FOI reference: FOI-2024-1958

You asked

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) to request information relating to UK Business Counts held by the Office for National Statistics and published via the Nomis service.

(1) Regarding the 'UK Business Counts - enterprises by industry and employment size band' dataset (https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/datasets/idbrent), I am looking for some more detail of the number of large enterprises in the UK. Please could you provide the following:

For each (2 digit) division, the number of 'Private sector total'; 'Public sector total' and 'Company (including building society)' enterprises in the United Kingdom within each of the following enterprise employment size bands: 1,000-2,499; 2,500-4,999; 5,000-10,000 and 10,000+. Please  provide these data for the years 2019; 2020; 2021; 2022 and 2023.

These data should be sufficient to conclude that e.g. "There were x# public / private enterprises / companies in the UK of employment size band xx-xx in (xx) industry in 20xx year".

(2) Regarding this same dataset, I am looking for some detail on the average number of employees at enterprises of various size bands. Please could you provide the following:

For each (2 digit) division, the average number of employed staff for enterprises in the United Kingdom of each of the following employment size bands: 0-4; 5-9; 10-19; 20-49; 50-99; 100-249; 250-499; 500-999; 1,000-2,499; 2,500-4,999; 5,000-10,000 and 10,000+. Please provide these data for each of the following enterprise legal statuses: 'Total'; 'Private sector total'; 'Public sector total' and 'Company (including building society)' in 2023.

Only if would not exceed the statutory time allowance for one FoI request, please also provide these data for the years 2019; 2020; 2021 and 2022.

Note that this includes some data for size bands already published and data for the size bands referenced in Item (1).

We said

Thank you for your Freedom of Information request asking for further details regarding the large enterprises referenced in our UK Business: Activity, size and location publication. 

This is a bespoke data request, so would need to be created by our Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) data service team. Such services are subject to disclosure controls, legal frameworks, resources, costs in line with the ONS Charging Policy.  

To discuss this further, please contact idbrdas@ons.gov.uk.

As the requested information is reasonably accessible via another route, even if only accessible on payment, Section 21(2)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) is engaged.