Identifying Community Businesses in National Datasets

Community businesses are small businesses, although they have many distinctive features that differentiate them from small private businesses. A core research question for Power to Change is around the definition and understanding of community business – how big is the community business market in England, how does it break down across industry sectors, and how is it performing? To help us to tackle these questions, we commissioned a team at the Enterprise Research Centre to look at whether existing business datasets can provide any of this information relating specifically to community business. This report describes their approach and findings. This work has been built upon and tested as part of our annual research into the community business market, and the findings of that work which can be read in The Community Business Market in 2017 report.