08:27 Thursday 23rd July 2015
BBC Radio Cambridgeshire
DOTTY MCLEOD: Start-ups are booming in Peterborough, with nearly 2000 new businesses registered in the city in the last year. .. Tom Hennessy is the Senior Economic Development Manager at Opportunity Peterborough. .. So what kind of businesses are we talking about?
TOM HENNESSY: Well these are all new start-up businesses that we’re talking about here. They’re home-grown businesses from within the Peterborough population, but also new companies starting up in the city, because of the enabling environment, and the fact that you know we’ve put so much investment into the roads that we’re now the UK’s first gigabit city with a city-wide fibre network. And the sorts of businesses we’re looking at are business-to-business service providers, consultancies, property management companies. Obviously again we’ve heard of the amount of investment going into property and new housing and new office and industrial space in the city. But also engineering, building on our advanced engineering for manufacturing prowess as well.
DOTTY MCLEOD: I don’t like to get too ‘numbersy’, but I’m going to get a little bit numbersy, just for a moment, because you’ve had 1,900 new businesses registering in the city over the last year, but the net growth of businesses is plus 825. So you’ve got about 1,000 businesses closing. Why do you think that’s happened?
TOM HENNESSY: It’s difficult to say I mean there’s obviously numerous reasons why businesses don’t succeed. But I mean if you look at that 825 figure, that is bigger than any other city in the East of England. And I think that’s because of the support structures that are in place to support new businesses. I mean a year on year survival rates for one year for new businesses across the country is about 90%, and over a five year period is about 50%. So it’s kind of you know it is expected that you see that kind of churn of business. The fact is that in Peterborough we’re doing much better than anywhere else in the rest of the East of England, and we’re way ahead of the UK average as well.
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New business in Peterborough.