More from the Office for National Statistics

I've been a bit too busy this week to add more stuff to my blog. But following my piece last week concerning the total absence of information about the financial sector in the Office for National Statistics data about UK economy activity, I had a very useful exchange with Rob Pennington from the ONS (thanks Rob).

He admitted that there was indeed nothing about the Financial Sector, but noted that there also wasn't any information about other important areas including Retail and Agriculture.

He pointed me to the ONS's figures on retail that can be found here. Specifically, there's an Excel file that you can download with all the gory details (over 600 kbytes). For me, the bottom line numbers are the figures for all Retailing including automotive fuel:

• 2009 : £317.6 billion
• 2010 : £326.2 billion
• 2011 : £343.2 billion

Obviously, these numbers can be added to the £2 trillion that I got from the turnover figures last week.

For the figures for Agriculture, Rob suggested that I contact the Department of  Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), but I've not got anything yet.

It doesn't really change much. The fact is that the numbers for total manufacturing and service industry turnover combined with the figures for retail are absolutely dwarfed by the numbers for the City - something like £1760 trillion a year.