Claimant Count: Change in method used to produce local authority figures

The geographic method used to produce local authority figures in claimant count datasets changed on 18 Jan 2010.

Prior to 18 Jan 2012, much of the geographic information for the claimant count (number of people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance) was aggregated using 1991 frozen census wards on a best fit basis i.e. if a ward was in more than one geographic area, it would be allocated to the area where the majority of that ward’s population lived. This was a historical limitation inherited from the main claimant count processing system.

ONS's new geography policy states that all geographies should be built up using single stable building blocks on a best fit basis, usually output areas or lower level super output areas (LSOA).  When the new parliamentary constituencies were introduced in 2010 ONS used the flexibility of NOMIS to build the new PCs and implemented the ONS geography policy by using LSOAs as the building block.

From 18 January 2012, the range of geographies that are constructed using LSOAs have been expanded to include local authorities and related areas and ONS will use these data as the National Statistic. These changes were announced in the December 2011 Regional Labour Market Statistical Bulletin. The changes have been retrospectively applied to all dates back to October 2004 when LSOA data was first published for the claimant count, thus introducing a discontinuity to the time series at that date. The Nomis geographies affected are:

• local authorities: county / unitary
• local authorities: district / unitary
• local enterprise partnerships
• regions
• Jobcentre plus districts as of April 2011
• Jobcentre plus groups as of April 2011
• pre-2009 local authorities: county / unitary
• pre-2009 local authorities: district / unitary

At local authority level there is little or no difference between either methods of aggregation for most areas. Of the 406 local authorities in the UK, 264 had no change at all in the level of the claimant count and a further 118 changed by less than 1 per cent. Of the remaining 24 local authorities, which changed by 1 per cent or more, only 6 changed by more than 5%. Of these local authorities our analyses suggest that the LSOA aggregation more accurately corresponds to the actual local authority boundaries.

The attached spreadsheet shows the local authorities where the level of change was greater than 1%.

Further changes may be made to more geographies as more data becomes available.


For further information contact Jonathan Knight:
    email: jonathan.knight@ons.gov.uk
    tel: 01633 455253