Small businesses in the UK will spend more than £18 billion in IT next year, a new study estimates.

AMI-Partners, a strategic planner for small and medium-sized businesses, forecasts that this figure will represent a ten per cent rise in IT spending.

The most important area of IT spending in the UK in 2005 is believed to be networking, which grew by 28 per cent from 2004 and security, which rose by 20 per cent during the same period, reports IT Week.

Ed Blake, head of e-security at VAR Real Solutions, said: "We have seen a lot of spending on security, with email and web security being the most important and I expect security to continue to go well."

Somnath Das, research associate at AMI-Partners said: "The flexibility of wireless connections has attracted the UK small businesses to adopt wireless LAN [a network connection to all users in the surrounding area].

"Many of them are planning to implement it in the next year and the UK has a genuine room for greater IT adoption."

Britain's economy has grown faster than Europe's in the past year, with 2.6 per cent gross domestic product per annum compared to two per cent in the EU, reports the publication.

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