Local Area Labour Markets in Scotland - Statistics from the Annual Population Survey 2013

About this publication

The Annual Population Survey (APS) combines results from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the English, Welsh and Scottish Labour Force Survey boosts. The boosts increase the sample size which means the APS can provide more robust labour market estimates for local areas compared to the main LFS. The Scottish Government funds the boost to the LFS sample in Scotland, taking the sample size from approximately 5,800 households each year to 20,000 households The APS is the primary source for information on local labour markets providing headline estimates on employment, unemployment and economic activity.

This is the eleventh publication of the series. It aims to provide reliable and up-to-date headline information for local area labour markets and covers employment, underemployment, inactivity and youth participation in the labour market within Scotland and its local authorities. Results are provided for the calendar years (January to December) 2004 to 2013, based on the data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on 20 March 2014.

The publication is split into two main chapters.

The first chapter examines changes at national and local authority area level for:

• employment across various sub-groups of the population
• different types of work people are employed in and which sub-groups may be driving changes in these
• different industry sectors as well as public/private and the third sectors
• different occupations and occupational skill distributions

The second chapter examines changes at national and local authority area level for those who are not in employment, looking at:

• changes in unemployment across various sub-groups
• changes in economic inactivity across various sub-groups
• reasons for inactivity and willingness to work
• those who have never worked

Disabilities and Equalities analysis

Estimates for the disability equalities groups have not been included in the publication this year due to significant changes made in the April-June 2013 quarter to the questions relating to disability in the survey; This has resulted in a lack of a full year's data for 2013 using a consistent set of questions. A further knock-on effect of these changes will be that data from Apr-Jun 2013 will not be comparable with previous estimates for disabilities. An analysis of disabilities data will be issued after the full-year data-set is available for April 2013-March 2014. Further information on the change to disability related questions in the LFS is available here. Disaggregations for other equalities groups (ethnicity and religion) tend to be unreliable at local authority area level due to the small sample sizes of many of the sub-groups, and are therefore only included in the accompanying web-tables at national or regional level.