From root: How can simulations help me take better actions?

Which support policies keep small businesses alive?

UK small business support comes in different flavours (rates relief, startup grants, incubators, mentoring, etc.): how should a cash-constrained policymaker choose between them, and to maximise what?

The simulation below (in this case it’s just one simple state partition) is calibrated to ONS business demography and Companies House register data for Kingston upon Hull, evaluating how six support portfolios shift five-year survival and register stock under three macro scenarios.

Pick a support portfolio and a macro scenario, and compare how survival and stock shift against the alternatives.

Small business support policy support: pick a portfolio and macro scenario; the simulator (calibrated to ONS and Companies House data for Kingston upon Hull) shows how five-year cohort survival and register stock shift across the six candidate portfolios over a 10-year horizon. This is a research model fitted to open data, not a policy-design tool.

Simulation

 

 

Live controls
Support portfolio
Macro scenario

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The link to this project can be found here.

Data and licence: This simulation is calibrated to ONS business demography statistics and the Companies House register, with economic covariates from NOMIS and the Bank of England. ONS and Companies House data is Crown copyright and contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

References and further reading

Companies House. n.d. “Free Company Data Product.” Companies House. http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html.
Geroski, Paul A. 1995. “What Do We Know about Entry?” International Journal of Industrial Organization 13 (4): 421–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-7187(95)00498-X.
Hardwick, Robert J. 2022. “Stochadex: A Simulation Engine Written in Go.” GitHub. https://stochadex.github.io/.
Hardwick, Robert J. 2026a. “business-survival: Small Business Survival and Support Policy Simulation.” GitHub. https://github.com/umbralcalc/business-survival.
Hardwick, Robert J. 2026b. “How can simulations help me take better actions?” umbralcalculations, May. https://umbralcalc.github.io/posts/how_can_simulations_help_me_take_better_actions.html.
Hardwick, Robert J. 2026c. “How does a simulation learn its parameters from data?” umbralcalculations, November. https://umbralcalc.github.io/posts/how_does_a_simulation_learn_its_parameters_from_data.html.
Hardwick, Robert J. 2026d. “What is a state partition?” umbralcalculations, November. https://umbralcalc.github.io/posts/what_is_a_state_partition.html.
Mata, José, and Pedro Portugal. 1994. “Life Duration of New Firms.” The Journal of Industrial Economics 42 (3): 227–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/2950567.
Office for National Statistics. n.d. “Business Demography, UK.” Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/business/activitysizeandlocation/bulletins/businessdemography/latest.
The National Archives. n.d. “Open Government Licence for Public Sector Information, Version 3.0.” The National Archives. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/.