The Quarterly Survey of Small Business in Britain: a short history

Policy recognition of the economic, political and social importance of small firms in Britain traces its roots back 40 years to the publication of the Bolton Report in 1971. Chaired by John Bolton, a successful and publicly-spirited industrialist, the Bolton Report also marked the conception of the Quarterly Survey of Small Business in Britain. Frustrated by the lack of accessible and consistent good quality data on Britain’s small business sector, the research director and principal author of the Report, Graham Bannock, strongly recommended that a regular survey of the small business sector be established in order to inform researchers and policy makers. With a mix of some public and mainly private sector funding and after a long gestation period, the Quarterly Survey was eventually born in 1984 under the direction of its inspirer, Graham Bannock. Making up for lost time, the Quarterly Survey produced a report on the state of Britain’s small businesses every quarter until 2014.

In the beginning, with entrepreneurship as an academic discipline in its infancy, the focus of the special topics each quarter was very much led by the concerns of financial institutions, interested government departments and bodies such as the Bank of England, Companies House, House of Commons Library, National Audit Office and so on. As academic, political and public policy interest in entrepreneurship and small business management grew, so too did the focus and reach of the Quarterly Survey. With this broadening of interest also came a significant shift in location when then Open University Business School Dean, Andrew Thomson, offered to host the Quarterly Survey in 1989. Some 20 years later, with an increase in enterprise activities across the University, the Dean at the time Professor James Fleck welcomed the Quarterly Survey formally into the Open University as a core element in its enterprise research. 

The Quarterly Survey was used widely as an economic barometer from its inception in 1984. It has been an important resource for SME academics, policymakers and professional support practitioners (such as accountants, bankers, consultants and lawyers).  It revealed quarterly and longer term trends on entrepreneurship and key small business issues. It also provided benchmarks for gauging SME regional, sector and size-related performance. The survey findings were regularly reported in the national press and other media. In addition, each quarterly report contained a feature section on a selected small business issue – such as the impact of the ‘credit crunch’; how entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial small firms differed in their approaches to growth and the recession; sources of advice on business and regulation compliance; environmental performance and changing use of information and computing technologies.

The late Emeritus Professor Colin Gray