GOOD to see the CBI’s John Cridland giving a shout out for medium sized businesses.

Small businesses have been hogging the limelight – quite rightly as the sort of businesses that are pushing forward the UK economy – but Cridland identifies medium sized businesses as really putting their shoulder to the UK economy’s wheel.

“The UK’s medium-sized businesses are the unsung heroes of our economy and have done much of the heavy lifting to drive the UK recovery,” the CBI director-general commentated yesterday.

“Despite making up less than 2 per cent of the private sector, they now employ 185,000 more people than in 2010 and contribute more than £300 billion to the economy.”

Typical is EA Technology, which works with the power industry to improve the reliability and efficiency of power distribution networks.

Recently it was behind the £9m ‘My Electric Avenue’ project, which looked at the technical and social impact of running electric cars on local communities who were able to lease a new 100% electric Nissan Leaf  at a specially negotiated rate for 24 months.

So what is a medium sized business?

It’s the next step on the small business ladder and the ‘M’ in the SME acronym, employing 50-499 people with a turnover of £10-100 million. They often have significant sized small fleets of between 50 to 100 company cars.

According to the CBI, 82% of medium sized businesses expect the economy to grow in 2014 and 88% reckon their own business situation will improve.

That’s good news for the economy – and good news for the UK auto industry: because they’ll be needing more company cars to fuel that growth.