Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what discussions she has had with the Office for National Statistics on its decision to suspend the publication of statistics on the labour market status of disabled people.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is responsible for the production of statistics on employment of disabled people, published in Table A08 on the ONS website. ONS have stated that the most recent version includes estimates for April to June 2017, and “ONS has suspended publication of these estimates for subsequent time periods due to an apparent discontinuity between April to June 2017 and July to September 2017. ONS is investigating this issue and the dataset will be reinstated as soon as possible”.

As a key stakeholder for labour market statistics, the Department for Work and Pensions maintains dialogue with ONS on the use of this data for national policy-making purposes. ONS has therefore regularly updated officials on their ongoing investigation.