Original post by Mike Butcher via TC

This is a joint guest post from security camera tech entrepreneur / startup finance blogger Nick Pelling and London tech business angel Andrew Lockley. They report on The UK government’s ongoing consultation on to the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which could well reshape the UK startup investment landscape during 2012.

The UK government has spent most of 2011 whacking the same pro-enterprise rhetorical stake into the ground. It wants to turn the UK into ‘Venture Central’, “the best place in Europe to start, finance and grow a business”; and it claims that it will do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this.

10/10 for ambition, but… what’s the plan? Aside from Tech City grandstanding (a bit shallow, but decent enough PR) and the whole Enterprise Zone fiasco-to-be (more offices? Why?), what the government wants to happen now is for business angels and VCs to start funding lots of high growth startups – fast.

Yet even though the March 2011 Budget increased the income tax relief available to angels via the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) to 30%, that decent-hearted snowball failed to trigger the government’s hoped-for avalanche of UK tech investments (seen any on TechCrunch? Nope, neither have we). As a result, it started to wonder whether the problem might be with EIS itself. So in July, HM Treasury opened up a three month consultation period on radical updates to the EIS, to end on 28^th September 2011.

However, the only ‘stakeholders’ likely to read (let alone submit detailed commentary on) its hefty document’s government-speak are the usual suspects: larger angel networks and trade bodies (e.g. the BBAA and the BVCA). This is not entirely unlike consulting solely with lions on your “Preferred Access to Wildebeest” scheme.

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