Small Business Support - January & February 20111
28/04/2011

There are currently an estimated 510,000 term loans (within some 3.9 million small business banking relationships) with a total outstanding value of £42.2bn, whilst overdraft borrowing stands at £7.6bn.

BBA statistics director, David Dooks, said of the data:

"Lending trends in the first two months of this year appear stable, albeit below the corresponding time in 2010, but in line with the findings of the Bank of England’s recent Credit Conditions Survey which found that credit demand from small businesses had fallen sharply in the first quarter.

"January and February saw more than 100,000 small businesses open accounts with the main banks, following the seasonal December dip in the number of new relationships established".

Please read the full release via the link below.

Notes to Editors

1. Contributors to this survey are Barclays, Clydesdale (including Yorkshire Bank), HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group (including HBOS), Royal Bank of Scotland (including NatWest), Santander UK (including Alliance & Leicester) and The Co-operative Bank.

2. Small businesses are defined here as those commercial businesses with an annual bank account debit turnover of up to £1 million.  Although clubs, charities and societies operate small business accounts with banks, their activities are not commercial in nature and are therefore not covered by these data.

3. Net changes are adjusted where appropriate to remove the effects of reporting discontinuities or coverage breaks, thus reflecting underlying business movements.

4. The BBA provides practical help and advice for small businesses, including a business account finder, in a Small Business Policy Issues Section of our website (http://www.bba.org.uk).

5. The Office for National Statistics applies a Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) within the UK National Accounts and the Bank of England does likewise for banking statistics. The SIC is defined by EU regulations and revised periodically to reflect changes in the profile of European residents’ activities - the latest classification was adopted in UK banks’ reporting in January 2011. As banks revised the SIC codes applied to their business customer accounts, they also reviewed the customer base generating these data. Across almost 4 million small business customers, correcting/updating codes and reviewing coverage resulted in some discontinuities in data for the month of January and for the month of February, hence combined data series in some cases for the two months.