Labour market in the regions of the UK: February 2022

Regional, local authority and Parliamentary constituency breakdowns of changes in UK employment, unemployment, economic inactivity and other related statistics.

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Contact:
Email Bob Watson

Release date:
15 February 2022

Next release:
15 March 2022

2. Main points

  • Between December and January 2022, the number of payrolled employees continued to increase in all regions, with levels now above pre-coronavirus pandemic levels.

  • For the three months ending December 2021, the highest employment rate estimate in the UK was in the East of England (79.1%); the lowest employment rate was in Northern Ireland (70.7%).

  • The largest change in the employment rate compared with the same period last year was in Wales, with an increase of 2.2 percentage points; the largest decrease in the employment rate was in the South East, at 0.8 percentage points.

  • For the three months ending December 2021, the highest unemployment rate estimate in the UK was in the North East (5.6%) and the lowest was in Northern Ireland (2.7%); both Yorkshire and The Humber, and the East Midlands, saw record lows in the unemployment rate at 3.8 and 3.4 percentage points respectively, with the East Midlands also recording a record low level (82,000 people).

  • The East Midlands saw the largest decrease in the unemployment rate compared with the same period last year, with a decrease of 2.9 percentage points, followed by London at 2.1 percentage points.

  • For the three months ending December 2021, the highest economic inactivity rate estimate in the UK was in Northern Ireland (27.3%) and the lowest was in the East of England (18.4%); The East Midlands saw the largest increase in the economic inactivity rate compared with last year at 1.7 percentage points, while the largest decrease in the economic inactivity rate was seen in Wales, with a decrease of 1.1 percentage points.

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3. Latest headline estimate

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4. Regional labour market data

Headline Labour Force Survey indicators for all regions
Dataset HI00 | Released 15 February 2022
Headline labour market indicators from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for all the UK regions. These cover economic activity, employment, unemployment, and economic inactivity. Datasets HI01 to HI12 provide all regional level indicators for each region of the UK.

Claimant count by unitary and local authority (experimental)
Dataset CC01 | Released 15 February 2022
Claimant count for people residing in local and unitary authorities, counties, and regions of the UK.

Regional labour market summary
Dataset S01 | Released 15 February 2022
Labour market indicators for countries and regions of the UK, covering employment, unemployment, claimant count, and workforce jobs.

Local indicators for counties and local and unitary authorities
Dataset LI01 | Released 18 January 2022
Labour market indicators for local and unitary authorities, counties, and regions in Great Britain for a 12 month period.

Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, seasonally adjusted
Dataset | Released 15 February 2022
Earnings and employment statistics from Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) (Experimental Statistics), seasonally adjusted.

All regional labour market datasets used in this bulletin are available on the Related data page.

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5. Glossary

Actual and usual hours worked

Statistics for usual hours worked measure how many hours people usually work per week. Compared with actual hours worked, they are not affected by absences, and so can provide a better measure of normal working patterns. For example, a person who usually works 37 hours a week who was on holiday for a week would be recorded as working zero actual hours for that week, while usual hours would be recorded as 37 hours.

Economic inactivity

People not in the labour force (also known as economically inactive) are not in employment, but do not meet the internationally accepted definition of unemployment. This is because they have not been seeking work within the last four weeks, and/or they are unable to start work in the next two weeks. The economic inactivity rate is the proportion of people aged between 16 and 64 years who are not in the labour force.

Employment

Employment measures the number of people in paid work or who had a job that they were temporarily away from (for example, because they were on holiday or off sick). This differs from the number of jobs because some people have more than one job. The employment rate is the proportion of people aged between 16 and 64 years who are in employment. A more detailed explanation is available in our guide to labour market statistics.

Local labour market indicators

Local labour market indicators cover employment, unemployment, economic inactivity and jobs density for sub-regional geographical areas such as local and unitary authorities, counties and regions in the UK, for the most recent 12 month period available of the Annual Population Survey (APS). The jobs density of an area is the number of jobs per head, of resident population, aged 16 to 64 years.

Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI)

These data come from HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC's) Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) system. They cover the whole population rather than a sample of people or companies, and they allow for more detailed estimates of the population. The release is classed as Experimental Statistics because the methodologies used to produce the statistics are still in their development phase. As a result, the series is subject to revisions.

PAYE is the system employers and pension providers use to take Income Tax and National Insurance contributions before they pay wages or pensions to employees and pensioners. This publication relates to employees only and not pensioners.

Unemployment

Unemployment measures people without a job who have been actively seeking work within the last four weeks and are available to start work within the next two weeks. The unemployment rate is not the proportion of the total population who are unemployed. It is the proportion of the economically active population (those in work plus those seeking and available to work) who are unemployed.

A more detailed glossary is available.

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6. Measuring the data

This bulletin relies on data collected from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), and the Annual Population Survey (APS) derived from it, the largest household survey in the UK.

Quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations and appropriate uses, is available in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) Quality and Methodology Information (QMI). The LFS performance and quality monitoring reports provide data on response rates and quality-related issues.

Data for Northern Ireland are available in full in the Northern Ireland Labour Market Report on the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) website. You can view local area statistics on the Nomis website.

Coronavirus (COVID-19)

For information on how labour market data sources are affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, see our Coronavirus and the effects on UK labour market statistics article, published on 6 May 2020. It details some of the challenges that we have faced in producing estimates.

Our Comparison of labour market data sources article, published on 11 December 2020, compares our labour market data sources and discusses some of the main differences.

Labour Force Survey (LFS) responses published from 15 July 2021 have been reweighted to new populationsusing growth rates from HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC's) Real Time Information (RTI). This allows for different trends during the coronavirus pandemic. Our Impact of reweighting on Labour Force Survey key indicators, UK: 2020 article explains the reweighting methodology, which gives improved estimates of both rates and levels.

When the recent weighting methodology for the Labour Force Survey (LFS) was applied, there was a small error in the implementation. When calculating three-month averages for the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) RTI, the months used were the previous three-month average. For example, for the October to December period, the RTI data used were those for September to November. This led to a slight overestimation of the non-UK population by approximately 0.5%. This represents less than half the size of the sampling variability. The size is roughly the same over the quarters of 2020, and the impact on January to December 2020 Annual Population Survey (APS) estimates is about 14,000 for EU-born, 25,000 for non-EU born and 39,000 for non-UK born. The impact on LFS economic activity estimates at national level is mostly below 0.1% and the impact on rates is less than 0.02 percentage points.

LFS and APS reweighting

We plan to reweight Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Annual Population Survey (APS) datasets that include data from March 2020. We will provide further details on our plans including a timeline in our March Labour Market publication.

Making our published spreadsheets accessible

Following the Government Statistical Service (GSS) guidance on releasing statistics in spreadsheets we will be amending our published tables over the coming months to improve usability, accessibility and machine readability of our published statistics. To help users change to the new formats, we will be publishing sample versions of a selection of our tables, and where practical, initially publish the tables in both the new and current formats. If you have any questions or comments, please email labour.market@ons.gov.uk.

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7. Strengths and limitations

The estimates presented in this bulletin contain uncertainty. The Labour Force Survey (LFS) gathers information from a sample of households across the UK. The sample is designed to be as accurate as possible given practical limitations. This can have an impact on how changes in the estimates should be interpreted, especially for short-term comparisons.

As the number of people in the sample gets smaller, the variability of the estimates that we can make from that sample gets larger. Estimates for small groups, which are based on small subsets of the sample, are less reliable and tend to be more volatile than for larger aggregated groups.

In general, changes in the numbers (and especially the rates) reported between three-month periods are small and are not usually greater than the level that is explained by sampling variability. For a fuller picture, short-term movements in reported rates should be considered alongside longer-term patterns in the series and corresponding movements in other sources.

Information on the quality of estimates is available in our Labour Force Survey sampling variability dataset.

The data in this bulletin follow internationally accepted definitions specified by the International Labour Organization (ILO). This ensures that the estimates for the UK are comparable with those for other countries. For more information, the Resolution concerning statistics of work, employment and labour underutilization publication is available to download from the ILO website.

Our reconciliation report of job estimates article, which compares the latest Workforce Jobs estimates with the equivalent estimates of jobs from the LFS (published every March), has been postponed until further adjustments are made.

Reliability of the main indicators in this bulletin can be obtained by monitoring the size of revisions. These measures are available in the Regional Sampling variability and revisions summary dataset.

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Contact details for this Statistical bulletin

Bob Watson
labour.supply@ons.gov.uk
Telephone: +44 1633 455070