Market Update: We break down the business implications, market impact, and expert insights related to Market Update: Low carbon and renewable energy economy, UK – Full Analysis.
6. Data Sources and quality
Data sources and collection
The survey collects information on turnover, imports, exports, employment, and acquisitions and disposals of capital assets, for 17 low carbon and renewable energy economy (LCREE) sectors, see our Low carbon sector codes and descriptions (DOC, 26KB). Data are collected annually from businesses.
Coverage
Includes only the portion of a business’ economic activity directly related to a defined LCREE sector in the UK.
Revisions
This release contains revisions to data for the years 2022 to 2023. Revisions can result from a variety of factors, including:
- businesses adding data for previous years
- businesses revising their previous submissions
- developments in methodology
Quality
Details on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our LCREE Survey quality and methodology information (QMI).
Strengths
The LCREE survey has a 74.9% response rate and directly collects information on LCREE activity by sector.
Limitations
Activity in LCREE sectors span a range of industries. While many LCREE sectors have grown, they remain small, and for many businesses LCREE activity is secondary rather than primary. Therefore, estimates are subject to volatility.
More information is available in Section 4 of our LCREE survey QMI.
Uncertainty
LCREE estimates are survey-based and gather information from a sample rather than the whole population. This means that they are subject to measurable sampling uncertainty, which affects how changes in the estimates across periods should be interpreted.
To support interpretation, confidence intervals and coefficients of variation are presented as estimates of the level of uncertainty associated with figures in the datasets. These uncertainty measures consider both the variability in the estimate of the proportion of businesses active in the LCREE and the variability of the estimate of those businesses.
The variability in the estimate of the proportion of businesses active in the LCREE can be particularly variable because of sampling. This can be seen in the fluctuation in the estimates of the number of businesses in our accompanying dataset, and their higher level of uncertainty.
We advise users to make sure that uncertainty is appropriately considered when interpreting results. Where year‑on‑year figures do not offer sufficient clarity on overall trends (for example, because of overlapping confidence intervals), it may be more appropriate to examine data over a longer period, such as three to five years.
As a more concrete example, our central estimates for overall UK LCREE employment range from 284,600 FTEs in 2022 to 317,000 in 2023, then fall to 304,000 in 2024. While this could be interpreted as a spike in 2023 that was largely reversed in 2024, it does not account for uncertainty in survey results. This uncertainty includes a difference of more than 50,000 FTEs between the upper and lower confidence intervals, and confidence intervals that overlap for all three years. Given these factors, a longer-term assessment is potentially more meaningful.
More information is available in our Uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys methodology.
Sample size
The LCREE Survey was undertaken for the eleventh time in 2025, for the reporting year 2024, using a sample of around 25,000 businesses. The response rate was 74.9%, with more than 3,300 businesses reporting LCREE activity.
Response rates were 79.5% for 2022 and 76.5% for 2023. Following our revision policy, late returns for the previous two years submitted within the current data‑collection period are included for those years, meaning 2022 is final, while 2023 and 2024 remain provisional. More information can be found in our LCREE Survey QMI.