Labour Market Trends: August 2024
Employment, unemployment and economic inactivity trends, sourced from the Labour Force Survey for Scotland and the UK.
About this publication
This publication contains the Labour Force Survey (LFS) estimates of employment, unemployment and economic inactivity for Scotland and the UK by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The publication also includes the experimental HMRC Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real-Time Information (RTI) and ONS Claimant Count statistics.
An Official Statistics in Development Publication for Scotland
These statistics are official statistics in development. Official statistics in development may be new or existing statistics, and will be tested with users, in line with the standards of trustworthiness, quality, and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics.
ONS have published an article which mentions the reintroduction of the Labour Force Survey estimates and the impact of the reweighting on the key indicators for the UK.
HMRC and ONS have also published a response to the OSR RTI review.
Scottish Government statistics are regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.
Source of data
The information included in this publication are from three separate sources covering the time periods shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Labour market data source reference periods
Comparison over time
Comparisons with the latest data over the year have been included within the commentary of this publication. Estimates for employment, unemployment and inactivity rates are compared over the quarter and over the year.
ONS Labour Force Survey
Previous revisions
An issue was detected in the weighting of the ONS Labour Force Survey for Northern Ireland for the November 2023 to January 2024 quarter only which affected the March 2024 release of the LFS estimates. This issue was resolved in the April 2024 release when the November 2023 to January 2024 figures were revised accordingly.
On 5 February 2024, ONS published a blog announcing the reintroduction of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) estimates and an article outlining how they have been affected by reweighting. These estimates were included in the main ONS release on 13 February 2024.
The reweighted LFS estimates incorporate the latest estimates of the size and composition of the total UK population, improving the representativeness of the LFS estimates.
ONS have used the 2022 mid-year population estimates for England, Wales and Northern Ireland which incorporate the results of the 2021 Censuses of England and Wales and Northern Ireland. However the 2022 mid-year population estimates for Scotland has been calculated using the 2011 Census results to produce an updated UK population projection specifically for the purpose of LFS reweighting. 2022 Census data from Scotland will be incorporated when they become available. This underlying data affects assumptions on gender and tenure weighting. The socio-economic non-response bias adjustment remains unchanged from the previous weighting approach. Please note that although the tenure distribution was unchanged for Scotland, it should be noted that it has changed for England and Wales and therefore the UK overall.
Given time constraints, ONS have only been able to reweight the LFS data from July to September 2022 onwards. Therefore, this reweighting exercise creates a discontinuity in the series between June to August 2022 and July to September 2022 where there will be a step change in the LFS estimates apart from the headline UK estimates. ONS have modelled the seasonally adjusted UK levels of employment, unemployment and economic inactivity by sex and age-band back to June to August 2011, to ensure that headline rates and levels by sex and age-band (datasets A02SA and A05SA) can be assessed without a discontinuity. For this reason, the Scottish Government’s Labour Market Trends publication will only compare LFS estimates for Scotland and the UK from July to September 2022 onwards.
The reweighting of the LFS estimates does not address the volatility seen in the recent estimates (since May-July 2023), therefore ONS have advised that users should be cautious when interpreting quarterly changes in the LFS estimates and that these should be viewed alongside the wider suite of labour market indicators including the Claimant Count data and HMRC Pay As You Earn Real Time Information (PAYE RTI) estimates.
The longer-term solution remains the replacement of the Labour Force Survey with the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS).
Other sources
This publication also contains HMRC PAYE Real Time Information (RTI) on median monthly earnings and payrolled employees. These are classed as Official Statistics in Development.
The ONS have also published experimental Claimant Count estimates which have also been included within this publication.
This release follows the ONS monthly releases of:
Contact
For enquiries about this publication please contact:
Labour Market Statistics,
Office of the Chief Economic Adviser
Telephone: 0131 244 6773,
E-mail: LMStats@gov.scot
For general enquiries about Scottish Government statistics please contact:
Office of the Chief Statistician
E-mail: statistics.enquiries@gov.scot
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