Peadar Tóibín
Question:185. Deputy Peadar Tóibín asked the Taoiseach the number of businesses that have closed either temporarily or permanently in total and separately due to Covid-19 in 2020 and to date in 2021. [46478/21]
View answerTuesday, 28 September 2021
Questions (185)
Written answers
The exact information requested by the Deputy is not available. Annual statistics on the business population are generally published by the CSO with a time lag of 18 months, as these statistics depend on business tax returns which may be submitted to Revenue up to 11 months after the reference year. The latest business demography results show that there were 272,531 enterprises in Ireland in 2019. To provide faster information since the onset of COVID-19, the CSO has conducted surveys on business impact and has also introduced a Business Signs of Life series.
The results of the CSO's survey on the Business Impact of COVID-19 on SMEs 2020 were published on 3 June 2021. The results indicated that an estimated 56% of responding SMEs had ceased trading at some point in 2020. Of those that did close at some point in 2020, 43% reported closing multiple times while 57% closed just once. Responding enterprises closed for an average of 18 weeks in 2020 and more than 70% of responding enterprises reported a decrease in turnover in 2020 compared to 2019.
The CSO's second report on Business Signs of Life was published on 28 April 2021. The report provided indicators on the interaction between employment-related State payments and business activity, from the beginning of the pandemic up to January 2021, based on an analysis of administrative data sources. Using this analysis, the percentage of enterprises in which all staff in the business were receiving the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) provides an indirect indicator of the percentage that are not trading at any given time. This analysis shows that 6.8% of enterprises had all their staff in receipt of PUP throughout the period from the initial lockdown in March / April 2020 to January 2021, i.e. they did not trade during that period. However, this is not an official indicator of enterprises that have ceased trading.
Monthly data from March 2020 to January 2021, showing the percentage of businesses in the Irish Business Economy in which all employees received the PUP, is set out in the following table:
|
Percentage of business that had all staff in receipt of Pandemic Unemployment Payment |
|
|
Month |
Percentage |
|
March 2020 |
27.1% |
|
April 2020 |
29.5% |
|
May 2020 |
28.8% |
|
June 2020 |
23.8% |
|
July 2020 |
15.5% |
|
August 2020 |
11.9% |
|
September 2020 |
10.3% |
|
October 2020 |
14.0% |
|
November 2020 |
14.6% |
|
December 2020 |
15.1% |
|
January 2021 |
21.5% |
A third report on Business Signs of Life, including estimates of the percentage of businesses no longer trading, is being prepared by the CSO for publication in the fourth quarter of 2021.