ONS have produced a paper which gives details of plans for changing the geographical basis for published claimant count statistics for local areas, including shorter-term plans for providing data according to '2003 statistical ward' boundaries by early 2004.

Plans for local claimant count data (MS Word document, 40kb)

Summary of shorter-term plans

New 2003 statistical ward data will be available on Nomis in similar detail to the present data by 1991 frozen wards from early 2004 (exact date to be confirmed). These 2003 ward data will be geographically compatible with data from the 2001 census.

Detailed data for individual 1991 frozen wards will cease to be available (except possibly aggregate totals), though for the time being they will still be produced for the purposes of producing official aggregates for higher standard geographies such as local authority districts. Historical data for 1991 frozen wards will remain available on Nomis.

Users of the 2003 ward data will need to recognise that official totals eg for districts, are still based on 1991 wards and may therefore disagree withfigures built up from the 2003 wards. There will be no back data for the 2003wards.

Details of the subsequent stages are given in the full paper which can be downloaded from the link.

Contacts

Any comments are welcome. Please contact ONS, Claimant Count and VacanciesBranch, Labour Market Division: