Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the number of people employed in the nuclear industry in each year since 2010; and what forecast he has made of the number of people employed in that industry in each year to 2025.

The Nuclear Skills Strategy Group conducts, as part of its activities, a labour market intelligence gathering exercise across the sector to produce an annual Nuclear Workforce Assessment (NWA), which identifies the sector’s forward demand requirements. However, the first NWA report was published in 2014, with a subsequent iteration released in 2015, to improve the estimates for job figures across the industry, and as such we are not able to provide an accurate estimation before this date. The estimate for total demand across the nuclear industry (in Full Time Equivalents) for 2014 and 2015 is 70,000 and 77,000 respectively.

The latest NWA published in July 2017 estimates the total demand each year to 2025 in FTEs as follows: 2016 – 84,000, 2017 – 87,000; 2018 – 89,000; 2019 – 90,000; 2020 – 96,000; 2021 – 100,000; 2022 – 100,000; 2023 – 97,000; 2024 – 94,000; 2025 – 90,000.