FOI reference: FOI-2025-2757
You asked
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I would like to know:
- The number of strike days in the UK as tracked by the ONS
- The number of strike days by sector in the UK as tracked by the ONS
I would like this information broken down, by year, for each of the past five years with a year-end of 31 March.
We said
Thank you for your request.
1. Estimates of working days lost due to strike action can be found in our Labour disputes in the UK publication on the ONS website. Please see the fourth tab along the bottom labelled '1 UK'. Table 1b shows estimates of cumulative 12-month totals for working days lost in the UK. From this table you can see that in the 12 months ending the 31st of March 2023, 3,539,000 working days were lost due to strike action in the UK. The corresponding figure for the 12 months ending on the 31st of March 2024 was 1,858,000. The estimate for the 12-month cumulative total for March 2025 will be made available in the latest version of our 'labour disputes in the UK' table on 13 May.
The collection and publication of labour disputes data was temporarily suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore we hold no data for the period February 2020 to December 2021.
2. Monthly estimates of working days lost due to strike action broken down by public and private sectors can be found in our Labour disputes in the UK on the ONS website. Please see the seventh tab along the bottom labelled '4 Sector'. For monthly estimates of working days lost broken down by industry sectors, please see the eighth tab labelled '5 Industry'. We do not publish cumulative 12-month totals for working days lost by sector or industry. However, public and private sectors can be calculated by adding up the estimates for the 12 months.