UK entrepreneurial activity 2006 to 2016

You asked

I would like to make a request under the Freedom of Information on the determinants of entrepreneurial activity in the UK, specifically focusing on the regional disparities between England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland.

I require data for the UK as a whole, and its individual regions (England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland) as well as their regions or constituencies:

Time Frame: 2006-2016

Birth rate of businesses (also by area)
Death rate of businesses (also by area)
Active enterprises (also by area)

AND

Birth rate of businesses by Industry (also by area)
Death rate of businesses by Industry (also by area)
Active enterprises by Industry (also by area)

We said

Thank you for your enquiry. Business Demography data are published annually in November. The latest data available are for 2015. Data on births, deaths and active enterprises are available back to 2004. The data are broken down by geography down to local authority district level or by Standard Industrial Classification down to 3 digit SIC level.

The first part of your request can be calculated by taking the birth and death figures and calculating these as a percentage of the active figures.

In order to calculate the data back to 2010 please use the data in the following link (Please note that death data for 2014 and 2015 are provisional):

https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/business/activitysizeandlocation/datasets/businessdemographyreferencetable

Data prior to 2010 can be found in the following link:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-357041

The second part of your request requires births, deaths and active businesses broken down by industry and area. These data are not in our publication but could possibly be produced for you by our bespoke data analysis service. You will need to contact them and discuss the level of the data you require as the births and deaths figures broken down by both industry and geography to a low level could be too granular.

This service may be chargeable. The following link outlines possible costs for producing data analysis. Please refer to the " Business register charge rates" PDF on the right hand side of the following link:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/whatwedo/statistics/publicationscheme

If you would like to discuss the request further please e-mail idbrdas@ons.gov.uk.

As the information needed to answer the second part of your request is already available to you via this route, we consider that s.21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. s.21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.