Statistically Speaking - Labour & Wages: The tracking of employment and pay across the UK

Labour & Wages: The tracking of employment and pay across the UK

07/26/22 • 36 min

David Freeman and Nicola White join Miles to discuss how the Office for National Statistics (ONS) tracks employment and pay across the UK.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome again to Statistically Speaking, the Office for National Statistics podcast. In this episode, we enter the world of work and clock on for a shift with the ONS labour market team. We'll explore how they keep track of employment and pay across the UK and find out how the figures we hear so much about in the news should really be interpreted. At your service, are employees of the month, our head of labour market and household statistics David Freeman, and later on his colleague, senior statistician Nicola White.

David, let's start with the basics. And one common misconception you still hear around the official statistics on unemployment is that they're based on the number of people claiming out of work benefits. And so, the theory goes therefore, that they're subject to manipulation in some way. But to be absolutely clear, the figures don't come from any other government department. This is data that comes from the ONS talking directly to real people, in their tens of thousands. DAVID FREEMAN That's absolutely right, Miles. The bulk of the information that we publish as part of our labour market statistics come from something called the ‘Labour Force Survey’. As this is one of our big household surveys, every three months we sample 40,000 households across the UK. And we go and we interview the people in those households about their labour market status. So, are they working, are they not working. We also gather a lot of information about the people in those households, what age they are, whether they have got a disability, what ethnic group [they belong to], which gives a us rich picture of the UK labour market. MILES FLETCHER

And by the standards of any survey, any regular survey, that's a huge sample isn’t it. I know we don't go in for superlatives, but it's possibly the biggest household survey regularly undertaken of any kind? DAVID FREEMAN I think it is the biggest one in the UK, outside of the Census of course, and again, through the data that we use, we’ll learn about the labour market, but the data will also feed into things like population estimates. So quite a wide range of uses, but its core purpose is really trying to measure the UK labour market. MILES FLETCHER And it's that time spent with people to gather a whole raft of data from them, and at scale, that can give a localised picture, which is so important too. DAVID FREEMAN Absolutely, we get a lot of information from the Labour Force Survey, either by age groups, by country of birth, also by regional level, and we have an annual version of the Labour Force Survey where we put the data together across a longer time period, which means we can get data down to things like local authority levels as well which is important for local government. MILES FLETCHER

And how do we choose people to take part? DAVID FREEMAN

It’s a totally random process. So we have access to the postcode directory for the UK, which is effectively a list of all the households in the UK, and we take a random sample of those. However, we make sure within taking that sample that we're represented across the country. So within each local authority area, we've got enough people to be able to give us a robust estimate of what's happening there.

MILES FLETCHER

You stay in the survey a little while, don’t you?

DAVID FREEMAN

You do, that's right, and that's one of the strengths of the Labour Force Survey. If you're selected to take part, you are in there for what we call “five waves”. So if you're selected in January, we'll also come back and talk to you again in April, July, October and the following January. And that's important because not only do we find out what people are doing now, as you say we find out how people have changed, and whether they have moved into employment, out of employment, how have their circumstances changed. And that gives a deep insight into how people are flowing through the labour market and changing over time. MILES FLETCHER

So, big sample, lots of data coming in. When it comes to the analysis though, essentially, we group people under three big categories. Now the first of those is employment. It sounds self-evident, but what is the definition of an employed person? DAVID FREEMAN To be employed is to be someone who has done paid work in the reference week, so when we interview people we’ll say, what were you doing in the week before we're interviewing you? They are considered employed if they have done paid work for a minimum of one hour in that week. So the bar is, you could say it’s quite low, in terms of one hour of work a week. But we have looked, and not that many people work that little in a week – less than 3% of people work less than five hours. So, as well as you'll get paid, we have ...

David Freeman and Nicola White join Miles to discuss how the Office for National Statistics (ONS) tracks employment and pay across the UK.

Transcript:

And how do we choose people to take part? DAVID FREEMAN

MILES FLETCHER

You stay in the survey a little while, don’t you?

DAVID FREEMAN

Previous Episode

undefined - A Matter of Life & Death: The impact of declining fertility rates; the re-birth of a dataset buried for 50 years; and why you should call your baby Nigel.

A Matter of Life & Death: The impact of declining fertility rates; the re-birth of a dataset buried for 50 years; and why you should call your baby Nigel.

In this episode Miles is joined by Dr James Tucker and Sarah Caul MBE to talk about how and why the Office for National Statistics count births and deaths, and what current fertility trends might mean for the future population. They look at the impact of popular culture on the most common baby names in England and Wales, and discuss the new significance of a dataset that was itself buried for 50 years.

Transcript:

MILES FLETCHER

I’m Miles Fletcher and this episode of ‘Statistically Speaking’, the official ONS podcast, is literally a matter of life and death. Specifically how and why we count births and deaths and what those numbers are telling us. We'll talk about the possible impacts of declining fertility rates in the UK and of children being born to older parents. And at the other end of life we'll look at the new significance of a dataset that was itself almost buried for 50 years

I'm joined here at ONS by two people who lead on all our data around births and deaths - Head of Analysis in our health and life events teams, James Tucker, and our very own Head of Mortality, Sarah Caul MBE, honoured for her work during the pandemic about which we will talk later.

Starting with you then James, at the beginning as it were, with births - how does the ONS gather information about the number of children being born in England and Wales week in, week out? JAMES TUCKER So the registration of births is a service that's carried out by local registration services in partnership with the general register office in England and Wales and the good thing about this, from the perspective of having a really nice complete dataset, is that birth registrations are actually a legal requirement, giving us a really comprehensive picture of births in the countries. MF So we gather the numbers, we add them up, what do we do with the information then? JT So there's a couple of ways that we look at the data. One is to simply look at the number of births per year. So for example, we're looking at about 600,000 births per year at the moment. But an alternative approach is to use what we call the ‘total fertility’ rate, which is basically the average number of live children that women might expect to have during their childbearing lifespan. So it's a better measure than simply looking at the trends in the number of births because it accounts for changes in the size and age structure of the population. MF So it has a sort of multi-dimensional value then statistically that you can use to infer various things about the age at which people are likely to have children, and how many they're likely to have. JT That's exactly right. So we've seen some changes in the total fertility rate in recent years. So if you've heard the expression 2.4 children as describing the average number of children per family it's now considerably lower than that. In fact, it hit a record low in 2020 when the total fertility rate was 1.58. MF That's a sharp decline. In fact, though, you've got to go as far back as 1970, when the current series began, that's when it really was 2.4. What's really striking is if you look at that graph, the decline that happened between 1970 and about 1977 - very sharp decline there. Do we know what happened during that period? What were the factors driving that particularly? JT I think there can be all sorts of socio-economic factors affecting the fertility rate: improved access to contraception, reduction in mortality rates of children under five, which can result in women having fewer children. And also, more recently, as we've seen the average age of mothers going up, we might see some lower levels of fertility due to difficulties conceiving because of that postponement in childbearing. MF Sarah, I can see you want to come in on this. SARAH CAUL So my mother had three children by the time she was 30, and growing up I would just assume that that was the route I was going to take because it was what I've known. I am now 31 and I think if I was pregnant, that thought would scare me. I don't think I've grown up enough to have a child. I’m a dog mum, but those don't come into the statistics. MF So there was a bit of fanciful talk about people in lockdown finding - how should we put it delicately? - you know, things to do with their time, and that might lead to a boom in births. But that didn't really transpire? JT The increase in 2021 would actually coincide with conceptions across the second and third lockdowns. So yes, there was some speculation that people may have had enough of board games and were occupying their times in other ways, but I think it's actually more likely that it's a result of people delaying having children earlier on in the pandemic because of the uncertainty that was around at that point. And then towards the end of 2020 people had moved on from that and we saw a bit of an increase. MF Nonetheless though, historic data shows that there is a most common time of the year f...

Next Episode

Trust in Data: The importance of ethics and privacy in producing statistics for the public good

In this episode Miles is joined by Professor Luciano Floridi of Oxford University; Simon Whitworth of the UK Statistics Authority; and Pete Stokes from the ONS to talk about data ethics and public trust in official statistics.

TRANSCRIPT

MILES FLETCHER

Hello, I'm Miles Fletcher, and in this episode of Statistically Speaking we're exploring data ethics and public trust in official statistics. In 2007, 15 years ago to the very day we are recording this, the UK Parliament gave the Office for National Statistics the objective of promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good. But what does, or should, the “public good” mean? How does the ONS seek to deliver it in practice? Why should the public trust us to act in their interests at a time of exponential growth in data of all kinds? Where are the lines to be drawn between individual privacy and anonymity on the one hand, the potential of data science to improve public services and government policies to achieve better health outcomes, even saving lives, on the other.

Joining me to discuss these topics today are Simon Whitworth, Head of Data Ethics at the UK statistics authority, Pete Stokes, Director of the Integrated Data programme here at the ONS and Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy and the ethics of information and director of the digital ethics lab at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Professor let's start this big concept with you. What do you think Parliament meant when it said that the ONS should serve the public good in this context? LUCIANO FLORIDI

It might have meant many things, and I suspect that a couple of them must have been in their minds. First of all, we know that data or information, depending on the vocabulary, has an enormous value if you know how to use it. And, collecting it and using it properly for the future of the country, to implement the right policies, to avoid potential mistakes and to see things in advance - knowledge is power, information is power. So, this might have been one of the things that they probably meant by “public good”. The other meaning, it might be a little bit more specific...It's when we use the data appropriately, ethically, to make sure that some sector or some part of the population is not left behind, to learn who needs more help, to know what help and when to deliver it, and to whom. So, it's not just a matter of the whole nation doing better, or at least avoiding problems, but also specific sectors of the population being helped, and to make sure that the burden and the advantages are equally distributed among everybody. That's normally what we mean by public good and certainly, that analysis is there to serve it. MF

So there's that dilemma between using the power of data to actually achieve positive outcomes. And for government, on the other hand, being seen as overbearing, or Orwellian, and spying on people through the use of data. LF

That would be the risk that sometimes comes under the term “paternalism”, that knowing a lot about your citizens might lead to the temptation of manipulating their lives, their choices, their preferences. I wouldn't over-emphasise this though. The kind of legislation that we have and the constraints, the rules, the double checking, make sure that the advantage is always in view and can more easily be squeezed out of the data that we accumulate, and sometimes the potential abuses and mistakes, the inevitable temptation to do the wrong thing, are kept in check. So yes, the State might use the government’s political power, might misuse data, and so we need to be careful, but I wouldn't list that as my primary worry. My primary worry perhaps, would be under-using the data that we have, or making mistakes inadvertently. MF

Do you think then, perhaps as a country, the UK has been too cautious in this area in the past? LF

I don't think it has been too cautious, either intellectually or strategically. There's been a lot of talking about doing the right thing. I think it's been slightly cautious, or insufficiently radical, in implementing policies that have been around for some time. But we now have seen several governments stating the importance of that analysis, statistical approaches to evidence, and so on. But I think that there is more ambition in words than in deeds, so I would like to see more implementations, more action and less statements. Then the ambition will be matched by the actions on the ground. MF

One of the reasons perhaps there might have been caution in the past is of course concern about how the public would react to that use of data. What do we know of public attitudes now in 2022, to how government bodies utilise data? LF

I think the impression is that, depending on whom you ask, whether it is the younger population or slightly older people my age, people who lived in the 50s versus my students...