400,000 British Businesses Disappear - Overnight

A quite extraordinary story from the Telegraph suggests that the UK economy has been much less entrepreneurial in recent years than originally reported by the Office of National Statistics.

Instead of there being 4.8 million businesses in the UK at the end of 2009, it appears there were actually only 4.4 million. Statisticians had double counted sole traders and individuals running one man companies (i.e. companies with no employees). It makes you wonder what they were paid for doing!

Re-stated figures on corporate Britain provide students with some useful insights into the nature of business organisation in the UK. For example, 99.9% of businesses in the UK are classified as SMEs (small / medium sized enterprises). There are approximately 2.8 million sole traders, of which around 1 in 8 employ someone else too. That’s a lot of people working alone, for themselves!

Just 8% of businesses in the UK are partnerships - that’s 370,000 partnerships in total.

Here is the link to the detailed pdf from the ONS - lots more business stats in here for students to discover.