence and clarity to the UK's employee share ownership framework. The Centre also welcomes the growing recognition of direct employee share ownership as a means of giving individuals a personal financial stake in the success of the businesses they help to build.

There remains considerable scope to broaden participation. Private equity and venture capital-backed businesses directly employ approximately 2.5 million people in the UK, representing eight percent of total employment. Extending access to tax-advantaged employee share schemes across a wider range of ownership structures would enable many more employees to participate in the capital growth of their businesses.

The Centre will continue to advocate wider adoption of SIP and SAYE, greater access to tax-advantaged schemes for private equity-backed businesses, and practical improvements to employee share liquidity. We look forward to continuing our constructive dialogue with HM Treasury and HMRC on these and other reforms, including the consultation on Founders' Relief. We also welcome the stability provided by leaving the existing EOT reliefs unchanged, allowing recent reforms time to bed in.

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