Labour Market Statistics Transformation in Northern Ireland
Labour Market Statistics Transformation in Northern Ireland
Labour Market Survey in Northern Ireland - Update and Progress
The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is continuing to transform 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.
NISRA has developed the Labour Market Survey (LMS), a locally tailored and shortened NI questionnaire, which closely aligns with the ONS’s Core Transformed Labour Force Survey for GB, to make it suitable for online completion, while delivering priority information needs for the continuance of UK level Labour Market Statistics.
NISRA will be undertaking the end-to-end processing of the data it collects through the new NI LMS. The ONS will combine the NI LMS data with the corresponding processed data from the GB LFS, seasonally adjusting it to facilitate the production of finalised NI and UK results. As per current arrangements, ONS and NISRA will release the NI and UK outputs at the same time on the same day. The transformed LMS questionnaire first went into the field in October 2023 with NISRA having now secured NI respondent data based on all 5 waves of the survey. This data is being used to finalise the build of NISRA’s processing system and examine its level of representativeness with the characteristics of the population. Results so far have been encouraging.
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%).
Over the coming months, NISRA will be holding a number of User Engagement Events to provide detailed updates and present some initial findings from the LMS. Users will be notified of these events nearer the time.
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