Local Area Labour Markets statistics

29 July 2010

Scotland's Chief Statistician today published statistics from the Annual Population Survey (APS).

The APS is an annual version of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the official source of many labour market and lifelong learning indicators for Scotland and its local authority areas. The publication provides a summary of data covering key indicators such as employment rates, unemployment rates, rates of young people not in education, employment or training and qualification breakdowns.

The data covers the calendar year, January to December 2009. Although Scotland is now officially out of recession there tends to be a lagged effect with labour market indicators continuing to deteriorate for sometime afterwards as reflected in the report findings.

Some of the main findings:

• There is considerable variation in employment rates across Scotland's local authorities. In 2009, employment rates varied from 63.3 per cent in Glasgow City to 89.0 per cent in the Orkney Islands. This compares to an average employment rate of 73.9 per cent in Scotland based on Jan-Dec 2009 data
• The majority of local authorities (25 in total) experienced a reduction in employment rates between 2008 and 2009 reflecting the challenging economic circumstances

• All local authorities have seen an increase in their unemployment rate over the past year. Those showing the largest increase in unemployment between 2008 and 2009 are North Ayrshire, East Ayrshire, Glasgow City, Clackmannanshire, West Dunbartonshire and Inverclyde, all up by more than 3.0 percentage points over the year

• Between 2008 and 2009 the proportion of 16 to 19 year olds estimated to be not in education, employment or training (NEET) increased by 2.0 per centage points from 11.8 per cent to 13.8 per cent

Trends in Scotland's labour market are monitored monthly using the quarterly LFS. The latest data, covering the period March-May 2010, is available on the ONS website.

As the quarterly LFS has a smaller sample size it cannot be used to monitor trends below Scotland-level so the APS remains the best source for local area labour market trends.

References to working age population throughout the publication refer to the traditional working age definition (females aged 16-59 and males aged 16-64). As the data covers up to December 2009, it does not take into account recent changes to the female state pension age in 2010.

Official statistics are produced by professionally independent statistical staff.

Source:  Scottish Government