The Scottish Government’s Quality Assessment of the Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey and Annual Population Survey data for Scotland

6 Next Steps

The Scottish Government have shared the results of this quality assessment with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to feed into their overall understanding of the issues faced by users of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Annual Population Survey (APS) data for Scotland.

We will now undertake phase two of the quality assessment which will focus on what options are available to improve on Labour Market Statistics for Scotland.

This will include activities such as:

• data quality rules: exploring and assessing alternative data quality rules to ensure greater confidence in the statistics we publish
• considering where we add the greatest value to our users and maximising work there
• exploring alternative data options to supplement the LFS and APS such as investigating administrative data and alternative data sources that might provide additional labour market information below the headline Scotland level
• exploring whether long-term labour market trends can provide more robust overviews of the Scottish Labour Market compared with the shorter term trends we rely on now
• continuing to work with ONS, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency to better understand the quality issues in the APS and LFS data
• continuing to engage with ONS on their plans to transition to the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS). This includes providing feedback on plans and quality assurance of early outputs and the impact this will have on Scottish Labour Market Statistics

We will publish updates over the coming year as work progresses and will keep users regularly updated through our Scotstat newsletter mailing list. Please sign up to these if you would like to be kept informed of further updates.

Until phase two of the quality assessment is complete, we will continue to publish analysis based on the current data quality rules