Standards | LG Inform Plus

Help text: This is the total number of wholesale local units in an area. A local unit is an individual site (for example a factory or shop) associated with an enterprise. It can also be referred to as workplace.

An enterprise can be thought of as the overall business, made up of all the individual sites or workplaces. It is defined as the smallest combination of legal units (that have registered for Value Added Tax (VAT) and/or Pay as You Earn (PAYE)) that has a certain degree of autonomy within an enterprise group.

The industry classification is the 2007 Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities (SIC 2007) which classify business establishments and other standard units by the type of economic activity in which they are engaged.

This is a snapshot of the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) as of March of the reference year and are equivalent to that published by ONS in the UK Business: Activity, Size and Location release.

It should be noted that although the counts of businesses shown in UK Business: Size, Activity and Location are derived from the IDBR, the counts of live businesses shown are different to those shown in a related ONS publication called Business Demography. This is because the definition of an active business for Business Demography is based upon activity at any time during the year, whereas for UK Business: Activity, Size and Location it is based upon an annual snapshot at a fixed point in time, that is, March of the reference year.

Please note that all data are rounded to protect confidentiality. The figures are rounded individually therefore the sum of component items may be slightly different to the totals shown. Furthermore, figures from NOMIS may differ by small amounts from those published in ONS outputs due to the application of a different rounding methodology. Small area data (MSOA) may be rounded to zero but not be a true zero.