Longitudinal Business Database, 1999-2024: Secure Access

The Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) is an experimental firm-level set of spines of business references. It provides a framework for longitudinally linking UK business microdata sources, using a consistent methodology. It can also be used to analyse changes to firms economic activity status such as business births and deaths. The LBD takes snapshots from the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) and links economically active units at a quarterly frequency. This is the first dataset produced for general release with the LBD. The current release features units along the WERL spine (Enterprise Group or WoW, which stands for Who owns who) Enterprise, Reporting Unit and Local Unit. Future development will explore the possibility of adding administrative business units: Pay As You Earn (PAYE), Value Added Tax (VAT) and Company Registration Number (CRN). This release of the LBD covers 1999 Q1 to 2024 Q4 at a quarterly frequency. The LBD variables are all derived from the IDBR. They include turnover, employment, Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) 2007, International Territorial Level 1 (ITL 1) geography and legal status. Markers for economic activity indicate businesses that are changing their activity status during the quarter (e.g. being born, closing or reactivating). The LBD differs from other linked, IDBR based datasets like the Business Structure Database (BSD) and the Longitudinal IDBR (LIDBR) in three important ways: (1) it provides information on business demography at quarterly frequency, crucial for analysis at business cycle frequencies. (2) it establishes true longitudinality for all units that comprise the structure of a business. This feature allows the LBD to capture within quarter activity faithfully. (3) it makes explicit IDBR decision rules developed from its original purpose as a sampling frame and converts them into activity criteria that give rise to an economically meaningful definition of the business population. The LBD is an experimental dataset. Economic activity criteria, spines and input data may change in future releases. The datasets generated with the LBD are for research use and are not a replacement for business demography National Statistics. Please see the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence Discussion Paper The UK Longitudinal Business Database: A User Manual (Lui et al., TBD) for methodology details. The documentation supplied with the SRS dataset further explains the current data linking strategy and economic activity criteria applied. The data are available only in CSV format.