Across Britain there is an estimated 200,500 organisations in the sector.  96% of organisations in the passenger transport sector employ between 1 and 4 people, 3% employ 5-199 and 1% of organisations have over 200 employees.  Wales has only under 10 companies employing more than 200 staff. 

There are significant regional variations:

• over 4% of London companies employ more than 200 staff, which is particularly high proportion 
• the South East and South West have above average numbers of companies employing 10 or fewer staff

26% of the passenger transport industry is based in rural areas.  Across the industries:

• community transport has almost equal proportions of urban and rural companies
• 13% of community transport organisations are in rural areas
• 19% of bus and coach companies are part of the rural passenger transport sector, compared with 15% in urban areas

30% of UK companies whose headquarters was in a rural county had recruitment difficulties compared to 26% for urban based companies.  The main recruitment difficulty for both urban and rural based companies was skill shortages among job applicants.

N.B.  Some caution is required in using this data as it is difficult to count the number of sole traders and, in some cases, large numbers of organisations are unattributed making analysis difficult.

Source: GoSkills Skills Needs Assessment (stage 1) sector summary 2006a

For information on sector company size see:

Great Britain passenger transport sector company size by industry, 2006