Econ0050: Size analysis of business sites, by local authority

ETES3, Welsh Assembly Government

Last update: 02 Aug 2007
Was added to StatsWales: 02 Aug 2007

Next Update: No longer updated.
Will be added to StatsWales by: Not a regular output

Source: Welsh Assembly Government
Contact: economic.stats@wales.gsi.gov.uk

This dataset provides data on the structure of the individual sites or plants (known as local units) of all enterprises active in Welsh local authorities in 2006, including estimates for the very smallest businesses that operate below the VAT threshold. The variables analysed are counts of the local units in each area, together with related employment in each of the given size bands, based on either the number of employees in the local unit, or the number of UK employees of the enterprise that contains the local unit.

The data given cover all live local units in Wales, regardless of the region of registration of the overall enterprise that contains the local units.

The size band of the local unit is defined either in terms of the number of employees at that local unit, or in terms of the number of UK employees (whether full-time or part-time) in the whole enterprise. In the latter case, this ensures that an enterprise employing 10,000 UK staff but only a handful in Wales is categorised as a large, and not a micro, enterprise when allocating a size band to the local unit.

The local units covered are all private sector enterprises (that is companies, sole-proprietorships, partnerships, private non-profit making bodies and mutual associations), plus public corporations and nationalised bodies. Local and central government organisations are excluded.

The data have been derived from a number of sources. The primary source is a detailed extract taken in March 2006 from the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) maintained by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This gives details of all local units active in Wales, including employment estimates. It also includes identifiers for industry (using the 2003 Standard Industrial Classification or SIC2003), geographical location and legal status of each local unit, as well as a link to the owning enterprise and its own similar classifying variables, thus allowing the analysis given here.

The IDBR covers a very high proportion of the employment in the UK, but because it excludes most of the very large number of smallest businesses that operate below the VAT threshold, its coverage in terms of the number of local units is only partial (just over 50%). In order to correct for this, the figures presented here include estimates for unregistered local units together with their related employment. These estimates for unregistered local units are taken to be the same as the estimates of unregistered enterprises used in the headline analysis (based on the assumption that unregistered enterprises are single site enterprises and hence equivalent to unregistered local units). The estimates for unregistered enterprises are calculated using a combination of:
. IDBR data;
. information on persons who are self-employed in their main or second job, taken from the Labour Force Survey carried out by the ONS; and
. information on the numbers of sole traders and partnerships from the Survey of Personal Incomes data provided by the Inland Revenue.

A fuller description of the methodology used can be found at the end of the page found by clicking <a href=http://www.wales.gov.uk/keypubstatisticsforwalesheadline/content/economy/2004/hdw20040930-e.htm target=_blank>here.</a>

Note that the local authority breakdowns of the data are workplace based. Each local unit and its related employment is allocated to a sub-area of Wales based solely on its physical location. The employment aggregates take no account of the area in which those employed in an enterprise reside.

As all enterprise counts and employment aggregates in this dataset have been independently rounded to the nearest 5, the figures may not add up exactly.

Name

Econ0050