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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of the accuracy of the Office for National Statistics' conclusions that there are 12,400 full-time direct jobs in nuclear energy reprocessing and generation in the UK.

Since 2015, the Department and its predecessor the Department for Energy and Climate Change have used the industry-recognised dataset for jobs in nuclear: the Nuclear Workforce Assessment (NWA). The Nuclear Skills Strategy Group (NSSG) – of which BEIS is a member – conducts a labour market intelligence gathering exercise across the sector to produce the NWA, which is used by the sector to inform employers’ recruitment practices. The latest NWA, published in July 2017, estimates there are currently 18,700 Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) employed in fuel processing and generation.

The ONS figure is based on a Low-Carbon & Renewable Energy Economy Survey from 2015. That survey uses a different dataset and weighting factor from the NWA which explains the difference between the two estimates.