Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES) provisional results: 2012

To support this release a set of tables providing greater geographical and industrial detail is available.

Estimates presented in this release and associated published tables are rounded to prevent disclosure. Differences may exist in totals across tables due to rounding of estimates and disclosure methods used.

For 2012, employee job numbers are estimated as at 14 September.

Sub-regional estimates are based on the county and district geography boundaries at the time the survey sample was selected (September 2012).

BRES produces estimates of employees and employment (employees plus working proprietors). BRES therefore includes self-employed workers as long as they are registered for VAT or Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) schemes. Self employed people not registered for these, along with HM Forces and Government Supported trainees are excluded.

Employee jobs are allocated to the area in which the workplace is located. Geographical figures relate to the area where employees work, which is not necessarily the same as where they live. Jobs at local hospitals, for example, may be situated in one local authority while the employees/people may reside in another.

The public sector comprises central government, local government and public corporations. The private sector comprises companies, sole proprietors, partnerships and non-profit bodies.

An employee is defined as anyone aged 16 years or over that is paid directly from the payroll, in return for carrying out a full-time or part-time job or being on a training scheme. Employment includes employees plus the number of working owners who receive drawings or a share of the profits. Full-time is defined as working more than 30 hours per week with part-time defined as working 30 hours or less per week.

Farm agriculture figures are provided by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Department for Agriculture and Rural Development Northern Ireland. These figures are not available for all sub-regions so for consistency they have not been included in estimates below Region level. The figures have only been included at a 2-digit Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) level and above. Where employment in farm agriculture has been included in estimates it has been included within the private sector.

Alternative employment estimates are available from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Workforce Jobs (WFJ). BRES is the primary source for employee estimates at a detailed regional and industrial level. Workforce Jobs will benchmark the private sector employee component to the BRES private sector employee estimates on an annual basis. The WFJ series, which is compiled mainly from surveys of businesses, is the preferred source of statistics when comparing changes in employment by industry over time. The LFS, which collects information mainly from residents of private households, is the preferred source of statistics on employment at the whole economy level. The concept of employment (measured by the LFS as the number of people working at least one hour during the survey reference week) differs from the concept of jobs, since a person can have more than one job, and some jobs may be shared by more than one person. The LFS can also be used to produce estimates of the total number of jobs in the UK, by adding together the headline employment figures (which are equivalent to main jobs) and those for workers with a second job.

The public sector employee job figures from BRES aggregated to regional or national level will not match those produced from the Public Sector Employment release, which is the recommended source for public sector employment figures. For example, in 2012 the BRES estimates that there were 5.62 million employee jobs in the public sector in the UK. The public sector employment estimates for the UK in the comparable period (2012 Quarter 3) indicate that public sector employment was 5.75 million; a difference of 125,000. The Public Sector Employment figures include HM Forces, whereas BRES does not.

On 31 May 2012, ONS announced the reclassification of English further education corporations and sixth form colleges to the private sector, as Non-Profit Institutions Serving Households (NPISH), effective from 1 April 2012. As such, employee estimates for English further education colleges and sixth form college corporations are included in ONS estimates of public sector employment for 2011 and earlier years. From 2012 onwards, English further education corporations and English sixth form college employment estimates will be included in the private sector.

A further breakdown of the number of employees, by region and industry, is provided on the Nomis website. Employee estimates from the Business Register and Employment Survey can only be viewed on Nomis by applying for access, details of which can be found on the Nomis website.

Figures are classified to the 2007 revision to the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). BRES includes breakdowns by public and private sector according to the legal status of employees for National Accounts classification purposes.

The coefficient of variation (cv) is a statistical measure of the precision of an estimate. Generally, the smaller the cv, the higher the quality of the estimate. Regional level coefficients of variation for the 2012 total employee estimates are shown in the table below:

Quality Methodology Information (QMI) for BRES is published on the ONS website and updated each year. This year's update will take place by the end of October 2013.

BRES is a sample survey. For the 2012 survey period, approximately 82,000 businesses were sampled for Great Britain. Further details of the sample design can be found in the BRES QMI. The response rate for the 2012 BRES survey was 89%. Northern Ireland data was collected independently by the Northern Ireland Statistical and Research Agency (NISRA).

The statistical contact for this release is Mark Williams (mark.williams@ons.gov.uk).

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