Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what are the latest employment activity rates for (1) each region of England, (2) England, (3) Wales, (4) Scotland, and (5) Northern Ireland.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.

I will deposit a copy of the dataset for employment activity rates for each region of England, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland in the House Libraries.

The Rt Hon. the Lord Wigley

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

21 December 2023

Dear Lord Wigley,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking for the latest employment activity rates for (1) each region of England (2) England (3) Wales, (4) Scotland, and (5) Northern Ireland (HL1373).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) collects information on respondents’ labour market status as part of the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which is a survey of people resident in households in the UK.

The economic activity rate is the proportion of the UK population aged 16-64 years who are engaged with the labour market, either through employment or searching for work while unemployed. The employment rate is the proportion of the UK population aged 16 to 64 years who are employed.

The latest LFS estimates available are for the period April to June 2023. Due to increased uncertainty in LFS estimates from May to July 2023, the latest LFS estimates are not being released. To give users a more considered view of the labour market, we have applied growth rates from administrative data (HMRC PAYE RTI (Pay As You Earn Real Time Information) for employment and Claimant Count for unemployment) to April to June 2023 LFS data to produce adjusted employment, unemployment, and economic inactivity estimates.

Table 1 shows estimates of economic activity and employment rates using LFS data from March to May 1992 to April to June 2023, and experimental adjusted estimates from May to July 2023 to August to October 2023.

As the data are quite extensive, a copy of Table 1 has been placed in the House of Lords Library.

Yours sincerely,

Sir Ian Diamond