You asked

I would like to request information on:

  1. How job vacancy figures for the Vacancy Survey are obtained?

  2. Can you provide a list of businesses which are surveyed in order to obtain job vacancy figures for the Vacancy Survey?

  3. What effort does the ONS go to in order to ensure that job vacancy figures for the Vacancy Survey are correct and indicate legitimate available jobs?

  4. In the last 12 months, has the ONS had knowledge of jobs being advertised which are, in fact, not actually available?

  5. What repercussions arise for businesses who are found to be reporting job vacancies that are fake or non-existent?

We said

  1. The Vacancy Survey produces monthly estimates of job vacancies across the whole economy. Questionnaires are sent to a sample of approximately 6,000 businesses every month. The following link contains quality, methodology and background information relating to the survey covering the whole of the UK economy (excluding agriculture, forestry and fishing):

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/qmis/vacancysurveyqmi

  2. Business details are confidential so we are unable to provide these. We cannot make lists of individual businesses available to the public. Under s.39 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, ONS is prohibited to disclose personal information obtained for statistical purposes. s.44(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 states that information is exempt from disclosure if its disclosure is prohibited by any enactment.

  3. Responses to the survey are subject to validation checks based on the size of the return compared to the employment size of the business and are also compared to returns from other similar surveyed businesses.

    Where a return is identified as looking too high or too low the business is contacted by ONS for confirmation that the return is correct before it is used in the survey.

  4. ONS is only concerned with returns to ourselves from businesses. We do not compare business returns against job adverts.

    Occasionally businesses are found to have accidentally misreported the number of job vacancies to ONS. For example, a business may incorrectly include vacancies which have been filled and are no longer available. When this is found to be the case the business return is revised and this is reflected in revised results for the survey.

  5. Returns from businesses are received in good faith. The questionnaire provides a list of inclusions and exclusions to help the business fill in the form correctly. Where a business has misreported they are advised how to complete correctly and the return is corrected and relevant results are revised.

    There is a legal requirement to complete the survey and failure to complete can incur penalties under the Statistics of Trade Act 1947. Deliberately providing false information could also incur penalties under this act:

    http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/10-11/39/section/4