Defining and Measuring Green Jobs

ONS consultation on use, preference and experience of using green jobs data

Numerous recommendations have been made in successive evaluations and reviews that we need a standard set of definitions in order to measure green jobs (and employment and skills). We have seen this recently in the Climate Change Committee’s Annual Report to the UK Parliament, it was also clear in the Green Jobs Taskforce reports, and critical to the work of the Green Jobs Delivery Group. To tackle this issue and to deliver a set of agreed, standard definitions, the ONS is being funded by the Treasury to do just this. Their consultation opened on August 11th and closes on October 6th, and so you have some time to get your views, needs, and experiences into the process.

The ONS consultation can be accessed here: Defining and Measuring Green Jobs

In our own work, we recently found major differences in the numbers of green jobs depending on the definition e.g. the LGA/Equity figures for each of the regions of England versus the WPI Economics ones (for London), and then the ones from the Energy Efficiency Infrastructure Group (all parliamentary constituencies) or PWC’s Green Jobs Barometer and that of Enginuity In all cases the green jobs total are “correct” and “accurate” but not transferable between the studies.

The HMRC is also running a consultation on the data it collects, and of particular interest to us are two elements: the business sector of the self-employed, and, the occupations of employees and self-employed. Micro-businesses and the self-employed have an important role to play in the decarbonisation of the domestic housing stock. The consultation runs between July 20th and October 12th 2022, and can be accessed here.