Change in Business Start-up data source
In November 2008 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released a new National Statistics series on business births, deaths and survival rates called 'Business Demography: Enterprise Births and Deaths'. From next year this will be the only official source of information on business start-ups and closures.
This more comprehensive release will replace the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) release "VAT registrations and de-registrations", which was published for the last time in 2008. There are a number of methodological differences between the two publications, which are explained in the article below:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_commerce/Intro-Bus-Demography.pdf