SMALL and medium-sized enterprises in Scotland are creating jobs faster than their peers in nearly every other part of the UK, but take longer to reach the £1 million turnover mark, research has shown.

The Enterprise Research Centre, a consortium of leading university business schools which includes academics from Strathclyde, has calculated that 13.2 per cent of Scottish SMEs increased staff numbers by 20 per cent or more per annum over a three-year period to 2015. It notes this is ahead of a UK-wide average of 12.3 per cent.

And it has calculated SMEs in Scotland created more than 46,000 net new private sector jobs in the 2014/15 financial year alone.

However, the ERC says that Scottish firms fall behind “when it comes to reaching the milestone of £1m turnover”. It notes that, of start-ups in 2012 with first-year revenues of less than £500,000, just one per cent of those in Scotland hit a £1m turnover by 2015, compared with 1.8 per cent of firms in the UK as a whole and 4.4 per cent in Belfast.

The ERC says, for those firms “taking the next step”, raising annual turnover of between £1m and £2m to more than £3m in three years, it is “a more complex story”. It has calculated that 11.5 per cent of SMEs in north-east Scotland, “centred on Aberdeen”, achieved such growth in annual turnover between 2012 and 2015,and notes this is the highest in the UK.

The ERC says Scotland’s business start-up rate of 33.3 new firms per 10,000 people in 2015 was ahead of respective figures of 30.1 and 20.6 for Wales and Northern Ireland but adrift of 48.6 for England.