Almost 13% of adults in the UK are now running fledgling businesses, according to new research. This is the highest percentage since the late nineties.
Around 13% of UK adults are in the first three months of starting a new business venture or are already operating a fledgling company, according to research from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.
In 2020, this figure was just 8%, which was at the worst point of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 70 per cent of Britons think starting a business is easy, but less than one in ten has any intention to do so.
Around half of Britons think they have the relevant skillset to start their own company and 61% believe there are good business opportunities in their local area, with 52% then citing fear of failure as a reason for not doing so.
The report found that very low numbers of those operating a new business expect to employ six or more people within a five-year time span.
However, the researchers discovered that the number of Britons who are owner-managers of businesses after more than three-and-a-half years has dropped to 5.3%, compared with 8.2% in 2019.
Oddly, the rise in entrepreneurship contrasted with the fall in self-employment over the same period of time. Statistics are showing a drop of 124,000 in the numbers of those, who are self-employed between the second and third quarters of 2021. Since the beginning of the pandemic, self-employed workers have dropped to nearly 600,000.
Report co-author Dr Sreevas Sahasranamam said: “It is heartening to see that more than 50 per cent of entrepreneurs in the UK are pursuing new opportunities due to the pandemic and more than 60 per cent are using more digital technologies to sell products and services, indicating flexibility and adaptability.”
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