UK international trade in services 2014 to 2015

​FOI Ref: FOI/2023/4803

You asked

Please could you provide by email the data on UK international trade in services (both exports and imports) by EBOPs sector (as disaggregated as possible) and by trading partner for all quarters in 2014 and 2015. This would be an extension back to Q1 2014 of the data found for Q1 2016 – Q2 2022: https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/internationaltrade/datasets/uktradeinservicesservicetypebypartnercountrynonseasonallyadjusted

If this is not available for all sectors, e.g. those not included in the IT IS survey, please could you provide the data excluding these sectors.

We said

Thank you for your request.

Please see the associated download named 'UK International Trade 2015.xlsx'. This provides our trade in services by partner country dataset for 2015 including quarterly and annual data.

Unfortunately, we are unable to disclose the information requested for 2014, as this data contains personal information about businesses. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it a criminal offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board for statistical purposes that would identify a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individual businesses can be identified, Section 44(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.

Normally, and as we have done for the 2015 data, we would be able to undergo disclosure controls for this data simply. However, a new system was introduced in 2015, and we do not hold the files required to perform the necessary disclosure controls for this information. These would therefore need to be created, which we have estimated to take around 2 to 3 weeks to complete. Unfortunately, owing to the requirement to recreate disclosure control of the files, we also cannot be assured of the quality of this data, even if we were to produce it.

However you may find the following information helpful: International trade in services - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk). This is a publication from the International Trade in Services survey team, which feeds into the publication that has been requested. It has country level information and product level information by industry. This dataset will be updated with 2021 data on 9 February 2023.