Reflections on fifteen years of change in using the Labour Force Survey

T he last decade or so has been a period of enormous improvement and increase in public confidence in the UK’s official labour market statistics generally. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publication Labour Market Review 2006 gives an overview of the improved state of labour market statistics in the UK and reflects the wealth of information that is now available from a wide range of sources. This article concentrates on those improvements to labour market statistics that have stemmed from the remarkable transformation of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) during the past 15 years. In 1991, the LFS was a valuable but obscure annual survey of households, published in isolation from other sources of labour market statistics a year or so after each year’s interviews took place. Users saw its value to be that it provided labour market information relating to population subgroups not identifiable from other sources. In sharp contrast, in 2006 the LFS is in the forefront of media attention each month as the up-to-date source of some of the most essential elements of ONS’s integrated monthly presentation of labour market statistics. The media see the LFS as the source of trusted unemployment statistics on the basis of the internationally-agreed definition, and economic analysts see the LFS as one of the principal sources of whole economy macroeconomic indicators.