Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the number of small businesses that have closed in (a) Greater London, (b) Bexley Borough and (c) the Bexleyheath and Crayford constituency in each of the last five years.

Data on business closures by size of business are not available. The data provided in the table below cover all registered business closures for the years specified.

98.1% of all registered business are small (0 to 49 employees), according to the business counts published in 2020 by the Office for National Statistics in UK business: activity, size and location, so the vast majority of business closures are very likely to be small businesses.

Where available, data on business closures for all registered businesses over the last 5 years for each of the 3 geographies are shown in the table below:

Table: Number of business closures, all registered businesses, 2016 to 2020

Sources:

Office for National Statistics ‘Business Demography: 2019’

Office for National Statistics ‘Business Demography, quarterly experimental statistics, UK’

* Data from Office for National Statistics ‘Business Demography, quarterly experimental statistics, UK’. This may not be directly comparable to other data in the table which comes from Office for National Statistics ‘Business Demography: 2019’.

** No data available