UK business dynamism fell across every sector between 2001 and 2024, ONS figures show

In 2024, more jobs disappeared when firms closed than were generated by new businesses opening their doors — a finding that sits at the heart of new industry-concentration statistics published by the Office for National Statistics. The figures also show that business dynamism was lower in 2024 than in 2001 across every single sector covered by the analysis, marking a broad, decades-long decline in the rate at which businesses start, grow, shrink and exit.

The ONS used existing business microdata — drawn from sources including the Annual Business Survey and the Longitudinal Business Database — to measure industry concentration, defined as the extent to which economic activity within an industry is dominated by a small number of large firms. The release also includes industry-level measures of business dynamism for the first time.

Firm-level data, the ONS says, can reveal patterns that are simply invisible from economy-wide averages. Differences in productivity growth between businesses, for instance, get smoothed away when only aggregate figures are examined.

It’s worth being clear about what the data doesn’t show. Industry concentration is distinct from geographical concentration — it concerns how activity is distributed among firms within a sector, not where those businesses are physically located. And a high concentration measure alone does not establish anti-competitive behaviour or any finding of consumer harm. The ONS makes no competition-policy conclusion from the statistics.

Sumit Dey-Chowdhury, a senior ONS economist, wrote the accompanying blog post published on 8 December 2025. Professional, scientific and technical activities accounted for 15.3 per cent of all registered UK businesses in 2025, compared with other sectors — making it the largest single category by business count in the ONS’s wider business statistics.

The ONS says the analysis can help identify sectors that have become less dynamic over time, and that the statistics complement existing aggregate productivity data by showing how economic activity is distributed across businesses of different sizes and ages.