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In the UK, how many people work in the insurance industry? How many people work for the top 1000 companies, of any industry, in the UK? How many people work for the top 250 law firms in the UK?
Hi there! Thanks for your request for statistics on general and industry-specific employment numbers in the UK. The most useful sources I found in my research were UK government statistics and Financial Times rankings. In short, my findings indicate that in the UK, there are approximately 314,000 people employed in the insurance sector, 8.2 million in the top 500 companies (all sectors), and 134,310 in the top 250 law firms.
I've entered these figures into your spreadsheet as requested. Please read on for a deep dive of these findings and how I reached them.
INSURANCE
To find this figure, I first checked the UK Office of National Statistics' Employment By Industry figures. Unfortunately, I discovered that the ONS lumps Insurance and Financial Services into the same category, so I knew those figures wouldn't be specific enough for our purposes. For this reason, I referred instead to the Association of British Insurers, whose website indicates that this sector currently employs 314,000 people.
TOP 500 COMPANIES
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any recent or reputable reports that listed the top 1,000 companies (by any measure) in the UK, and of those that listed a smaller number, very few provided both revenue (which I felt would be most useful for gauging "top" companies) and number of employees.
In this respect, the best source I found was the Financial Times' 2015 UK 500 list (the 2016 report was not publicly listed), which indicates that the top 500 UK companies by revenue employ approximately 8.2 million people.
To get a sense of how this figure may compare relative to the target focus of 1,000 companies, I cross-referenced this data against UK government statistics that indicate that UK businesses employing 500 people or more (of which there are slightly over 3,500) account for about 9.2 million employees. Since this latter figure that reflects 1 million employees accounts for 2,500 more businesses than you were looking for, we can reasonably assume that the target figure of 1,000 businesses probably has employee figures much closer to the 8.2 million mark.
TOP 250 LAW FIRMS
This was another tricky one, as I could not locate publicly available data listing the top 250 UK law firms by any measure. The closest equivalent I found was an excerpt from The Lawyer's UK 200 report (the full version of which appears to be paywalled), which indicates that, as of 2016, the top half of the UK 200 (so the top 100 firms) employed 52,924 lawyers, or an average of 529 lawyers per firm. Applying this average to the remaining 150 firms yields 134,310 employees.
When reviewing these figures, however, a couple of caveats: on the one hand we might expect this figure to be slightly high (as it would be reasonable to assume that the remaining 150 firms would be smaller and have fewer employees than the top 100), on the other hand, the base figure only tells us how many lawyers are employed by these firms, and doesn't include non-lawyer staff (accountants, receptionists, custodians, IT, etc.). Therefore, depending on how broadly or narrowly you interpret "employees" here, these two factors may balance each other out somewhat.
CONCLUSION
To wrap up, in the UK, the insurance sector employs approximately 314,000 people, the top 500 companies employ around 8.2 million, and the top 250 law firms employ 134,310. Thanks for using Wonder! Please let us know if we can help you with anything else!