Business Insights and Conditions in Scotland (wave 142): 30 October 2025

Data and Methodology

BICS stands for the Business Insights and Conditions Survey (BICS). Before Wave 24 (survey period 8 February to 21 February 2021), the survey was called ‘Business Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Survey’. The BICS was renamed to reflect the current question set, which goes wider than the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. It is a voluntary fortnightly survey, which captures businesses’ responses on how their turnover, workforce, prices, trade and business resilience have been affected by current conditions, as well as gathering information on other topic areas (for example, climate change adaptation and artificial intelligence use).

ONS BICS Methodology

The BICS is a modular survey and as such not all questions are asked in every wave of the survey. The ONS regularly review the survey questions and topics, and they often add, remove or amend questions to reflect changing circumstances and analytical priorities. The questions for each wave of the survey are published on the ONS website.

Currently, even numbered waves contain a core set of questions and enable a monthly time series for key topic areas such as turnover, prices and performance with additional topics being included at regular intervals (for example, stock levels). Odd numbered waves have questions focusing on different topic areas, for example trade, workforce, business investment.

For some questions, businesses are asked for their experiences for the survey live period. However, other questions ask specifically about the most recent calendar month in relation to the time of completion, or other time periods specified in the question.

The BICS includes businesses of all sizes. Most sectors of the UK economy are covered. However, the public sector is excluded, as are the following standard industrial classification 2007 (SIC 2007) sections:

• A - agriculture, forestry and fishing)
• D - electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply)
• K - financial and insurance activities

ONS weight the UK level results from the BICS to be representative of the UK business population. However the main Scottish BICS results published by ONS are unweighted. This means that they can only be used to make inferences about the businesses that have responded to the survey.

Scottish Government weighted Scotland estimates

This publication provides weighted estimates for Scotland from the BICS. Weighting the BICS responses enables us to produce estimates for Scottish businesses more generally, not just those that have responded to the survey. We have used BICS microdata provided by ONS to develop the weighted Scotland estimates.

Our weighted Scotland estimates are for businesses with 10 or more employees, unlike ONS’ weighted estimates for the UK as a whole which include all business sizes. We exclude businesses with less than 10 employees because the number of survey responses for such businesses in Scotland is too small to provide a suitable base for weighting. Our estimates are for businesses that have a presence in Scotland. Having a presence in Scotland means that the business has a local unit or site (e.g. shop, office, factory) in Scotland, although its headquarters may be elsewhere.

Larger businesses and some industry sectors tend to be over-represented in the BICS. Our weighting methodology corrects for these biases by producing business count and employment weights using a standard expansion estimation. For example, for business count weights, the weight applied is the ratio between the population size in a stratum (that is a group of business with same characteristics based on SIC industry, employment size and Scottish jobs dominance) and the number of responding businesses in that stratum. Our weighting method is very similar to the methodology used by ONS to weight their UK level estimates.

Our weighted Scotland estimates are derived from results collected from UK businesses for the UK as a whole, but weighted by business counts or employment in Scotland. No account is being made for regional differences between business sites.

Wave 142 of the BICS was live from 6 October to 19 October 2025. In terms of the base of the estimates, 10,415 businesses responded UK-wide. 1,229 of these businesses had a presence in Scotland. Excluding the micro businesses (those with less than 10 employees) takes the base down to 1,150 responding businesses with a presence in Scotland.

Related publications

Business insights and impact on the UK economy - Office for National Statistics – this is the main ONS BICS publication and provides weighted estimates for the UK as a whole, as well as unweighted estimates for countries/regions within the UK. The estimates include businesses with less than 10 employees, whilst ours do not. ONS do provide weighted data for businesses with 10 or more employees for the UK as a whole in the accompanying data tables. These should be used if making comparisons to our estimates for Scotland.

Business insights and impact on the UK subnational single-site economy - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) – this ONS publication provides an analysis of weighted data for areas within the UK (including Scotland). It focusses on single-site businesses. This differs to the approach taken for our weighted estimates  provided in this publication which include single-site and multi-site businesses together. In addition, our estimates only include businesses with 10 or more employees, whereas this ONS publication includes all sizes of business.

Access to BICS data

The BICS weighted Scotland data for waves up to and including Wave 142, including the data used in this publication, is available in the Business insights and conditions in Scotland - data to wave 142 - tables - time series Excel workbook in the ‘Supporting documents’ section. UK microdata can also be accessed, by accredited researchers, via the Secure Research Service (SRS).