The Bank's regional equity tracker runs on Beauhurst's data

The record

In October 2025 the British Business Bank published the fifth annual edition of its Nations and Regions Tracker, a report the Bank describes as designed to complement its separate flagship Small Business Finance Markets report by isolating geography. Every chart in the equity chapter carries the same line: 'British Business Bank analysis of Beauhurst data.' On that basis the Tracker states London's share of UK equity deals fell to 47.1% in 2024 from 50.8% in 2023, that the North West recorded 146 deals in 2024, up 11.5%, worth GBP654 million, and that UK equity investment totalled roughly GBP10.8 billion in 2024, below the GBP20.6 billion the Bank records for 2021. Every figure here is the Bank's analysis of a named third-party dataset, not a Bank-collected count.

What the sources establish

The Tracker's own endnotes disclose a stage-definition change made by the data provider, not the Bank. Beauhurst historically classified equity deals into seed, venture and growth stages, then in 2019 added an 'established' stage as a subset of growth. The Bank states it has combined 'established' into a single growth-stage category 'for both simplicity and consistency with past British Business Bank reports.' That is the Bank flagging its own presentation choice: a reader comparing stage splits across editions is reading the Bank's re-grouping of Beauhurst's categories, and the report's multi-year deals-per-100-high-growth-enterprise figures already carry that adjustment. The Bank's research and publications page lists the Tracker separately from the Small Business Finance Markets report, confirming the two are distinct outputs.

Scope and revision

The Tracker's geographic unit is the UK nation or English region, its equity figures cover three years for trend context, and its high-growth-enterprise denominator, deal-counting rules and stage taxonomy belong to Beauhurst, not the Bank. Both figures behind a deals-per-100-high-growth-enterprise table originate outside the Bank's own management information; the Bank's contribution is aggregation and framing. The report is dated to a specific edition, and its endnote on the established-stage merge is the clearest signal a reader should check each edition's endnotes before assuming a stage category is stable across years.

The decision in front of you

A founder or analyst quoting regional UK equity concentration should cite the attribution line under the specific chart, not simply 'British Business Bank data,' and should note the Beauhurst dependency before comparing stage splits against a report using Beauhurst's current schema unmodified. This is editorial guidance: treat the Tracker as the Bank's regional lens on Beauhurst's company tracking, and check the endnotes of any two editions being compared for taxonomy changes before drawing a multi-year conclusion.

• Does the chart's own source line name the underlying data vendor, or only the publisher presenting it?
• Has a stage, sector or geography definition changed between the two editions being compared, and does either publisher say so?
• Is the denominator behind a per-enterprise figure defined by the same body that reports the numerator?

None of this makes the Tracker's figures wrong; it makes them a labelled, second-hand analysis, and a reader who keeps the Bank's attribution line attached to every number will not mistake a re-grouped Beauhurst count for an independent Bank statistic.