Labour market statistics consultation 2019
The Labour Market Statistics Consultation was launched on the 8th of July 2019 and closed on the 16th of August 2019. The consultation gave users the opportunity to comment on our economic activity, jobs, unemployment, redundancies and earnings outputs from the Economic and Labour Market Statistics (ELMS) Branch at NISRA.
Responses to the consultation and a copy of the questionnaire are available to download from the Labour Market Statistics Consultation 2019 page. The views expressed in each response are those of the respondent and do not necessarily reflect NISRA's views. All responses to the consultation are Anonymous.
An overview of the main findings and ELMS response are below. (An update with progress at July 2020 is provided in brackets.)
- Users are content that QES is no longer benchmarked to BRES. ELMS will keep the resulting estimates from the two surveys under review but do not plan to benchmark the 2017 and 2019 results. (The QES results were not benchmarked to BRES 2017 or BRES 2019 employee totals)
- There is a user need for detailed industry and area breakdowns of employee jobs. ELMS plan to carry out the large Business Register and Employment Survey every two years but in efforts to reduce burden on business will carry out a smaller survey in the interim years. ELMS will consider whether summary tables rather than a publication are sufficient in the interim years. (The BRES 2019 data were published on 30th June 2020. The sample was ~ 33,500 and the response sufficiently large to allow disaggregation to 5-digit SIC, Ward level and Parliamentary Constituency Area by Section level. The BRES 2019 data was more timely due to the automation of some statistical processes. The BRES 2020 sample is the smallest of our sample sizes and as such we hope to be able to publish employee job data by Headline industry and District Council Area, given a sufficient response rate.)
- The degree to which Labour Force Survey products are found useful varies. The LFS Religion Report received the highest number of respondents of all the LFS outputs finding it ‘not applicable or not useful’. This is in keeping with the TEO Religion Report user survey in 2019 which asked users the impact of ceasing to publish the bulletin. As such the LFS Religion Report will not be published in 2020. (LFS religion related data requests have been added to the user request section and PfG data are disaggregated by religion where possible: see PfG data here. No plans for a LFS religion report in 2020.)
- Users indicated demand for more bespoke analysis of the Labour Force Survey and the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. ELMS will consider the available resource for this service and will continue to publish the requests on line. Users also requested business vacancy data. ELMS plan to publish vacancy data from the Business Register and Employment Survey in 2020.