Maidstone Businesses Do Fine for Two Years - Then a Third of Them Vanish

Every West Kent borough starts and loses businesses at roughly the rate you'd expect for the South East - except in what happens next. New figures from the Office for National Statistics show that a business in Maidstone is about as likely as one anywhere else in the country to make it through its first two years, then loses almost a third of that original 2021 cohort in year three alone - a drop far steeper than its neighbours or the England average.

The ONS's Business Demography release tracks every business birth, death and survival by local authority. Of the roughly 1,265 businesses born in Maidstone in 2021, 94.1% were still trading a year later and 78.7% after two years - the best two-year figure of any West Kent borough, and above the England average of 70.3%. By year three, though, only 45.1% remained - a fall of 33.6 percentage points in a single year, against a 16.8-point drop nationally. Sevenoaks, by contrast, saw a much gentler year-three fall (from 78.0% to 65.2%, a 12.8-point drop) and ended up with the best three-year survival rate in West Kent, comfortably ahead of the England figure of 53.5% and the South East's 57.8%. Tonbridge & Malling (50.0%) and Tunbridge Wells (58.6%) sat in between.

The pattern holds up in the 2024 figures too. Maidstone had the highest rate of new business births relative to its existing stock of any West Kent borough - 875 new businesses against 8,475 active ones, a birth rate of 10.3% - closest of the four to the England-wide rate of 11.2%, and ahead of Sevenoaks (9.6%), Tunbridge Wells (9.6%) and Tonbridge & Malling (9.4%). But Maidstone also recorded the highest closure rate locally, at 9.0% (765 deaths), versus 8.3% in Sevenoaks, 8.7% in Tunbridge Wells and 8.1% in Tonbridge & Malling. The net effect - births minus deaths, as a share of the active business stock - left Maidstone and Sevenoaks essentially tied for the fastest-growing business base in West Kent (both around 1.3%, matching the England average), with Tonbridge & Malling just behind at 1.2% and Tunbridge Wells trailing at 0.9%, the same as the South East average.

Sevenoaks stands out on a second measure: how many businesses it has relative to its size. With 6,955 active businesses and a population of around 123,200, Sevenoaks has roughly 56.5 active businesses per 1,000 residents - the highest of the four boroughs by some margin, and well above the England average of 42.9. Tunbridge Wells is second on this measure (53.6 per 1,000), followed by Tonbridge & Malling (46.9) and Maidstone (44.3, just above the England average despite being the largest borough by population). Put together with the survival figures, the picture is of two different kinds of local economy: Maidstone, the largest borough by population, generates and loses the most businesses in raw numbers but not, proportionally, the most per resident; Sevenoaks has fewer businesses in absolute terms, but they're denser on the ground and considerably more likely to still be there in three years' time.

Sources: ONS, Business Demography, UK: 2024, ONS, mid-2025 population estimates