Midday Markets: Burnham’s welcome crack down on pesky non-competes

The Midday Market report is a new newsletter from City AM, giving you fresh analysis on the City s biggest stories straight into your inbox every lunchtime. Today, Ali Lyon outlines the positive case for Andy Burnham s clampdown on non-competes and lengthy notice periods. You know something is wrong with the upper end of Britain’s labour market when some of the country’s most promising companies find it is easier to relocate top talent from America than hire from our own shores. But those are exactly the lengths to which one founder told me he and his fellow UK tech entrepreneurs are regularly going to take on high-skilled engineers quick enough to fuel their companies’ rapid growth. The rise in this sub-optimal practice is not, you will be relieved to read, for a lack of high-functioning, high-IQ minds being churned out by our universities. The culprit, in fact, is the thicket of draconian, anticompetitive clauses that employers are minded to slap on the contracts of their