Beyond historic monuments, sites and buildings, the heritage sector includes a wide range of assets and landscapes that are connected to history and valued by communities. Currently, no formal definition exists for the sector, and heritage’s fragmented market structure spanning multiple industries makes it challenging to quantify its impact on the UK economy.

To address this gap, Alma Economics was commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to assess available methodologies and offer insights into the best way to develop reliable estimates of the economic contribution of the heritage sector. These methodologies included dynamic mapping, SIC-SOC mapping, international satellite account approaches, and approaches that work with ‘big data’. Each methodology was assessed against six criteria: coverage, disaggregation, robustness, feasibility, replicability, and comparability.

Our final report included a set of recommendations on combining the SIC-SOC mapping approach with additional research. This would expand the list of heritage industries/occupations and incorporate additional data on heritage activities and outputs to develop more precise estimates for the sector.

These recommendations will help DCMS develop a set of experimental statistics aligning with the UK national accounts methodology to estimate the scope and scale of the heritage sector.

The report and recommendations can be found here.