You asked
Can you please tell me how many brick and mortar businesses there are in the UK as of 2019-2020? Also can you please tell me how many brick and mortar businesses have closed at the end 2019? or to the most current date you have. I have searched your site and publications and there is nothing on the matter.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The Inter Departmental Business Register (IDBR) contains all UK businesses registered for VAT and/or PAYE. The information from the IDBR is used to create 2 annual publications:
UK Business: Activity, size and location - This is an annual snapshot of the IDBR taken in March of each year. The number of businesses registered for VAT and /or PAYE are broken down by industry, geography, legal status and employment and turnover size bands. The latest data available are for March 2019. The data for 2020 will be available in October.
Business Demography - This publication shows all businesses that were active at any point during the reference year (not just at a specific date.) In addition, we show the number of business births (businesses newly registered for VAT or PAYE) and business deaths (businesses that have de-registered for VAT or PAYE). We also show up to five-year business survival rates. All data are broken down by geography and industry. The births and deaths relate to the whole business and not the opening and closing of individual sites. The latest data available are for 2018. The data for 2019 will be available in November.
Your request specifically asks for "brick and mortar" businesses. We have interpreted this as businesses with a physical presence, for example a street side shop rather than purely an online presence. Unfortunately, we do not produce data on "brick and mortar" businesses and cannot clearly identify these using the IDBR data.
If you think any of our publication information could help, please do not hesitate to contact our data service team on idbrdas@ons.gov.uk and we can discuss this further.