Cinemas: Closures

Mr. Moss
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office how many cinemas have closed in (a) England and (b) North East Cambridgeshire since 1 January 2008.

Angela E. Smith
The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Letter from Jil Matheson, dated December 2009:

As National Statistician, I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question concerning what estimate has been made of the number of cinemas which have closed in (a) England and (b) North East Cambridgeshire since 1 January 2008 (303714).

ONS does not have any statistics on the number of cinemas. Annual statistics on business births, deaths and survival are available from the ONS release on Business Demography at www.statistics.gov.uk. The table below contains the latest statistics available on business deaths of cinema businesses for England and the constituency of North East Cambridgeshire. All counts are based on enterprises and not local units (i.e. sites). Where a local unit closes but the enterprise continues to trade at other sites, a death will not be recorded in this data.

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|    |                                    |England|North East Cambridgeshire|
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|5914|Motion picture projection activities|25     |0                        |
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