Nearly 1 in 20 British small business owners are planning to close their firms over the coming 12 months as a result of the CCP virus pandemic, a business group said on Monday. In a survey of 1,400 small firms, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) found that just under 5 percent of the businesses expect to close this year. If this proportion can be extrapolated to all the UK’s 5.9 million small firms, the country could be on course to lose more than a quarter of a million businesses this year, the FSB said. Some 23 percent of small firms have reduced the number of people they employ over the past three months, and 14 percent say they will be forced to cut their workforce over the next quarter. The real situation could be worse, as the survey was conducted in December, before the latest national lockdown was announced …