NISRA logo

Labour Market Statistics – Newsletter

Published 24 January 2025

Welcome to the Labour Market Statistics Newsletter

Welcome to the fourth Labour Market Statistics Newsletter. This newsletter provides an overview of key Labour Market developments throughout 2024 and those planned in 2025.

1. Labour Market Statistics User Group

In keeping with best practice, NISRA plan to provide users with relevant updates on the transformation of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) throughout 2025 as and when appropriate. Details of the next Labour Market Statistics user group will be sent in due course.

2. Impact of the Labour Force Survey reweighting on the Northern Ireland labour market results

The ONS has recently undertaken an exercise to re-weight the LFS to take account of updated population estimates. In advance of their Labour Market Overview published on the 17th December, ONS released some communication in respect of the reweighting exercise,Impact of reweighting on Labour Force Survey key indicators: December 2024. d As part of their re-weighting work, the ONS discovered an error in their processing of the NI LFS results dating back to the January to March 2020 quarter. NISRA provided some further detail on the reweighting impact for NI’s key labour market indicators: this can be found at https://www.nisra.gov.uk/publications/background-information-lfs.

The newly reweighted series up to the August to October 2024 quarter can be viewed in the Labour Market Report published on the 17th December. When compared to other UK countries and regions for August to October 2024, Northern Ireland has the lowest unemployment rate, the fourth lowest employment rate (behind the North East, Wales and Yorkshire & The Humber) and the second highest inactivity rate (just behind the North East). These rankings are all based on seasonally adjusted rates.

NISRA continues to work towards the transformation of the LFS through an online-only Labour Market Survey, which is progressing well. As part of this work, the development of the processing systems required for the production of NI results has greatly enhanced NISRA’s ability to quality assure the ONS’s reworking of the key NI labour market results presented as part of this exercise.

3. Labour Market Statistics – Transformation in Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is currently in the process of transforming the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and associated labour market statistics for Northern Ireland. This work is being advanced alongside work by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to transform the LFS in Great Britain.

On 10th April 2024, NISRA published The Transformation of Labour Market Statistics in Northern Ireland – NISRA User Information Paper April 2024. This paper provided background on the current LFS together with an overview of NISRA’s Social Surveys, outlining both the potential and necessity to change how such surveys are conducted in the future. The paper also details how the new Labour Market Survey (LMS) will follow an online first approach, highlighting how both the content of the questionnaire and the supporting field operation have been tailored to meet local needs.

Alongside this, an LMS & LFS Mapping Document - April 2024 was published. This document compared all of the questionnaire variables in the LMS to the equivalent in the LFS and highlights the differences and similarities between the two surveys. More information on the transformation of the Labour Market Statistics in NI can be found at Labour Force Survey Transformation.

The transformed LMS questionnaire first went into the field in October 2023, following development, user engagement and testing of the questionnaire content and a successful pilot involving circa 1,000 HHs.

We are now in the position of securing data based on all 5 waves of the survey and are using that to finalise the build of NISRA’s processing system, which has been developed with the professional input of informed colleagues at the ONS.

Participation in the survey by the general public is encouraging, with overall Wave 1 response rates currently in the region of 54%, with the vast majority of responses (circa 96%) being complete end-to-end responses (hence very low levels of missingness).

Our expectation is that when we transition from the LFS to our online LMS, our monthly Labour Market Report analyses will be based on a significantly larger data file than is currently the case (i.e. for the most recent period there were approximately 7900 cases based on the LMS compared with approximately 5360 cases based on the LFS – an increase of 47%).

While the LMS secured sample shows an encouraging degree of representativeness with the characteristics of the population we are trying to assess, the NISRA processing system will encompass an adjustment for non-response bias, in line with arrangements throughout the rest of the UK.

In advance of sharing any results from the processing thus far, we are keen to secure some expert independent quality assurance of the processes we have developed, including the code that is used to generate the key economic labour market indicators such as employment, unemployment and inactivity. This independent expert quality assurance would pave the way for the processing system to be finalised and production of experimental results that will be used to inform NISRA’s transition to the LMS and shared with users through planned engagement.

If you have any queries regarding NISRA’s work in this space we would love to hear from you. All queries should be sent to: Labourmarketstatistics@nisra.gov.uk

4. ONS’s Labour market transformation – update on progress and plans

The latest information on ONS’s progress and plans can be found at Labour market transformation – update on progress and plans - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk).

5. Launch of the accredited official statistics badge

On 7th June 2024, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) launched the Accredited Official Statistics badge to replace the National Statistics badge. The replacement badge has appeared on labour market publications from this date onwards.

Accredited Official Statistics are official statistics that have been independently reviewed by the OSR and confirmed to comply with the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics. Accredited official statistics are called National Statistics in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

This change has been implemented following a review of the National Statistics designation by the OSR, which found that people were confused by the term ‘National Statistics’. This led to the introduction of the label ‘accredited official statistics’, to clarify the meaning of ‘National Statistics’. In order to make the designation of statistics clearer, and ensure consistency of language, the OSR introduced a new badge for accredited official statistics that replaces the old ’National Statistics’badge.

6. Business Register and Employment Survey 2023

The Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES) collects employee job figures by gender and working pattern from public and private sector businesses in Northern Ireland. In 2023, around 15,000 businesses were surveyed. This was a smaller sample year which allows for disaggregation of results at Headline Industry and District Council Area levels only. Results for the 2023 BRES survey are expected to be published in Spring 2025.

The BRES 2024 survey was issued in September 2024. This was a larger sample year with circa 35,000 businesses surveyed. Results are expected to be released in September 2025. The larger sample size allows the data to be disaggregated to small geographical areas and to 5-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) level.

7. Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) publication

The 2024 ASHE publication – “Employee Earnings in NI” – was be published in an HTML format on 29 October 2024.

ASHE data for 2011 to 2024 is currently available on the new NISRA Data Portal, allowing users to build their own bespoke tables. These can be found by either searching for ‘earnings’ in the search bar at the top of the website, or by selecting ‘Labour Market and Social Welfare’ from the list on the left-hand side of the website and clicking on ‘Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings’.

8. Good Jobs in Northern Ireland 2024

The Good Jobs in NI 2024 publication was be published on 11 December 2024.

Following engagement with the Department for the Economy, this paper provides a good jobs measure for NI. This provides a good jobs measure that focusses on aspects fundamental to all jobs, that is, jobs that offer an employee of working age (16 years to 64 years) a permanent contract that is a non zero-hour contract; and earnings at the level of the Real Living Wage or more. A fuller suite of indicators from the Labour Force Survey aligned to the Carnegie framework for good jobs will be released in coming months. More information on the Department for the Economy’s approach to good jobs can be found at Skills and Employment | Department for the Economy.

The most recent figures for this Good Jobs measure relate to 2024 and are derived from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings.

9. Work quality in Northern Ireland

The latest Work quality publication was released in February 2024. This release contained a time series of the Work Quality indicators. These are made up of seven indicators that are sourced from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), alongside an earnings indicator from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE).

All publications related to Work Quality can be accessed from the Work Quality Area on the NISRA website.

10. QES Statistical Production Project

The Quarterly Business Survey (QBS) team have recently completed a project to update their statistical production processes. The project involved working with an external consultant with expertise in R coding to update the current statistical processes, which used a mix of SAS and Excel, to using R open-source software. The project has successfully introduced a RAP (Reproducible Analytical Pipeline) process for the quarterly surveys (including the Quarterly Employment Survey (QES)) – meeting key aims set out in the 2023/24 NISRA Business Plan and the GSS Quality Strategy.

Users should be aware that the QBS team will now begin phase two of the statistical production project and begin developing HTML outputs to replace the current PDF bulletins. Users will be informed through quarterly user engagement emails once the transition to HTML outputs has completed.

11. HMRC PAYE RTI data

NISRA are continuing to engage with HMRC to access the HMRC PAYE RTI data for the purposes of population and economic statistics.

13. Upcoming Publications

Work Quality in Northern Ireland - March 2025

Business Register and Employment Survey – Spring 2025

Thanks for reading

Please let us know if you have found this newsletter useful, and if there is anything else you would like to see in future editions. Please email us, at Labourmarketstatistics@nisra.gov.uk