Business investment in the UK: April to June 2024 provisional results

• UK business investment fell by 0.1% in Quarter 2 (Apr to Jun) 2024 and is 1.1.% below the level in the same quarter a year ago.

• This release contains datasets for Quarter 2 2024 business investment provisional results; for further commentary on these data please see our GDP first quarterly estimate, UK: April to June 2024 bulletin.

• Following an accessibility review, we are updating our data tables in line with the Accessibility statement for the Office for National Statistics in the Quarter 2 2024 revised release to be published on 30 September 2024. This will update the formats of our tables to meet accessibility requirements, but the data content will remain unchanged.

Quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our Business investment Quality and Methodology Information (QMI).

Revisions

In line with the National Accounts Revisions Policy, there are no periods open for revision in this publication.

Data within this bulletin

All data within this bulletin, unless specified, are presented in chained volume measure (CVM). This means the effect of price changes has been removed (in other words, the data are deflated).

In Quarter 2 (Apr to Jun) 2024, the Quarterly Acquisitions and Disposals of Capital Assets Survey (QCAS), the largest data source for gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) and business investment, had a response rate of 66.3% for estimates used in the provisional release.

Adjustments

Large capital expenditure tends to be reported later in the data collection period than smaller capital expenditure. This means that larger expenditures are often included in the revised results but are not reported in time for the provisional results. This can lead to a tendency toward upward revisions in the later estimates for business investment and gross fixed capital formation (GFCF). Following investigation of the impact of this effect, from Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2013, a bias adjustment was introduced in the provisional estimate. This bias adjustment is later removed in the revised release.

This adjustment was suspended in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2020 because of uncertainties surrounding the effect of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. However, since Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2021, after further investigation and analysis of its impact, the bias adjustment was reintroduced to business investment and GFCF. The bias adjustment for this provisional release is positive £1.2 billion.