DARLINGTON is a hotspot for new business start-ups.

That was one of the standout findings of a report published this week, which also highlighted the massive challenges facing the North-East economy.

As with most surveys, the Start- Up Britain report was open to interpretation and spin. It only tracked businesses newly-registered at Companies House last year, so the smallest start-ups and home-based businesses were unlikely to figure.

But it showed the Darlington area had 1,406 new business registrations in the year, outstripping Sunderland (805) and Durham (1,018).

The work done by the Darlington Partnership of public and private sector organisations has created a support network which helps entrepreneurs get started, with advice on funding and business know how, and crucially, hand-holds the fledgling firms so they survive into their second and third years of operations.

It was a great result for the town, but the national picture was less encouraging, with regional powerhouse Newcastle sitting bottom of the top 25 leading centres of new business, behind Guildford, Harrow, Twickenham, Tonbridge and Chelmsford in the south.

NISSAN has a knack of elbowing its way onto our business pages.

Last week, we could hardly move for stories about the Japanese carmaker as it launched full production of the new Qashqai model and at the same time revealed that its Sunderland factory now employs 7,000 workers.

That is a staggering number and is set to grow even higher when new models come on stream, including the new Infiniti Q30.

Nissan’s importance to the regional economy should not be underestimated.

There are another 21,000 in the North-East employed supplying the factory. In addition, there are 7,000 workers in the rest of the UK supply chain and 1,000 at the firm’s research and development centre in Cranfield.

Add in the car dealers, mechanics and sales people, there are about 40,000 people directly employed by Nissan in the UK.

More than one-in-three cars built in the country is made by Sunderland workers.

With numbers like that, it won’t be long before the car maker is hogging the headlines again.