Contents

Summary 4

1 Employment 7

1.1 Type of employment 10

1.2 Public and private sectors 12

1.3 Vacancies 13

2 Unemployment and economic inactivity 15

2.1 Unemployment 15

2.2 Redundancies 16

2.3 Economic inactivity 17

2.4 People claiming unemployment benefits 20

3 Earnings 21

4 People in the labour market 23

4.1 Women and men 23

4.2 Young people 24

4.3 Ethnic groups 25

4.4 Nationality 26

4.5 Disability 28

5 Problems with Labour Force Survey data 29

5.1 Is there a reliability problem with labour market statistics? 29

5.2 Is the quality of labour market statistics improving? 29

5.3 How does the reweighting affect the figures? 30

5.4 What happened between October 2023 and January 2024? 32

5.5 Does the ONS have a longer-term plan for labour market statistics? 33