Seven companies listed on the London Stock Exchange in the first half of 2026, raising £577m between them. For a market that has spent years being written off, that is progress. EY-Parthenon's leader for UK and Ireland IPOs, Scott McCubbin, describes a shift from "if" to "when" for prospective issuers, and the numbers support some of that optimism. Proceeds were up 215 per cent on the same period last year. Five listings in the second quarter alone raised £564m, a 422 per cent increase year-on-year. After a long drought, the language of recovery is finally attaching itself to London.

Look closer at what has actually been listed, though, and a more specific pattern emerges. Globally, the momentum has come from SpaceX's record-breaking $86.2bn flotation, from semiconductors, from power and data centre infrastructure, from robotics and advanced manufacturing. These are the sectors investors trust to demonstrate what the report calls credible AI-driven growth. Health technology and life sciences barely register in the account of what is driving this reopening. For a country whose National Health Service is simultaneously trying to modernise its digital infrastructure, expand ambient AI tools in clinical settings, and reduce its dependence on a small number of dominant overseas vendors, that absence deserves more attention than it is getting.

The pattern is not new, but it has been thrown into sharper relief by a market that is otherwise showing signs of life. British health-tech and life sciences companies have long faced a narrow set of choices once they outgrow venture funding. They can sell early to an American acquirer with deeper pockets and a larger home market, they can remain privately held through repeated funding rounds while founders and early investors wait years for liquidity, or they can attempt a listing in New York rather than London, where valuations and analyst coverage for health technology have traditionally been stronger. What has been largely unavailable is a credible path to a UK public listing that values these firms on their own terms. Nothing in the current recovery suggests that has changed.

This matters beyond the balance sheets of individual companies. The NHS has spent the past two years wrestling with the practical consequences of vendor concentration, most visibly in the debates around the Federated Data Platform and in the uncertainty following changes at Epic Systems, one of the small number of firms whose electronic patient record systems now underpin much of English hospital care. Ministers and NHS England's successor bodies have talked about building sovereign capability in health data and AI, partly as a hedge against exactly this kind of dependency. That ambition requires domestic companies that can scale, attract long-term capital, and eventually list without being absorbed by a foreign buyer along the way. A capital market that reopens for defence contractors and chipmakers but not for health-tech firms does little to support it.

There is a policy dimension too. The British Business Bank has taken on a more active role in underwriting early-stage health-tech investment precisely because private capital has been reluctant to back the sector through to maturity. Public money filling that gap is a reasonable stopgap, but it is not a substitute for a functioning exit market. If health-tech founders cannot see a realistic route to a UK listing, the rational response is to build for acquisition or list elsewhere, and either outcome leaves Britain a rule taker rather than a rule maker in the technologies its own health system will increasingly rely on.

McCubbin's framing of a market moving from "if" to "when" is a fair description of London's aggregate mood. For the companies actually building the tools the NHS needs, from AI scribes to interoperable patient records to diagnostic software, the more honest question is not when London reopens, but whether it reopens for them at all. On the evidence of this year's listings, that question remains unanswered.