Mansfield had the highest business closure rate of any UK local authority area in 2024, according to research published by insurance broker Alan Boswell Group. The area saw 18.0% of its active businesses close during the year, against a UK average of 9.8%. Blackpool and Torfaen ranked second and third, both recording closure rates above 15%.
Alan Boswell is a broker with a commercial interest in the findings it publishes here - the research supports the case for better SME coverage conversations. The underlying data is drawn from official ONS Business Demography statistics, which are independently verifiable. The study ranked local authority areas by a composite score based on the 2024 closure rate, the five-year survival rate for businesses founded in 2019, and the balance between new business openings and closures. Mansfield's ranking was driven partly by a net shortfall between openings and closures: 460 new businesses opened in the area against 660 closures.
Blackpool and Torfaen followed Mansfield, with Salford, South Derbyshire, North Northamptonshire, Wolverhampton, Doncaster, Rhondda Cynon Taf and Rugby completing the top 10. Salford's position came less from its closure rate, which was roughly balanced against openings, and more from having the lowest five-year survival rate in the top 10: just 28.2% of businesses founded in 2019 were still trading five years later.
At the other end of the ranking, the Isles of Scilly recorded the lowest closure risk in the UK, though the report itself notes this is based on a small sample of businesses. The Shetland Islands, Fermanagh and Omagh, Mid Ulster and Torridge made up the rest of the lowest-risk group, with several areas in Northern Ireland and Scotland featuring prominently.
The local pattern sits within a wider national picture that has been deteriorating for some time. Insurance Business UK has reported that UK company insolvencies reached 2,343 in May 2026, continuing a run of historically high monthly figures, with construction, wholesale and retail trade, and accommodation and food services leading the sectoral insolvency table. Begbies Traynor's Red Flag Alert data recorded 67,369 companies in critical financial distress in late 2025, a 43.8% year-on-year increase, with all 22 monitored sectors reporting deterioration.
Allianz Trade has separately described five consecutive years of rising global insolvencies as unprecedented since the financial crisis, estimating around 27,650 UK business insolvencies in 2025, just below the 12-year record set the year before.
That national context makes Mansfield's 18.0% closure rate, and the general pattern of high closure rates clustering in the East Midlands, North West and parts of Wales, look like a sharper regional expression of pressures already visible in the national insolvency data, rather than an isolated local anomaly.
Heath Alexander-Bew, personal lines director at Alan Boswell Group, said business closures typically follow a sustained period of pressure - higher costs, quieter trading, late payments and staffing difficulties - rather than a single event. He said areas such as Mansfield, Blackpool and Torfaen show pressure across more than one measure at once, with high closure rates in some cases compounded by more businesses closing than opening.
This is where the piece moves from a geography story to an insurance one. Separately from the Alan Boswell research, there is independently documented evidence of an underinsurance problem among UK SMEs that sits directly alongside the closure risk data.
Hiscox's Global Protection Gap Report found 74% of SMEs worldwide remain underinsured, with 55% missing at least one essential cover such as professional indemnity, public liability or employers' liability. Close to two-thirds of SMEs could not accurately describe what public liability insurance covers. A separate finding cited in that research suggests around a third of SMEs had not reviewed their policies in three years.
The documented business failure sequence Alexander-Bew describes - sustained cost pressure, falling revenue, late payments, then closure - is precisely the period during which gaps in cover become consequential and hardest to address. A business trading under sustained financial strain is unlikely to be reviewing its insurance programme; it is more likely to be cutting costs wherever it can. That makes the coverage gap most likely to be discovered at the point of claim, which is also the point at which it can no longer be fixed.
The combination of the Alan Boswell geographic data and the Hiscox underinsurance data gives brokers two specific tools. The geographic ranking identifies where, statistically, SME clients are under the most combined pressure - high closure rates, low five-year survival rates, more businesses closing than opening. The Hiscox data identifies what the coverage gap most commonly looks like when a business in that position has a claim: missing PI, public liability or EL, or a policy that has not been reviewed since conditions changed.
For brokers with SME books in Mansfield, Blackpool, Torfaen, Salford and the other high-closure areas the research identifies, the combination is a prompt for a proactive coverage review conversation - not because the data proves these clients are underinsured, but because the underlying pressure environment is exactly the one in which underinsurance tends to go undetected longest.
