FOI reference: FOI-2025-3174
You asked
Please provide the reduction of pubs in London over the last 10 years. If possible, please split into boroughs and then an overall count as well.
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request. You asked us to provide statistics that show the reduction of pubs in London over the last 10 years, split into boroughs.
Our UK: Business, Activity, Size and Location bulletins are 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 2025. The data were released in September 2025. In the publication we break down the number of UK businesses by geography, employment size-band, industry, and legal status.
If this is of interest to you, the easiest way to access the data is through 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, and so on. This will allow you to view the number of businesses, with your chosen criteria, for the previous ten years.
We recommend using local unit level data to help with your request as this will provide you with individual site counts. If you look at the enterprise counts, this will give you the pub chain data as a whole.
A local unit is an individual site (for example, a factory or shop) associated with an enterprise. It can also be referred to as a workplace.
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 please also contact the IDBR team. Please note, depending on the time taken to produce it, the request could be chargeable.
As the requested information is reasonably accessible through another route, the exemption found under Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.