Small Businesses in Rural Areas

A thriving small business sector is central to the vision of economic and social regeneration of rural areas presented in Defra’s Rural Strategy 20041. Away from urban centres, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) provide local jobs, services and places to trade, as well as the potential to protect and sustain the countryside environment.The Small Business Service aims to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a business, with special attention paid to groups under-represented in self-employment, socially excluded groups and economically underperforming areas. It is therefore useful to compare SMEs in rural areas with those in urban areas in terms of their contribution to the economy and their perceptions of and attitudes to the obstacles they encounter in doing business. These measures are particularly pertinent in a minority of “lagging” rural areas with high social deprivation, most of which are either geographically peripheral or characterised by industries that experienced rapid declines in the recent past, e.g. coalmining, agriculture and fishing.[...]