Business Statistics

BIS are currently reviewing the content and structure of the detailed data tables that are produced as part of the 'Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions' National Statistics release, in advance of the next publication planned for October 2013.

We are now considering making three changes to the publication including the following:

1. Providing more detail about larger businesses, by creating a new 1,000+ employee size category for most of the suite of tables (note - the number of businesses in this size band is already available in the ONS 'UK Business' publication, so the benefit of this would only be to add estimates of the share of employment and turnover in these businesses and having the information all in one publication).

2. Adjust some tables to display information separately for registered businesses (those that are registered for either VAT and/or PAYE) and our estimates of the unregistered business population (i.e. the smaller non employing businesses).

3. Investigate producing local authority level Business Population Estimates to publish alongside the BPE 2013 release. There are two options that could be considered - either a one-off version using self-employment data from the 2011 Census, or a 2013 version using the ONS Annual Population Survey (with the option to repeat it in future, if resources allow it). These local authority level estimates would not be fully consistent with the UK and Regional estimates already produced, due to the different data sources used for the unregistered estimates.

To help inform our decision about whether to proceed with these changes, which would involve quite a considerable amount of resource from the BIS BPE production team, we would welcome your views by Friday 15th March, including examples of how these improvements could add value or inform any on-going research or analysis.

A link to the publication is provided below: