Michael Izza, chief executive of the ICAEW, which advises 1.5 million companies across the UK, has said in the accountancy body’s Tomorrow’s Enterprise study on the changing state of business: ‘There are now over 5.4 million businesses, a million more than there were before the financial crisis.
‘In 2015 alone, close to 600,000 were created. This has coincided with the biggest self-employment boom in 40 years.’
However, while companies are being created at a rate of more than one a minute and there are now more being created than people going into full-time jobs, Izza urged the Government to ‘make the survival and growth of new businesses a matter of national priority’.
The UK is now widely considered Europe’s capital of enterprise, but Izza said all too often the ambitious plans of entrepreneurs are ‘not realised’.
He said: ‘For every ten new businesses created, six existing ones are dissolved. Business failure is a natural part of a competitive economy. However, the excessively high instance of business failure is a problem and one we believe the Government, in partnership with the private sector, can help fix.’
Meanwhile, Emma Jones, the founder of small business network Enterprise Nation, who was recently appointed a Business Ambassador by Prime Minister David Cameron, said in the report: ‘Tomorrow’s Enterprise does not call for an increase in small business support programmes funded by the Government – a sensible reality in an age of budget cuts that have seen schemes such as Growth Accelerator and Manufacturing Advisory Service abolished.
‘Rather, it looks at existing schemes and suggests areas for improvement. It comes at a critical time, a new era for business support as the Government asks the private sector to step up and deliver.’
