Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what are the latest figures for the number of trainee welders in the UK.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the Permanent Secretary of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Rt. Hon the Lord Spellar

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

09 December 2025

Dear Lord Spellar

As Permanent Secretary of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what the latest figures for the number of trainee welders in the UK are (HL12585).

The ONS uses the Annual Population Survey (APS), which is a survey of people resident in households in the UK, to estimate information on apprentices and the number of people in different occupations. We classify people’s occupations using the Standard Occupational Classification 2020 (SOC20), based on their own description of their occupation. For this question we have used SOC20 group 5213, welding trades.

Table 1 contains APS estimates of the number of apprentices in occupation 5213, welding trades, resident in the UK, for APS periods from July 2021 to June 2022, until July 2024 to June 2025, the latest APS dataset available. All estimates in Table 1 are based on a small sample size. This may result in less precise estimates, which should be used with caution. The ongoing challenges with response rates, response levels and weighting approach mean that labour market statistics based on the Annual Population Survey (APS) are subject to increased volatility and are considered ’official statistics in development’ until further review.

Table 1: Number of apprentices in the Welding Trades (SOC20 5213), UK, not seasonally adjusted

Source: Annual Population Survey

Yours sincerely,

Darren Tierney