FOI reference: FOI-2026-3467
You asked
I would like to request information about unemployment for people aged 16 to 24.
Please can you tell me:
- how many Deaf BSL users aged 16 to 24 are unemployed
- how many people with hearing loss aged 16 to 24 are unemployed
- whether you have any data for the West Midlands
- if not, whether you have UK data
- how these groups are defined in your data
- what year or period the data is from
I understand you may not have this information in full. If not, please send the closest data you have.
We said
Thank you for your request regarding unemployed young people, relating to BSL and those with hearing loss.
We produce estimates on the number of young people who are unemployed from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the annualised version of the dataset, the Annual Population Survey (APS), based on interviews with people resident in households in the UK. As part of the interview, we also collect a wide range of personal information about the interviewee.
Unfortunately, we do not collect any information on the use of BSL from these surveys, so cannot provide any estimates relating to unemployed BSL users.
We do collect information on people who have identified themselves as having a health condition lasting or expecting to last 12 months or more. Within this, people can then categorise the nature of any health conditions, including being able to classify themselves as having difficulty in hearing.
Due to relatively small sample sizes, the only output that we regularly create relating to unemployment using this information is for everyone aged 16 and over, and combines the category of difficulty in hearing with difficulty in seeing.
It would be possible to request an analysis to be produced that specifically only looked at those unemployed with difficulty in hearing and included age and geographic dimensions to it. However, please note that due to the small sample sizes involved, the more detailed the categories within your query, the less likely it is that we would have sufficient sample size to produce meaningful statistics.
You can make a request for a tailored analysis by contacting our social surveys team at socialsurveys@ons.gov.uk. There may be a charge for this service depending on the amount of time taken to develop the analysis and undertake quality and disclosure control processes.