Britain has been waiting a long time for a serious push to get more people thinking about investing, not least in home-grown companies. Now, a bit like London buses, several initiatives have arrived all at once.

After years of drift, the nation’s aversion to investing (as opposed to saving) has moved centre stage in political and regulatory debate. The budget offered a few well-intentioned but half-baked fixes, while the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), is rethinking how risk is communicated, speeding up company listings and making it easier for private investors to access corporate bonds.

The industry meanwhile has launched a rare coordinated campaign to persuade people that investing could be for them. Even Martin Lewis, the nation’s consumer champion, has devoted a primetime TV show to the merits of investing.

The glass-half-full view is that change is finally coming; the glass-half-empty reality is that cultural barriers are so established that no single reform, rule change or rebrand can break them down. The jury is still very much out on whether any of this will lead to change.

Let’s start with the budget. Rachel Reeves signalled her intent by cutting the annual cash Isa allowance from £20,000 to £12,000 for under-65s, nudging the remaining £8,000 towards stocks and shares (in which you can still invest the full £20,000 each year). The message was blunt: too much money sits idle in cash.

I’ve argued in this column before that the logic here is flawed. Squeezing cash allowances won’t magically push savers into shares. What it will do is take one of the few financial products people understand and load it with complexity, caveats and soon tax. From April 2027, HM Revenue & Customs will levy tax on interest earned on cash held within stocks and shares Isas. What we needed was clarity and confidence; instead we’ve got layers of complexity introduced into a product that was built on a simple promise: it was tax-free.

Alongside this came a three-year stamp duty holiday on shares bought in new UK flotations. This was a sensible attempt to revive London’s languishing initial public offering (IPO) market, although arguably a bit lukewarm. The UK is an outlier among the world’s largest markets in taxing you when you buy its stocks, which directly affects ordinary investors. You pay 0.5 per cent of the share price on most UK stocks, even if you buy them in an Isa.

There’s a quiet irony at the heart of Britain’s capital markets. UK government bonds, also called gilts, are spared both capital gains tax (CGT) and stamp duty, giving them a built-in advantage, particularly for wealthier investors, who pay higher rates of CGT. Home-grown enterprise, by contrast, is penalised: buy UK shares and you pay stamp duty. And if you hold them outside an Isa you may end up paying CGT on any profits too.

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By making gilts more tax-efficient than equities, the system nudges capital away from productive investment. The government talks up the need for well-functioning capital markets, yet its tax framework quietly tilts the playing field towards government debt.

The FCA wants to change how risk is communicated, clarifying investment firms’ obligations and the misconceptions around the ever-present “capital at risk” warnings. Next April, it will let financial firms give “targeted support”, which will sit between generic guidance and full financial advice. It should allow companies to offer sensible suggestions to groups of consumers to help them make better-informed decisions about what to do with their money.

With fewer than one in ten people getting regulated advice, and many turning to social media —or even AI — this change is clearly needed. The advice gap is a chasm and millions are navigating managing their money in the dark. But risks remain if targeted advice is poorly executed, and gaps persist: firms will not be able to advise on pension consolidation, despite the fact that combining small pots being a useful way of controlling how your investments.

The investment industry, unsurprisingly, has joined the “get Britain investing” party. A coalition of banks, trading platforms and wealth managers will launch the UK Retail Investment Campaign in April. Backed by the Treasury, the FCA and the government’s Money and Pensions Service, with creative help from by M+C Saatchi, it is an attempt to do something rare in financial services: to speak with one voice.

Its focus is telling. FCA research shows that only 34 per cent of UK adults believe that “investing is for someone like me”. That phrase captures the investment problem. Many still think they’re not wealthy enough, don’t know enough, say they’re not good at maths, or feel like it’s gambling. But most of us are already investors. Anyone with a defined contribution pension will probably hold shares — they just don’t have that sense of ownership.

Here’s the rub. The regulator’s reforms and the industry campaign point in the right direction, but people rarely start investing because of policy changes. They start by owning a slice of something tangible: the company they work for, a brand they trust, a business they believe in. Requiring firms to give customers and employees a slice of the company in the form of shares could be a way to ignite interest. It’s something PensionBee did when it listed.

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A true retail investor revolution also needs excitement — the kind companies like the tech giant Nvidia generate. In the UK, that means listing household names and innovators like the payment firm Revolut on our stock exchange.

Ownership changes behaviour — it turns spectators into stakeholders. Popular IPOs such as Royal Mail and the computing company Raspberry Pi had overwhelming public demand, yet the allocations of shares to retail investors were scaled back by as much as 86 per cent, shutting them out of big British success stories.

The decline in the UK stock market has been decades in the making. In 1963, retail investors owned 54 per cent of the stock market. By 2022, that had fallen to 10.8 per cent. If private investor ownership had remained at its 1963 level, the public would be an estimated £1.045 trillion wealthier today, according to Retailbook, an company that helps people find firms to invest in.

When people stop owning stakes in the companies around them, markets lose their social connection. Retail investors bring patient capital, liquidity and belief — this matters for growth.

So will this burst of red-bus reform change anything? There’s a difference between being invested, feeling invested, and believing that investing is for “someone like me.” Rewriting rules is easy; changing mindsets is harder. But it must happen because the capital truly at risk is the capital left uninvested, idle and failing to grow the economy.

Maike Currie is the vice-president of personal finance at the pensions consolidation firm PensionBee