How this is built

It brings together information that is already public by law: the company register, insolvency notices, food hygiene ratings, official statistics and councils' own spending data. Company profiles sit inside analysis of the local economy; there is deliberately no directory or "search all directors" feature. Scores and indicators are opinions formed from the public facts by the published method below, shown next to those facts, never presented as statements of fact about any company's solvency, creditworthiness or probity.

Lancashire is mid-reorganisation. Every area is therefore shown in two ways, and a toggle switches between them:

The distress indicator is an Observatory assessment, not a statement of fact about any company. For an area, it is the share of active companies showing register-based stress signals (for example an active strike-off proposal, overdue accounts, or a filed insolvency step), measured against the active company base.

The clean rate excludes companies registered at flagged address clusters: single addresses where an unusually large number of companies are registered and most are dissolved or striking off. Those clusters can sit in one postcode and would otherwise distort a whole area's figure, so they are set aside and the raw (pre-exclusion) rate is shown alongside on each area profile. Cluster notes describe only the observable pattern, for example "411 companies registered at this address; 98 percent dissolved or in strike-off". They never assert a purpose.

Each figure carries its basis and its data date. A company-level signal is shown next to the underlying register fact it comes from, so the reader sees the fact and the assessment together.

Two measures sit on the growth page. The official benchmark is the ONS Business Demography high-growth share: companies averaging 20 percent annual growth in employment over three years, from a base of ten or more employees. That is a published official statistic, shown per area against the England share for the same year.

The candidate scale-ups are an Observatory assessment, our own read of the average employee numbers disclosed in filed accounts (section 411, Companies Act 2006) over at least three consecutive periods. It is not turnover-based and has not been checked with the companies. Only complete series from a base of ten or more employees carry the "meets ONS definition" flag; a base of three to nine with strong growth is flagged "emerging" and shown separately. Obvious data errors (for example a ten-fold jump from a filing typo) are cleaned out. Every candidate states its basis in the table.

Each council's published payments to suppliers are sorted into four tiers, an Observatory assessment based on register facts:

Registered companies and registered unincorporated businesses are counts. The unregistered / below-threshold layer on each area profile is a modelled estimate, not a count, and is labelled as such wherever it appears. It applies a Business Population Estimates North West ratio to Annual Population Survey self-employment, to indicate activity that sits below registration thresholds. It must not be read as a headcount of businesses.

A register is a snapshot. Every file records when it was generated and when its sources were retrieved, and pages show a data-date line. A company figure reads, in effect, "based on accounts to a stated date, filed on a stated date, retrieved on a stated date". Figures reflect the register at the retrieval date shown and may have changed since. Food hygiene ratings, which can carry consumer-protection weight, are shown with their "as at" date and refreshed on a schedule.

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed. Report it to tom.pickup@lancashire.gov.uk.

Register data about directors and persons with significant control is personal data. It is published here for journalism in the public interest (the special-purposes basis under the Data Protection Act 2018), inside analysis of public money, not as a people-search tool. The lawful basis is legitimate interests, assessed and recorded before publication.

If you are named and want an entry reviewed, write to tom.pickup@lancashire.gov.uk. Objections are answered within one month. As a default, resigned officers of dissolved companies and individuals with no live public-money connection are suppressed on request; officers and persons with significant control of live companies holding public contracts are, as a default, retained, with a recorded balancing test, because of the public-money interest. No marketing or contact list is built from this data, and registered proprietors are never contacted.