Current Issues Note 25: How big is London's green sector?

Key information

Publication type: General

Publication date: Tuesday 8 June 2010

When people use the term green jobs or green technology it is often hard to know exactly what they mean by these terms which makes the "green sector" a hard thing to actually measure. This note starts to address this issue.
We identify those activities which can be said to be 'mostly green' using the Standard Industrial Classification - this enables us to track changes in the sector over time and compare London with other parts of the United Kingdom. Using this approach we estimate around 25,000 employees in the sector in London (around 0.6 per cent of the capital’s total employees). With some heroic assumptions about people doing ‘green’ jobs in sectors of other colours, we can potentially bring this number up to as much as 150,000. Even then, this only represents around 3 or 4 per cent of London’s employment.
Finally we review what is missing and the problems that are likely to be involved in addressing the gaps.