USER GROUP MEETING 17th DECEMBER 2013

the inter-departmental business register: annual publication

INTRODUCTION

  1. The purpose of this paper is to gather information to support development of the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) Annual Publication: We are seeking feedback on:
  2. Uses and users of the current publication
  3. Proposed changes to the publication, including whether employment[1] or employee sizebands are the most useful (or whether a mixture of both should be retained).

THEINTER-DEPARTMENTAL BUSINESS REGISTER

  1. The Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) is a UK register and contains information on businesses which are registered for VAT and/or operating a PAYE scheme. The IDBR covers most of the economy including the Agriculture, Production and Service sectors in Northern Ireland. It does not, however, include very small businesses which fall below the VAT and PAYE thresholds.
  2. The register is located in the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Newport but the Northern Ireland element of the register is maintained within is available from ELMSB as an ad-hoc information request or. ELMSB are responsible for answering information requests relating to the NI component of the IDBR.
  3. The IDBR holdsinformation on the characteristics, structure and location of NI businesses including local sites. This includes, among other things, legal registration status, country of ownership, turnover, employment, employees and industrial classification (SIC 07). Births and deaths and survival rates for businesses can be determined by looking at employment/turnover activity captured by survey returns and VAT/PAYE updates.
  4. New businesses are identified through VAT and/or PAYE registrations and companies house registrations. The Business Register Inquiry (or Proving Survey) verifies the existence of the business, its characteristics and the location and characteristics of local sites. Subsequent updates take place as a result of survey returns, information received directly from businesses and VAT information received from HMRC. The main vehicle for updates is the NI Census of Employment Survey. This provides employment/ employee information and also identifies mergers/takeovers and where local sites have opened or closed. Turnover information is taken from HMRC VAT returns or the NI Annual Business Inquiry (ABI).
  5. The IDBR is used for both independent analysis and as the sampling frame for the vast majority of Northern Ireland Government statistical surveys to businesses. An annual IDBR publication is also produced.

THE ANNUAL IDBRPUBLICATION

  1. The annual IDBR publication entitled ‘Characteristics of VAT and/or PAYE registered businesses in NI: Facts and Figures from the IDBR’provides an overview of the number and characteristics of businesses in Northern Ireland alongside business birth, death and survival rates for the last 5 years. Equivalent datafor Scotland, Wales and the English regions are provided for most of tables to set the Northern Ireland figures in context.
  2. The publication comprises three sets of excel tables -‘VAT and/or PAYE tables’, ‘Business Demography tables’ and ‘Foreign Ownership tables’ – along with a bulletin providing a short commentary on each. The first set of tables provides information on the characteristics of VAT and/or PAYE registered businesses in Northern Ireland (geographical location, industrial classification, employment sizeband and turnover sizeband) set in the UK Context. These tables are accompanied by NI-specific tables on legal status and public/private sector. The Business Demography tables provide birth, death and survival rates for Northern Ireland businesses set in the UK context. The Foreign Ownership tables include two NI-specific tables on non-UK Foreign ownership.
  3. Currently most of tables in the publication are taken from existing UK publications with a small number of tables produced in-house. The ‘VAT and/or PAYE tables’ are taken from the ONS’s “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” publication and the “Business Demography tables” are taken from the ONS’s UK “Business Demography” publication. This approach is not ideal as the Enterprise-based definition used in UK publications means that businesses operating in NI are only included in NI tables if their main UK address is also in Northern Ireland.
  4. Full details of the most recent publication can be found here and a full list of tables is included in Appendix A.

LOCAL UNIT DATA

  1. The NI IDBR publication does not currently include any information on the number, location and characteristics of local sites belonging to businesses operating in Northern Ireland. Information on local sites can be obtained from the local unit tables in ONS’s “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” publication
  2. Unlike the Enterprise-based tables, the Northern Ireland figures in these tables will include all Northern Ireland local sites for businesses operating in Northern Ireland. Local units are allocated to a geographical locations based on their actual address.
  3. This publication provides the number of local units split by Broad Industry Group and Employment Size bands for Northern Ireland, Local Government District and Parliamentary Constituencies. Information on the number of local units split by detailed 4-digit UK SIC (2007) Industry, and 2-digit UK SIC (2007) Industry by Employment Sizeband is also provided at the Northern Ireland level. These tables are UK wide and include equivalent data for the rest of the UK. A list of the tables containing Northern Ireland data is included in Appendix B.
  1. Additional breakdownsfor local sites within Northern Ireland can be requested from Economic and Labour Market Statistics Branch.

USESANDUSERSOF THE IDBR PUBLICATION

  1. The Code of Practise for Official Statistics and the UK Statistics Authority highlight the importance of effective user engagement in order to investigate the needs of users, the use made of existing statistics and the types of decisions they inform.
  1. In order to aid development of the IDBR Facts and Figures Publication we would like your feedback on the questions below. This feedback is essential if we are to ensure the IDBR publication better meets the needs of users:
  1. Did you know about this publication?
  2. How did you find out about it?
  3. Do you think awareness of this publication needs improved?
  4. If so, what is the best way of doing this?
  1. Doyou use the tables/information in the publication?

(or would you have used it if you had known about it?)

  1. What are the main purposes/areas of researchfor which you use the data?
  2. What sector do you work in, e.g. government, academia, commercial, financial, voluntary etc?
  3. Are these regular/one-off pieces of work?
  1. Does the information provided meet your needs? Or how could it be improved?
  2. What are the strengths/ weaknesses of the format/presentation of the current suite of tables?
  3. What are the strengths/ weaknesses of the format/presentation of the current publication?
  4. Is there anything you feel is missing from the publication (or tables) which would be useful?
  1. Are there any other groups that would use the publication if they knew about it?
  1. There are currently no plans to include data for local sites in the NI IDBR publication. However we would like to assess user demand and interest inlocal unit data and whether the existing provisions are sufficient to meet user needs. There is also a risk that the ONS’s “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” publicationmay no longer be published as the ONS makes necessary reductions to its statistical outputs[2].
  2. Did you know about these tables?
  3. Do you use the information in these tables?

(or would you have used them if you had known about them?)

  1. What are the main purposes/areas of research for which you use (or would use) the data?
  2. Are these regular/one-off pieces of work?
  3. Does the information provided meet your needs? Or what additional analysis would you require?
  4. Have you ever requested data for local units from ELMSB?
  5. What did you use these data for?
  6. Is there any benefit from including extracts from the ONS tables in the NI publication?
  1. These questions have been provided in advance to give participants an opportunity to consider the questions prior to discussion at the meeting. Email responses from group members or other interested parties would be particularly useful either prior to or following the meeting. Please use the following email :

PROPOSED CHANGES

  1. We are proposing to make some changes to the next edition of the IDBR publication (provisional publication date 31 January 2014).
  2. As part of these changes we will be making some amendments to both the suite of tables and the bulletin. Both will be expanded and re-structured to make them more relevant to users and easier to understand.
  3. We are also considering whether the tables should be standardised so that only employment or only employee sizebands are used.

Current Format

  1. The IDBR Facts and Figures Publication currently comprises 3 sets of tables accompanied by a short bulletin. A full list of the current tables is available in Appendix A.
  2. The current bulletin has an executive summary with a short commentary for each of the elements listed above, followed by contact details and a section containing background notesand specific definitions used throughout the publication. As the bulletin is primarily an executive summaryit does not include any time series data or charts.
  3. Full details of the IDBR Facts and Figures Publicationcan be found here:

Summary of changes to accompanying tables

Standardisingthe definitionof a business

  1. The majority of the tables in the current publication are Enterprise based[3]but some are Reporting Unit based[4] and this causes problems when comparing data across tables. The Enterprise based tables are the standard definition used by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) but do not include businesses operating in Northern Ireland withtheir main or registered address elsewhere in the UK. The Reporting Unit based tables address this issue[5] but result in businesses being counted more than once if the business has more than one Reporting Unit in Northern Ireland (around 35 businesses).
  2. It is planned to move to a new definition ‘Enterprises operating in Northern Ireland.’ This is similar to the Reporting Unit approach but removes the double-counting issue. This is the approach taken by Scotland.
  3. Where tables are only available from ONS and cannot be replicated in-house i.e. the UK-wide tables and the Demography tables, the standard Enterprise definition will continue to be used. A single table containing figures for Northern Ireland on both definitionsfor the complete time series will be produced so that the difference between the two definitions (byBroad Industry Group) can easily be assessed.

Increased availability of time series data

  1. In the current tables there is very little information on change over time. Only two of the nineteen “VAT and/or PAYE tables” include any time series data and none of the “Foreign ownership” tables. We propose to increase this number to 9 (out of 23) “VAT and/or PAYE tables” and 3 (out of 4) “Foreign ownership” tables. This will allow users to set the current year in context and easily view trends over time.
  2. For the remaining tables, the level of detail means that displaying time series data in an easily readable format on a single sheet would be difficult. Equivalent data for these tables will be available on request (and for the initial year will be published on the website)[6].
  3. For tables broken down by industry it is only possible to extend the time series back to 2008 as the current industry classification (SIC 07) was not available prior to this year.The “UK Context” tables (for VAT and/or PAYE Registered Businesses) can also only be extended back to 2008, as these tables are extracted from the ONS publication “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” which only included VAT registered businesses prior to 2008. All other tables can be extended back to 2006.

Additional information

  1. Several additional tables have been included in the proposed new suite of tables. These have been included to better meet user needs (identified through ad-hoc data requests) and to provide more detailed information. For example,
  • business births, deaths and survival rates by industry*
  • businesses split by NI/non-NI country of ownership
  • employment in foreign owned (non-UK) businesses
  • employment in businessessplit by NI/non-NI country of ownership
  • NI/non-NI businesses and foreign owned (non-UK) businesses by industry
  • business by legal status (e.g. limited company, sole proprietor) and industry

*these tables require a special data request from ONS and are subject to the data being available in time for the January 2014 publication.

Numbers and Percentages

  1. Percentages have been provided alongside the numbers in order to allow users to more easily compare geographical areas, industries, countries of ownership etc. Generally the tables follow a common structure with numbers shown in the top section and percentages shown in the bottom section (Tables 1 and 3), or numbers shown in the left column and percentages shown in the right column (Tables 2). This should make the tables easier to read and assist the user in comparing trends over time or across areas.

Improved timeliness (proposed for January 2015)

  1. The current reference date for the “VAT and/or PAYE Registered Businesses” and “Foreign Ownership” tables is March of the previous year, i.e. March 2013 for the January 2014 publication. This means that the data is 10 months out of date at the time of publication and the published tables will not reflect recent increases or decreases in the business population.
  2. In addition the IDBR extract is currently taken prior to the annual employment and turnover updates which take place in August.Missing the August update means that the majority of the employment data and some of the turnover data will be 18 months (rather than 6 months) out of date in March. For example, a March 2013 extract will contain employment data for September 2011 (rather than September 2012) and turnover data for 2011 (rather than 2012) where ABI data is used to update the turnover[7].
  3. While we could retain the March reference date it is proposed to move the reference date to September of the previous year (as data is not available for October and November[8] for earlier years) to address this issue. This will reduce the time lag to 4 months and ensure that the most up-to-date employment and turnover data is used. In addition it will reduce the gap between the published data and more timely data used for ad-hoc requests[9].
  4. The main drawback of this approach is that the local unit data contained in the ONS’s “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” publication will no longer have the same reference date as the tables contained in the NI IDBR publication. This could be addressed in the future by including equivalent data with a September reference date in the NI IDBR publication if there was sufficient user demand.
  5. Time series data for the revised reference date will be produced for all tables in the publication[10]. This will allow users to set the current year in context and easily view trends over time. For some tables, this time series data will form part of the publication and will be produced on an annual basis; for others it will be published separately as a one-off set of tables.
  6. This change is howeverdependent on data for the “UK Context” tables being available from ONS and permission being granted to include these tables in our publication. Publishing these tables would mean that the UK Context tables would be publicly available to all users (or could be compiled) on both a March and September reference date. If this causes a problem for ONS, consideration will be given to splitting the existing publication into two, and publishing the “VAT and/or PAYE Registered Businesses” and “Foreign Ownership” tables in October/November shortly after the ONS publication (a 7/8 month time lag) and the “Demography” tables in January.
  7. The publication date for the “VAT and/or PAYE Registered Businesses” and “Foreign Ownership” tables part of the IDBR publication cannot be brought forward from October/November (if the March reference date is retained) as the equivalent ONS publication “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” is not published until early October. Similarly the publication date for the “Demography” tables cannot be brought forward from January as these tables are taken from the ONS’s UK “Business Demography”publication which is sometimes not available before mid-December. A recent UK Statistics Authority assessment has also advised against publishing during the Christmas period.
  8. Due to the timescales involved the “UK Context” data would not be available in time for inclusion in our January publication. Consequently this proposed improvement will not be introduced until January 2015.
  9. Note that statistics for the UK containing NI information would continue to be available as part of the ONS’s “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” publication if users wanted to make comparisons across the UK at sub-regional level.However this publication is currently subject to review and may be discontinued as ONS makes necessary reductions to its statistical outputs[11].
  10. The “UK Business: Activity, Size and Location” publication uses a March reference date due to an EU requirement to produce UK business structure statistics for the first quarter of the calendar year.

Layout and formatting changes