17 Jul 2026
The decline in UK IPOs is part of a broader global trend, but the UK has been hit particularly hard. With fewer companies listing, more choosing overseas markets, and a steady stream of takeovers, the question is no longer whether there is a problem, but how serious it has become and whether there is a realistic path to recovery.
The honest answer is: it’s bad. Not just a little bit bad — structurally bad.
And it’s not simply a UK problem. Across global public equities, the number of listed companies has been declining for years. But in the UK, those trends feel more pronounced, more visible, and frankly, more worrying.
For a long time, the explanation was easy enough: companies didn’t need to list. Asset-light businesses, especially in technology, could remain private, raise vast sums of capital, and avoid the public markets altogether. Why bother with quarterly reporting and scrutiny when private capital was effectively unlimited?
Now however, the narrative is starting to shift. One could argue that an AI-driven world might require more capital (like markets in the past), which in theory should favour public markets. But it’s far from clear that this will lead to a broad reopening of IPO markets. There is a risk the same handful of mega-cap names — the three or four big tech IPOs — grab the headlines and give the illusion of recovery, while the underlying market remains thin.
In the UK, though, that the situation is even more concerning. The few companies that do IPO are increasingly doing it elsewhere, typically in the US. And at the same time, established UK companies are voting with their feet. CRH, Ashtead, Ferguson, Arm are not marginal businesses. They have either moved their primary listings or chosen to list abroad altogether.
Even that it is not the whole story. Another worrying trend is developing beneath the surface; the UK market is being steadily picked off. It genuinely feels like almost every week another listed company is either being bid for or openly discussed as a target, by opportunistic overseas buyers or private equity. In 2026 alone, names such as Schroders, Senior, Tate & Lyle, Intertek, easyJet, Beazley, Bodycote, Evoke, Advanced Medical Solutions, a huge chunk of the market, have been touched by bids or bid speculation in a very short period of time. The longer-term numbers also reinforce the story. In 2025, there were 56 firm offers and 129 distinct bid situations. That tells you everything. This is not a stable market — this is one that is being actively dismantled.
It’s fair to say that Brexit hasn’t helped, but is probably not the whole story. In theory, there was an opportunity post-Brexit to reposition the UK as a more dynamic, competitive, globally oriented market with more flexible listings, more founder-friendly governance and faster regulation. In reality, that opportunity hasn’t really been fully realised — or at least not convincingly.
The counterargument is always the same: COVID, the war in Ukraine, geopolitical instability, inflation and energy shocks. All of that is true, but these are global challenges, not uniquely British ones.
In fact, one could argue the UK should have been relatively well positioned. The UK market has significant exposure to energy, resources and financials, exactly the sectors that should benefit from inflation and commodity disruption. Structurally the UK leans more towards “value” than “growth” as a market structure. Yet despite these advantages, there’s been no meaningful revival. UK equities still trade at a persistent discount to their US peers. That’s the key point. Everything else flows from that.
There’s also a wider issue that’s harder to quantify but easy to observe: the lack of renewal. There are no real new corporate champions coming through. The top of the market looks very similar to how it did 10 or 20 years ago. Compare that to the US — or even elsewhere. Japan, for example, has seen real reshuffling at the top. Meanwhile the UK feels static. When the UK does produce a global technology success story like Arm, it lists in the US. That probably tells you more than any statistic.
Left to its own devices, the outlook doesn’t look particularly encouraging. The UK equity market has already shrunk significantly from roughly 2,000 names in the All-Share Index in the early 2000s to about 540 today. That’s not a cyclical move — that’s structural.
The obvious question is: why should that trend reverse? What actually makes the UK an attractive place to list right now?
Demand is weak. UK pension funds have spent years reducing their allocation from equities, driven by regulatory pressure and liability matching. This has essentially hollowed out one of the natural buyer bases that historically underpinned the market and underpins many other regional markets. There is a cultural element too. The US has a deep-rooted investing culture. Retail participation is high, and people generally understand — or at least engage with — equity investing. In the UK, that just isn’t the case, with many people unaware of exactly what is held in their pension.
And beyond demand, the structural issues are obvious:
Even relatively smaller markets, like Sweden, manage to sustain a vibrant, entrepreneurial equity ecosystem. The UK, for all its history, currently doesn’t.
In theory, yes. In practice, it is much harder.
The solutions are easy to list:
But most of these measures are incremental. The deeper issue is that domestic demand for equities in the UK is structurally weak. Until that changes, the remainder probably doesn’t matter. At the moment, it doesn’t feel like this is particularly high up the priority list for policymakers which maybe explains why the situation, despite being widely acknowledged, hasn’t meaningfully improved.