FOI ref: FOI-2023-1376
You asked
On your website, I can see that in 2001-2017 there are 180 licensed restaurants in the City of London. I would like to request a list of restaurants both licensed and un-licensed that were: • Owned by Frenchmen • Located in Soho in Shaftesbury avenue or in the surrounding streets of Rupert St, Wardour St, Dean St and Frith St. Operating in 2001 For each please could you provide the full address and full name of the proprietor?
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request enquiring about the number of restaurants in the City of London.
For information, we produce an annual publication called UK Business: Activity, size and location. This publication breaks down the number of UK Businesses (registered for VAT and/or PAYE) by geography, employment size-band, industry and legal status. It is created using an extract of the Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) taken in March. The most recent data available are for 2022. 2023 publication data will be available from 27 September 2023.
Unfortunately, we do not hold information on our records showing whether the owner of a business was French.
We are also unable to disclose the names and addresses of businesses. Section 39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA) renders it a criminal offence to disclose information held by our organisation for statistical purposes that would identify an individual or a body corporate. As we are prohibited by law from publishing statistics in which individuals can be identified, Section 44(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies.
If you have any queries regarding our UK Business publication, please do not hesitate to contact our IDBR data service team via idbrdas@ons.gov.uk.