Office for National Statistics (ONS)

Labour Market & Households Division

Office for National Statistics

Laura Caldwell
ONS (Newport)
Government Building
Cardiff Road
Newport
NP10 8XG
United Kingdom

The Monthly Business Survey (MBS) and Quarterly Business Survey (QBS) collect employment variables once a quarter in March, June, September and December, covering different industries. Estimates from these surveys are benchmarked to estimates from the Business Register & Employment Survey (BRES).

NACE Rev. 2.

Sections A to T of NACE Rev. 2.

The business surveys collect the following employment variables each quarter:
a. Male employees working more than 30 hours per week
b. Male employees working 30 hours or less per week
c. Female employees working more than 30 hours per week
d. Female employees working 30 hours or less per week
e. Total employees

An employee is anyone aged 16 years or over that the organisation directly pays from its payroll(s), in return for carrying out a full-time or part-time job or being on a training scheme.
Includes:
— all workers paid directly from
— this business's payroll(s)
— those temporarily absent but still being
— paid, for example on maternity leave.
Excludes:
— agency workers paid directly from the agency payroll
— voluntary workers
— former employees only receiving a pension
— self-employed workers
— working owners who are not paid via PAYE.

The estimates went through a number of changes released in 2010:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/elmr/economic-and-labour-market-review/no--9--september-2010/revisions-to-workforce-jobs.pdf

Accounting conventions: The business surveys use a reference date for employment counts.

The enterprise or the activities of a specified list of local units belonging to an enterprise are used as the reporting unit. Very often the latter of these is close to the KAU.

The observation unit is the same as the reporting unit, namely the enterprise or a list of local units.

In common with other business surveys conducted by ONS, the sampling frame is the Inter-departmental Business Register (IDBR). The IDBR stores detail of about 2 million businesses registered in the UK, and is maintained largely by updated from Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs, Companies House and surveys conducted by ONS specifically geared to maintaining the IDBR.

Data are collected separately for Great Britain and Northern Ireland but in a harmonised and integrated manner.

The geographical area covered is the United Kingdom. No activities are included outside of the United Kingdom.

Employment data has been collected from the Monthly Business Survey (MBS) and Quarterly Business Survey (QBS) since 2010Q1 and from their predecessors the Monthly Production inquiry (MPI), the Monthly Inquiry in to the Distribution and Services Sector (MIDSS) and the Quarterly Inquiry in to the Distribution and Services Sector (QIDSS) since 1996.

Not relevant.

Number of jobs.

The reference period is a specified day (the count date) in the quarter month. The questionnaire asks for the number of employee jobs on this day.

Legal basis is the Statistics of Trade Act 1947.

The business surveys are compulsory. Fines for refusing to provide information are laid down by the Statistics of Trade Act.

Not available.

Statistical disclosure control

Statistical disclosure control methodology is applied to Workforce Jobs data. This ensures that information attributable to an individual or individual organisation is not identifiable in any published outputs. The Code of Practice for Official Statistics, and specifically the Principle on Confidentiality set out practices for how ONS protects data from being disclosed. The Principle includes the statement that ONS outputs should ensure that official statistics do not reveal the identity of an individual or organisation, or any private information relating to them, taking into account other relevant sources of information. More information can be found on the Statistical Disclosure Control Methodology page of the ONS website.

http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/assessment/code-of-practice/index.html

https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/methodologytopicsandstatisticalconcepts/disclosurecontrol

A number of activities are confidential and they are protected by combining different headings.

Announced on ONS website: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/release-calendar/index.html

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/release-calendar/index.html

Policy on ONS website: http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/assessment/code-of-practice/index.html

Estimates are electronically transmitted to Eurostat via E-DAMIS.

Results are published on a quarterly basis.

See 10.2.

The survey estimates are published on a quarterly basis as part of the Vacancies and Jobs Statistical Bulletin:

Vacencies and jobs in the UK

The ONS website contains the survey data in an online format: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/employeejobsbyindustryjobs03

No microdata access available.

Data are transmitted to Eurostat for the publication and for the use in European aggregates.

See 10.7.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/method-quality/quality/quality-information/labour-market/summary-quality-report-for-workforce-jobs.pdf

Guidelines for measuring statistical quality: https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/methodologytopicsandstatisticalconcepts/qualityinofficialstatistics

The work the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is undertaking to monitor the quality of published statistics, and develop improvements to existing data can be found in the following link:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/methodologytopicsandstatisticalconcepts/qualityinofficialstatistics/qualitydefined

Furthermore the UK Statistics Authority publishes a report on each assessment it carries out. Workforce Jobs was assessed as part of Labour Market Statistics and the assessment can be found in the following link, report number 273.

http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/assessment/assessment/assessment-reports/assessment-report-273---statistics-on-the-labour-market.pdf

Users and uses

Workforce Jobs estimates and data produced for the quarterly publication are used across government, business and academia, and feed into a number of wider publications and outputs. Some government departments use the total figures to facilitate policy making, whereas others use specific components of the published data.

Some of the main users are:

• HM Treasury - WFJ estimates are used to assess labour market conditions and are an important indicator in the context of macroeconomic assessment;

• Bank of England (BoE) - the BoE Monetary Policy Committee is a user of WFJ estimates. The BoE use the WFJ estimates as an indicator for setting interest rates;

• Department for Education (DfE) - DfE use WFJ to inform and monitor policy making such as the success of their Welfare to Work programme;

• Eurostat -  estimates of EJ are supplied directly to Eurostat. This is a legal requirement under the Short Term Indicators Regulation (STIR);

• Devolved Administrations - Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Governments.

Assessment of user needs and perceptions

(The processes for finding out about users and uses, and their views on the statistical products.)

Workforce Jobs seeks to obtain user views and uses via:

•  consultation exercises. For example, during the redevelopment of Workforce Jobs in 2010, a consultation exercise was undertaken inviting users of quarterly employment estimates to provide their views and comments, shaping the outputs catalogue;

•  ad hoc meetings with Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland Governments;

•  feedback from users on an on-going basis;

•  triennial/quinquennial reviews of the sources and surveys which comprise WFJ.

Strengths and limitations

The WFJ series are designed to be comparable over its whole duration, and this, together with the accuracy of its industrial information, is its major strength. However, the series cannot provide detailed industrial breakdowns (for example, 4 digit SIC 2007) which are best sourced from the Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES). There is also no information available for geographies smaller than NUTS1 regions. Additionally, since WFJ is reliant on inputs from multiple sources, issues such as discontinuities in source data can impact on the quality of final outputs (see the Comparability and coherence section for more on this).

See 13.2 & 13.3.

Sampling error

WFJ estimates are mainly based on statistical samples and as such are subject to sampling error. Historically, this has not been measured, due to the various complexities of WFJ. However, work has been undertaken to produce approximate confidence intervals by region and industry section:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/datasets/workforcejobssamplingvariabilityjobs07

Non-sampling error

Non-sampling error is the error attributable to all sources other than sampling. It includes frame error such as undercoverage, treatment of non-response and outliers, measurement error and processing error. 

Response rates are monitored closely on a quarterly basis by the survey team. Furthermore, each survey has a list of critical respondents (usually those with the largest employment) where special efforts are made to achieve 100% response and clearance of test failures.

Provisional estimates are provided to Eurostat 2 months after the reference month and are updated shortly after the National Release approximately 2.5 months after the reference month.

The questionnaires are sent shortly before the quarterly count date.

For more details on related releases, the UK National Statistics Release Calendar is available online and provides 12 months’ advance notice of release dates. If there are any changes to the pre-announced release schedule, public attention will be drawn to the change and the reasons for the change will be explained fully at the same time, as set out in the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/release-calendar/index.html

http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/assessment/code-of-practice/index.html

Employee jobs estimates cover the whole UK economy as classified by industry using SIC 2007.

When methodological changes or other effects such as benchmarking (see the Coherence section) are made to the latest data, every effort is made to ensure the series is comparable over time. A comparable back series is available back to 1959 for annual estimates and 1978 for quarterly estimates.

Each year ONS publishes a comparison of estimates of jobs from LFS and WFJ: 

Reconciliation of estimates of jobs

See 17.1.

Not available.

Errors and revisions

In the event of a large error being detected with the data, all outputs and data sets will be revised in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. More information on revisions can be found in ONS’s Revisions and Corrections Policy and Guide to statistical revisions.

Reliance on surveys to collect information with which to produce statistics, means that events and economic trends cannot be measured in their entirety. As more information becomes available over time, estimates can be revised to improve quality and accuracy, which provides a better picture of what is being measured. A policy of accepting revisions improves the accuracy of the data as other information becomes available. Revisions are therefore standard practice when producing official statistics. In the case of WFJ, revisions are made to estimates for the previous period on a quarterly basis. Further to this, each year, revisions are made to the previous two years’ WFJ estimates to align the short-term employee jobs series to the latest estimates from BRES (please see the Coherence section for more details).

http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/assessment/code-of-practice/index.html

https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/methodologytopicsandstatisticalconcepts/revisions/revisionspoliciesforlabourmarketstatistics

See 17.1.

The employee jobs component of workforce jobs is compiled by measuring the movements in the Short Term Employment Surveys (STES) and is benchmarked to the Business Register & Employment Survey (BRES):

Employment variables are collected quarterly.

A single questionnaire is used for all respondents falling within the population regardless of size.

Historically business surveys have been sent as postal questionnaires and responses received by Telephone Data Entry (TDE).  However, a project is nearing completion to move collection of business surveys on-line. In the most recent period, 2019Q4, 28,100 responses were sought via electronic questionnaire. The remaining 7,900 responses were sought via postal questionnaire. The number of responses sought via electronic questionnaire will increase by approximately 7,100 from 2020Q2 as the remainder of the Monthly Business Survey (Construction industry) migrates from paper to electronic questionnaire.

The employment business surveys use an editing and validation approach known as selective editing. Selective editing is an internationally recognised method that uses a data based approach to assess the influence of business estimates on the aggregate outputs.

Imputations are made based on responses from similar units. Responses (and imputations) are weighted to the register population using a ratio estimator with registered employment used as the auxiliary variable.

Responses (and imputations) are weighted to the register population using a ratio estimator with registered employment used as the auxiliary variable.

None.