FOI reference: FOI-2025-3200
You asked
I am looking for the number of open and running London pubs per borough from the years 2000-2025.
I would like them split into years and boroughs, with a number for each.
E.g. 2001 Westminster 20 pubs, 2002 Westminster 15 pubs
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request. The Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) contains all businesses registered for VAT and/or PAYE.
The requested information is publicly available on the ONS website.
Businesses births and deaths in London are available from our annual Business Demography release up until 2023. Here is a link to the 2023 publication. It contains data broken down by geography or industry. Annual business demography figures for 2024 will become available on 20 November.
We have another publication called UK: Business, Activity, Size and Location and this is an annual snapshot of the IDBR taken in March. The latest data available are for 2025. In the publication we break down the number of UK businesses by geography, employment size-band, industry and legal status.
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 access the data at enterprise level and local unit level (individual site level). Local unit level may be helpful if you are looking at the number of pubs. If you look at the enterprise counts this will, in the case of pubs, give you the pub chain as a whole rather than the number of individual sites. Both the annual and quarterly demography publications are only available at enterprise level.
As the requested information is accessible via another route, Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
If you require further assistance or guidance, please contact our Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) data service team at IDBRDAS@ons.gov.uk.