Professional Services Sector

In the most recent quarter of this year 'Professional Services' saw a significant improvement to sales and profits from the previous quarter. Only 2% of this area shows a high risk of financial difficulty, amongst one of the lowest business areas.

What this tells us is that this sort of revenue stream is currently an attractive stream of revenue. If your local authority has a high amount of this sector in your region then collections should be strong. This then leads to two things.

One, an amount of envy from other local authorities that there is sustainable business in the area, or

Two, some queries from the billing authority that if they have a high number of outstanding debts mid year then why are they not paying?

I would expect that most authorities don't actually know as standard practice the trends in business health. Maybe it is useful, in time of austerity and uncertainty from government about where the next pound will come from, to know that of the 1.3m businesses in this sector that actually almost 1,300 (around 1% in my maths) of these companies in this sector failed in the last 3 month - therefore potentially 4 times this throughout the year!