More than a fifth of UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are anticipating strong performance and business growth over the next 12 months, despite uncertainties surrounding Brexit and the upcoming General Election.<\/p>\n
The figures come from the latest quarterly Business Barometer from finance company Close Brothers, which tracks changes in business attitudes throughout the year.<\/p>\n
The latest Barometer, which was published earlier this week by Business Matters<\/em> magazine, found that a large proportion of UK SMEs are currently feeling \u2018cautiously optimistic\u2019 about their future.<\/p>\n It found that, despite high expectations regarding success and growth, many businesses fear that substantial \u2018cost pressures\u2019 will pose new challenges over the coming year.<\/p>\n A quarter of business owners told the survey that they were concerned their business would struggle with the ever-rising cost of the National Living Wage (NLW) \u2013 which previously rose to \u00a37.50 an hour last month and is forecast to hit \u00a39 by 2020 under existing proposals.<\/p>\n A similar number of respondents said that recent changes to business rates were also a concern going forward.<\/p>\n Furthermore, a significant number of businesses quizzed cited inflation fears and the ongoing struggle with late payments amongst their key concerns for 2017.<\/p>\n As many as 11.8 per cent of respondents added that they fear contraction or closure within the next 12 months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More than a fifth of UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are anticipating strong performance and business growth over the next 12 months, despite uncertainties surrounding Brexit and the upcoming General Election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1843,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1842\/revisions\/1843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}