For business owners, being ‘sent to Coventry’ might not be such a bad thing, according to new research published by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) in its annual UK Local Growth Dashboard, which revealed that Coventry and Warwickshire were the biggest job creators last year, (as a percentage of the total workforce). And when it comes to growing your start-up into a multimillion-pound business, entrepreneurs are better off basing themselves in Belfast and Aberdeen than London, says ERC.

Stephen Roper, professor of Enterprise and Warwick Business School and director at the ERC said: “What we see in the Growth Dashboard is that firm growth and job creation is spread right across the UK and is not limited to a few cities or regions. Nor is it restricted to certain types of ‘fashionable’ high-growth firms – there’s a complex growth pipeline of companies in every corner of the country that have different support needs based on their individual ambitions.

“This is incredibly important to understand if we’re going to create an industrial strategy that capitalises on the strengths we already have without over-focusing on star firms, or regions labelled as ‘powerhouses’.”

The research shows that the Midlands city and surrounding Warwickshire beat London into second place in the job creation stakes. Firms in the area created 23,432 net new jobs in 2014-15, the largest number as a proportion of total jobs of any Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) area, at 7.5% - ahead of London’s 4.0% (although London still created the highest number of jobs, 165,540).