FOI reference: FOI-2025-3049
You asked
Please provide statistics that explain the number of registered charities that have been forced to close in West, South and North Yorkshire over the past ten years.
We said
Thank you for your request.
We do not hold separate data specifically for charities. We have a publication called UK: Business, Activity, Size and Location and this is created from the Inter-departmental Business Register (IDBR) which holds all businesses registered for VAT and/or PAYE. The publication is an annual snapshot of the IDBR taken in March. The latest data available are for 2024. The next publication is released in September 2025.
In the publication we break the number of UK businesses down by geography, employment size-band, industry and legal status. Using the legal status, the data are broken down to "non-profit bodies" but not specifically to charities.
If this is of interest to you then the easiest way to access the data is via the NOMIS data explorer tool, you will need to choose the UK Business Counts option. Data are held here back to 2010. Using NOMIS you can filter the data by legal status, geography, industry, year etc. This will allow you to view the number of businesses, with your chosen criteria, for the previous ten years.
We have another publication that may be of interest called Business Demography. Again, this is created from the IDBR. Amongst other things, this publication shows the number of business births and deaths (businesses newly registering for VAT and/or PAYE or de-registering during the reference year.) The latest data available are for 2023. The next publication will be released in November 2025. The data in this publication are broken down by geography or industry but not legal status. However, we do have a data service team who could possibly do this for you. Again, they would only be able to filter to "non-profit bodies" and not specifically to charities. The publication data does not contain reasons for the closure of businesses.
If you require further assistance or guidance, please contact our Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) data service team at IDBRDAS@ons.gov.uk.
If you would like the team to produce a request for you then, depending on the time taken to produce it, the request could be chargeable.
Alternatively, you may wish to contact the Charity Commission who may be able to help.