Companies House response to official statistics consultation
Updated 21 December 2018
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/companies-house-official-statistics/outcome/companies-house-response-to-official-statistics-consultation
1. Background
Companies House publishes a range of statistics on company activities in the UK. These are currently published on a quarterly and annual basis.
Companies House ran a consultation to seek users’ views on their satisfaction with the content and the quality of the annual publication.
The consultation ran from 20 August to 30 September 2018, receiving a total of 85 responses. This document summarises the key findings and outlines Companies House’s response and planned next steps. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all respondents for taking the time to respond to this consultation.
2. Key findings
In total, 85 responses were received from a range of organisations. Table 1 shows the number of respondents by specified sector.
2.1 Table 1: Number of respondents by specified sector
| Sector | Number of respondents |
|---|---|
| Business | 55 |
| Academia/research | 7 |
| National government/department | 5 |
| Voluntary and charity | 5 |
| Local government/public authority | 3 |
| Journalist/media | 3 |
| Other | 7 |
All respondents completed the survey in English. Table 2 shows the number of respondents by the range of data uses.
2.2 Table 2: Number of respondents by data use
| What the data is used for | Number of respondents |
|---|---|
| General background information | 57 |
| Research | 31 |
| Monitoring | 26 |
| Decision making | 25 |
| Inclusion in reports | 18 |
| Writing briefings | 15 |
| Policy development | 15 |
| Benchmarking | 14 |
| Modelling and/or forecasting | 12 |
| Do not use | 5 |
3. Usefulness of the data in the release
One of the main aims of the consultation was to determine which tables the respondents found useful. 72 of the 85 respondents answered the questions relating to the tables they used.
The most used table was table A8 (Historic data), with 39 respondents reporting their use of this. This was followed by table A7 (Analysis of directors and shareholders on the register), which 37 respondents reported using.
The least used table was table B4 (Summary of changes in Limited Liability Partnerships), which 16 respondents reported using. The remaining tables were used by between 18 and 33 respondents. Annex A provides a breakdown of the number of respondents by individual table use.
4. Satisfaction with the annual publication
Respondents were asked to provide feedback on their satisfaction levels across several aspects of the publication. Table 3 shows the number of respondents that had positive and negative feedback on different aspects of the publication. The figures show that a high number of respondents felt positive about various aspects of the publication. Annex A provides a full breakdown of responses to each of the individual questions.
4.1 Table 3: Number of respondents and satisfaction indications on each aspect of the publication
| Aspect of publication | Number of respondents that responded with ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ | Number of respondents that responded with ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of access | 49 | 7 |
| The relevance to your needs | 49 | 9 |
| Clarity (illustrations and accompanying advice) | 46 | 10 |
| Accuracy | 45 | 8 |
| Timeliness of the bulletin | 43 | 5 |
| Adherence to planned publication dates | 43 | 3 |
| Presentation of publication tables | 43 | 7 |
| Comparability over time and between sources | 41 | 9 |
| Coherence with other statistical sources | 39 | 6 |
| Metadata (additional information about the data item) | 39 | 6 |
| Commentary on the data | 38 | 7 |
5. Further comments provided
Respondents were invited to make comments in relation to the publication. However, only a small number of respondents took the opportunity to do so. The main themes, in relation to these comments, were as follows:
- Three respondents stated they were happy with the publication.
- Two respondents requested greater analysis of SIC code data.
- Two respondents questioned the quality of the data.
- One respondent suggested more promotion of the statistics.
- One respondent suggested making the data available in other formats, such as JSON and XML.
6. Companies House response
Of the questions that were asked of them, respondents were satisfied overall with the publication. Respondents were asked to provide suggestions on what they would like to see in the next publication. Table 4 shows the changes that we will make, based on these respondent comments.
6.1 Table 4: Changes due to the responses of the consultation
| You said… | …so we will |
|---|---|
| You would like to see more promotion of the statistics. | We will continue to work with our external communications team to promote the statistics on our social media platforms to ensure they reach as wide an audience as possible. We will also write occasional blogs to promote the official statistics and to identify key points within the release. |
| You would like it if data was made available in open, machine-readable formats such as JSON, XML or libreoffice. | We are investigating the feasibility of making the data available on request in these alternative formats and will provide contact details for any such requests in due course. |
| You would like further analysis of SIC code data. | We are currently carrying out work to improve the way SIC code data is captured and recorded. Once this work is complete then we will expand our analysis in this area. |
Since all the tables in the publication were used by several respondents, we will continue to produce all of these tables in future publications.
Most users reported that they were happy with the release overall. However, to ensure that the publication remains relevant to users’ needs, we will continue to engage with them on an ongoing basis and will adapt and enhance our outputs to ensure that they continue to meet our users’ needs.