The seeds of new business start-ups continue to take root faster than existing companies wither and die, according to official data suggesting that the fertile conditions enjoyed by enterprise since the mid-1990s are still in place.
The number of value added tax-registered businesses increased by 2 per cent to 1.96m in the 12 months to January 2007, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday.
The figure, one of the key measures of business activity, means the number has now risen every year since 1995. There are now 21 per cent more VAT-registered businesses in the UK than 12 years ago.
There were 182,200 new VAT registrations in 2006, an increase of 0.3 per cent on the previous year. However, the number of deregistrations, which fell 0.3 per cent to 143,100, was at its lowest since 1994.
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