Reeves needs to save the London Stock Exchange

Flutter, the gambling giant that owns Paddy Power, has already London, and the British chip designer ARM decided to float in New York. There have been reports that AstraZeneca may move its listing too. Now we learn that even Goldman Sachs may be giving up on the City, as it delists Petershill, the majority-owned investment vehicle it launched almost 20 years ago, from the London Stock Exchange. The City is facing extinction, but there is still no sign that the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will do anything to rescue it.

Petershill was launched in 2007, and listed on the stock market in 2021, to offer retail inventors a slice of private equity and hedge funds. With the backing of the world’s most feared, and usually most profitable, investment bank, it should have been a huge success. Instead, it has struggled to make any respectable returns for years. Today, it has decided to call it quits, delist its shares, and return its capital to its shareholders. Yet another FTSE 250 company will have left the market.

Of course, individual companies disappear all the time. Petershill has been struggling for years, with the shares still 35 per cent below the price at which they were floated, and its shareholders will probably be pleased to get their money back. The trouble is, the latest delisting is yet another indication of how much trouble the City is now in. The London stock market, which used to be one of the biggest in the world, is in steep decline. More than 150 companies have either delisted or moved to the US since the start of 2024, while last year only 18 new ones floated their shares. It looks like 2025 will be just as bad.

Rachel Reeves has done little to stop this slow-moving car crash. She unveiled the so-called ‘Leeds reforms’ back in July, aimed at cutting red tape and encouraging savers to put more money into the market, but the blunt truth is that it will take a far more radical set of measures to revive the stock market. The Chancellor should scrap the stamp duty on shares, ditch the environmental, social and governance codes that have made a listing prohibitively expensive, and offer generous tax breaks to entrepreneurs willing to list their companies in London to encourage a new wave of floats.