Start-ups - the spirit of enterprise lives on

Good news on the number of business start-ups. More than 4,000 more start-ups were established in 2008 than in 2007 despite the worsening economic climate, according to figures from Barclays. The research from Barclays found 436,600 new businesses were set up in 2008, compared to 432,300 in 2007. The number of start-ups set up by women increased by an encouraging 9% too. All this despite the credit crunch - which has restricted the availability of bank finance to small businesses.

There will be a host of reasons why the number of start-ups has risen. The back-end of 2008 would have seen an increasing number of salaried employees taking redundancy. A good proportion of those would have used the redundancy and other personal sources as the platform for starting a business. It will be interesting to see if this momentum is sustained into the first six months of 2009.