1. Main points
The percentage of children living in long-term workless households has continued to decrease.
1.0 million children (7.9%) lived in long-term workless households in 2020.
79.7% of children in workless households lived in long-term workless households.
The South West had the lowest percentage of children in long-term workless households.
The North East had the highest percentage of children in long-term workless households.
A methodological review on the estimates in this bulletin found that previously a household’s status on whether they were long-term workless was based on an assessment of all returns from that household, not just the relevant years. This led to an undercount of long-term workless households from 2015 onwards although the revisions are relatively small. Following this review, estimates have now been updated.
2. Children living in long-term workless households data
Children living in long-term workless households (Table A1)
Dataset | Released on 27 October 2021
Annual estimates of the number of children living in households in the UK where all the adults have not worked for at least 12 months.
Children living in long-term workless households, by combined economic status (Table B)
Dataset | Released on 27 October 2021
Annual estimates of the number of children living in households in the UK where all the adults have not worked for at least 12 months, by combined economic status of adults in the household.
Children living in long-term workless households, by region (Table D)
Dataset | Released on 27 October 2021
Annual estimates of the number of children living in households in the UK where all the adults have not worked for at least 12 months, by region of residence.
3. Measuring the data
Annual Population Survey (APS) household datasets are used for analysis of family or household characteristics. For all analysis in this bulletin a household is defined as containing at least one person aged 16 to 64 years. This bulletin focuses on the number of children living in workless households (households where no adult is in employment) and long-term workless households (households where no adult has worked in the previous 12 months).
When the recent weighting methodology for the Labour Force Survey (LFS) was applied, there was a small error in the implementation. When calculating three-month averages for the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) the months used were the previous three-month average. For example, for the October to December period, the RTI data used were that for September to November. This led to a slight overestimation of the non-UK population by approximately 0.5%. This represents less than half the size of the sampling variability. The size is roughly the same over the quarters of 2020 and the impact on January to December 2020 APS estimates is about 14,000 for EU-born, 25,000 for non-EU-born and 39,000 for non-UK-born. The impact on LFS economic activity estimates at national level is mostly below 0.1% and the impact on rates is less than 0.02 percentage points.
Coronavirus
For information on how labour market data sources are affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, see the article published on 6 May 2020, detailing some of the challenges that we have faced in producing estimates.
An article published on 11 December 2020 compares our labour market data sources and discusses some of the main differences.
Labour Force Survey (LFS) responses published from 15 July 2021, and the Household Annual Population Survey estimates used in this bulletin, have been reweighted to new populations using growth rates from HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC's) Real Time Information (RTI), to allow for different trends during the coronavirus pandemic. Our Impact of reweighting on Labour Force Survey key indicators, UK: 2020 article explains the reweighting methodology, which gives improved estimates of both rates and levels.
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