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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how many small businesses closed in each financial year from 2010-11 to date.

Data on business closures by size of business are not available. The data provided below covers all registered business closures in the UK for the periods specified.

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

Data on business closures over the last 3 financial years are shown in table 1:

Table 1: Number of business closures by financial year, all registered businesses

Source: Office for National Statistics: Business Demography, quarterly experimental statistics, UK

Prior to 2017 data are only available for calendar years, rather than financial years. The number of closures in each calendar year is shown in table 2:

Table 2: Number of business closures by calendar year, all registered businesses

Source: Office for National Statistics: Business demography, UK statistical bulletin