Thanks to the commitment of our participants, the size of the panel has been steadily increasing since the DMP was launched in August 2016. Approximately 10,400 businesses were part of the panel as of February 2024 and we are grateful to all panel members who have agreed to be part of the project. To minimise the time commitment required to respond to the questions, each month we send one of three sets of questions to one third of the panel members.

As of February 2024

10,450

Businesses have participated in the Decision Maker Panel

Our panel is comprised of Financial Officers from small, medium and large UK companies operating in a broad range of industries and is designed to be representative of the population of UK businesses.

We would be very happy to answer your questions about our early findings and we welcome feedback on any aspect of DMP membership. We are very grateful to you for taking the time to answer our questions and are keen to make it as easy and as useful for you to participate as we can. Please feel free to call the programme director, Phil Bunn, on 020 3461 3096 or email Philip.Bunn@bankofengland.co.uk anytime with questions or concerns.

The motivation behind establishing the Decision Maker Panel (DMP) was to collect more detailed information on business expectations than is currently available from other sources. The results have proven valuable to the Bank of England, both in terms of informing policy decisions and in creating opportunities for high quality research. Improving our understanding of the decisions that companies are likely to make over the coming years will be critical in helping the Monetary Policy Committee to assess the prospects for the UK economy.

The DMP monitors firms’ future expectations and associated uncertainties regarding changes in their prices, level of employment, capital investment and sales revenue, with questions each month focussing on one or more of these topics on a rotating basis. Over the medium term, we aim for the survey to become part of the Bank’s regular surveillance of the UK corporate sector. The survey complements existing Agency intelligence by asking structured questions to a randomly selected sample of firms; this allows the Bank to gather quantitative data about firms’ expectations and the distribution of those expectations.

Individual survey responses will be treated as confidential.

They will be:
♦  held securely;
♦  aggregated before being published; and
♦  anonymised before being made available to researchers.

The Bank of England may use a secure service, such as the Office for National Statistics’ Secure Research Service for these purposes.

By completing the survey you authorise the use of your data in this way.  If at any point you no longer wish to participate in the survey please inform us by emailing dmp@bankofengland.co.uk.

Our privacy policy, in line with the General Data Protection Regulation, is available here.