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

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of (1) the number of jobs, and (2) the total value of sales, within the retail sector attributable to (a) online retail, and (b) high-street retail premises.

In 2015 the retail sector accounted for nearly 3.2m jobs. It is not possible to allocate these jobs to online or offline retail nor to “high-street” or “non-high street” premises.

Excluding sales of automotive fuel the total value of retail sales was £340bn in 2015, with around 12.4% of these sales (£42bn) attributable to online retail.

It is not possible to determine what proportion of sales were made by “high-street” premises. There is not an operational statistical definition of this term, so data is not collected on this basis.