They include the self-employed, partnerships and privately owned limited companies that are owned by the people running them.

They do not include quoted public companies or the subsidiaries of quoted or overseas companies.

According to UK government statistics:

• “Micro” businesses are defined as having 0-9 employees, “Small” businesses as having 10-49 employees, “Medium” sized businesses as having 40-249 employees, and “Large” businesses as having 250 or more employees.
  
  
• All those businesses with less than 250 employees are collectively defined as SMEs (“Small and medium sized entities”).
  
  
• There are 7,000 large businesses and 3.8 million SMEs in the UK.
  
  
• Of those SMEs, 3.6 million are micro businesses, 167,000 are small and 27,000 are medium sized.

Click here to discover why SMEs are the engine of economic growth in the UK and Ireland