Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the reasons why unemployment is higher in the North East than in other regions of the UK.

In the three months to March 2018 the unemployment level in the North East was 63,000, a joint record low for the area. The unemployment rate stood at 4.9%, 0.1 percentage points above the record low for the North East.

Estimates of unemployment differ in different areas of the country due to a range of factors such as the demographics of the local area and local labour market conditions, as well as the effects of sample variability in the Labourforce Survey on which the ONS’s Labour Market Statistics are based.

(Data from the Labourforce Survey for the period January – March 2018)