---

Construction: Small Businesses

Answer

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the Acting National Statistician of the UK Statistics Authority.

Emma Rourke | Acting National Statistician

The Lord Mawson OBE

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

2 June 2025

Dear Lord Mawson,

As Acting National Statistician, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking how many small and medium-sized building companies have ceased trading in the financial years (1) 2024–25, (2) 2023–24, and (3) 2022–23; and what assessment has been made of the trend of these figures (HL7770).

Using the quarterly business demography release[1], we can show, in Table 1, the number of businesses which were classified to the construction industry which have ceased trading in the financial years listed. Figures for building companies are not separately available so the wider aggregation of the construction industry has been used. This consists of construction of buildings, civil engineering, and specialised construction activities. These figures are classified as ‘official statistics in development’.

Table 1: Number of businesses classified to the construction industry which have ceased trading in the financial years 2022/23 – 2024/25.

Financial year	Number of business closures within the Construction industry
2022/23	46,505
2023/24	40,700
2024/25	39,235

Source: Office for National Statistics

It is not possible to show these figures for small and medium sized enterprises only since this breakdown is not available from the quarterly release. However, figures from our 2024 UK Business: activity, size and location dataset[2] show that small and medium sized enterprises, taken to be businesses with employment less than 250, make up 99.9 per cent of businesses in the construction industry.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) makes no estimate of the trend of these figures.

Yours sincerely,

Emma Rourke

[1]https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/business/activitysizeandlocation/bulletins/businessdemographyquarterlyexperimentalstatisticsuk/latest

[2]https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/business/activitysizeandlocation/bulletins/ukbusinessactivitysizeandlocation/2024

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

HL7770

Session

2024-26

Subjects

Closures Construction Small businesses

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk