FOI reference: FOI-2024-2356
You asked
I wish to make a freedom of information request. Nomis data, from the labour force survey, pertaining to country of birth and nationality by region has, for quite some time, been labelled as "temporarily unavailable".
I would be grateful if you could a) tell me why this has been the case for so long, b) provide me with the actual data. If this is not possible, please can you tell me why it is not available.
We said
Thank you for your query regarding country of birth and nationality data on Nomis.
The data temporarily suspended on Nomis came from the Annual Population Survey (APS), which is an annualised version of the Labour Force Survey (LFS). The LFS is a household survey based on interviews with individuals resident in households in the UK.
Historically, the LFS has been based primarily on face-to-face interviews at a first wave of contact, followed up by telephone, or face-to-face interviews in subsequent waves. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic the ONS had to suspend face-to-face interviewing as an initial form of contact and rely on telephone-based collection only.
This change in collection mode for the initial collection wave led to a significant change in the pool of people who responded to the survey. One very noticeable characteristic of this change in non-response bias was the poor response from migrants, leading to implausible movements in our country of birth and nationality statistics. This led to us suspending our labour market statistics relating to levels of migrants in 2021.
Following this initial suspension, a new temporary methodology was developed for the LFS relating to migrant counts, making use of information from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Indicators (RTI) data. This method uses calibration constrained to UK, EU and Non-EU groups, which was identified as the priority level of disaggregation required. Whilst allowing for the production of migrant information for those three groups, this methodology is not designed to support more granular country breakdowns.
With the introduction of this new methodology, we reintroduced the publication of high level country of birth and nationality breakdowns from the LFS. However, the detailed country level breakdowns from LFS and APS remained suspended. This information therefore is not held.
After further methodological work, the current reweighting of the LFS is based on a later iteration of weighting methodology. It is hoped that this version, as well as using more up to date population estimates, will allow us to reintroduce further breakdowns by country of birth and nationality from LFS. However, this is subject to quality assurance that will be carried out on these data once our reweighting work is completed.
If the new methodology does deliver detailed country information that we are happy with for LFS, the next step would be to apply similar methodology to APS datasets. Assuming this work proves satisfactory, we would then be able to reintroduce the suspended datasets on Nomis.