Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions
Background
The Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions (BPE) publication provides the only official estimate of the total number of private sector businesses in the UK at the start of each year, with their associated employment and turnover. Further information is provided by number of employees, legal status, industry and geography.
Published editions
The publication comprises three main outputs (accessible via the links provided below). For headline summary information, refer to the Statistical Release, whilst for more detailed disaggregated data, you should use the detailed Excel data sheet. The Methodology and Quality Note provides further information on how the estimates are calculated, on the quality of the statistics and on changes to the methodology..
The latest data available relates to the start of 2012. Data for the start of 2013 will be published in October 2013. Future release dates will be pre-announced on the National Statistics Publication Hub.
| BPE Edition | Publication Date | Statistical Release | Methodology and Quality Note | Detailed data tables
SIC 03 SIC 07
| Pre release Access List |
|---|
| 2010 |
24/05/2011 |
SR2010 (PDF, 190 Kb) |
MethNote2010 (PDF, 111 Kb) |
DataSIC032010 (XLS, 56 Kb) |
DataSIC072010 (XLS, 1.5 Mb) |
BPE2010PRAlist (XLS, 13 Kb) |
| 2011 |
12/10/2011 |
SR2011 (PDF, 180 Kb) |
MethNote2011 (PDF, 257 Kb) |
Not Applicable |
DataSIC072011 (XLS, 1.6 Mb) |
BPE2011PRAlist (XLS, 14 Kb) |
| 2012 |
17/10/2012 |
SR2012 (PDF, 327 Kb) |
MethNote2012 (PDF, 253 Kb) |
Not Applicable |
DataSIC072012 |
BPE2012PRAlist (XLS, 14 Kb) |
* Updated version loaded on 20 October 2011 with corrected data labels on figure 9
The 2012 edition of Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions will be published on 17 October 2012.
Methodology
Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions was first released in 2011, following a public consultation and methodological review. The BPE publication uses an improved methodology, which had an impact on the estimate of the number of businesses in the UK. It is therefore not directly comparable with estimates from previous editions of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises for the UK and Regions.
To address the issue of the break in the series that these methodological improvements introduced, the BPE publication now contains a time-series of headline level estimates of the number of businesses in the UK back to 2000, using a consistent methodology throughout. Therefore information in the latest BPE edition revises and supersedes previously published estimates in this series of the total number of businesses since 2000.
An article was published in the Economic and Labour Market Review in April 2011, providing further details on the impact of the methodological improvements on the series.
Tell us your opinion of the Business Population Estimates
We would like to keep our publication as relevant and useful as possible. Therefore, we are carrying out a survey to collect information on users’ experience of Business Population Estimates for the UK and Regions. If you are interested in contributing, please click on the link.
