This morning The Times has written about about our friends at Beauhurst and NatWest releasing the New Startup Index Report for 2024, examining data from Companies House and their own sources in order to understand new business registrations across the company. It makes for very interesting reading.
We had prior sight of the report and a chance to comment ahead of publication. Our CEO, Timothy Barnes, writes in the report:
“The all-time high for businesses operating in the UK is a positive indicator of the strength of our entrepreneurial economy and deserves to be celebrated.
The significance of the sectoral balance is hard to read but the strongest trends remain in services. Recent analysis has suggested small, expert-led, consultancies are increasingly vital to the UK economy and are a global strength. The categories shown growing here support that insight. Northern Ireland sees the largest percentage jump in new registrations, likely reflecting the unique EU-UK position it now occupies, but that needs further investigation.
The incredible level of activity in London is a sign of its global leadership among entrepreneurial clusters and is something in which we can all take pride. It is ranked regularly in the top two or three startup environments in the world and drives a large part of the national economy, benefitting everyone. Our analysis of national startup support infrastructure has shown that much of what has driven London’s position is being replicated across the country but more could be done and regional policy makers should feel empowered to draw on those lessons.”
You can read the new Beauhurst and NatWest report here.
The CFE has looked at this topic each of the last nine years. In our 2023 report, we examined the Post-Covid impact that could be seen throughout the startups registered in 2022. At that time, we saw some 790,000 new businesses contrasting with the 900,000 or so seen in this report on the following year’s data. The large jump in Northern Ireland’s new starts contrasts with a sluggish year in 2022, that actually saw a decline.
We are delighted to have had a chance to work with Beauhurst on this report and hope it may be the first of many collaborations where we can add analysis and insight to their data, which is undoubtedly the best in the UK. In particular, the ever-recurring issues around potential fraud and the geographic spread of new businesses are worthy of further investigation. 2022 saw Northern Ireland’s new count actually fall, for example, so the rebound this year is really good to see.