Number of Businesses by Detailed Industry, 2, 3 and 4 Digit SIC

Estimates of total businesses broken down by industry (2, 3, 4 digit SIC 2007 codes and industry section). Workplace data units from Annual Business Inquiry (ABI) for London and Great Britain.

Data rounded to the nearest 100. Percentages calculated on unrounded data.

An extract compiled from the Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) recording the number of local units that were live at a reference date in March. Estimates can be broken down by employment size band, detailed industry (5 digit SIC2007) and legal status. Available from country down to mid layer super output area and Scottish intermediate zones.

A local unit is an individual site (for example a factory or shop) associated with an enterprise. It can also be referred to as a workplace.

Industry is broken down using SIC 2007 codes. Read more about SIC here http://www.statistics.gov.uk/methods_quality/sic/downloads/SIC2007explanatorynotes.pdf
The ABI is a business survey which collects both employment and financial information. Only employment information for the location of an employees workplace is available from Nomis
The ABI is based on a sample of approximately 78,000 businesses and is used to provide an estimate of the number of employees.
The difference between the estimate and its true value is known as the sampling error. The actual sampling error for any estimate is unknown but we can estimate, from the sample, a typical error, known as the standard error. This provides a means of assessing the precision of the estimate; the lower the standard error, the more confident we can be the estimate is close to the true value. https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/articles/showArticle.asp?title=Information&article=news/071212_abi-stderrors.htm

This dataset excludes farm based agriculture data contained in SIC class 0100.

Relevant link: https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/Default.asp