A note on definitive national motorsport industry statistics

There are no genuinely ‘definitive’ current statistics available, despite endless requests over the past decade, from the MIA to Government – Department of Business Innovation and Skills -  to update this work, all of which have been rejected.

The only definitive national figures ever produced were those in the MIA’s ‘National Survey of Motorsport Engineering and Services (MES) 2000’, which stated, at that date...

• The annual turnover value of motorsport engineering and services (MES) to the UK economy was estimated to be approximately £4.6 billion of which £2.9 billion was generated from ‘motorsport engineering’ and £1.7 billion from ‘motorsport services’.
• The export earnings from MES was estimated to be over £2billion of the above total.
• The minimum estimated employment for MES activity is 38,500, of which some 25,000 were engaged in engineering of one sort or another, and the remainder in services.
• There were 2200 companies who achieved more than 50% of their sales from MES, 75% of which were established between 1980 and 2000.

Any other figures used are simply inventions or adjustments based on the above.

Some have used annual inflation to adjust these, or updated simply by a notional increase each year, or changed these into a dollar or euro figures, using varying exchange rates at different times. These are purely hypothetical and must be misleading.

It would help the MIA, and the wider UK industry, if you felt so moved to write to the new Minister for Business, Mark Prisk MP at the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, 1 Victoria Street, London. Please ask him to encourage his Department to help the MIA conduct an update of these important figures, which continue to be used by Ministers to explain this major British success story, but which are out of date, incorrect and misleading.