You asked
I would like to know, does ONS have a definition of ‘self-employed’ which it uses in its datasets on employment, in particular, with regards to EMP14: Employees and self-employed by industry?
We said
Thank you for your request.
Estimates of the number of people who are self-employed, like those published in EMP14, are produced from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which is a survey of people resident in households.
In the LFS, after having established that someone meets the international definition of employment, someone is classified as 'self-employed' based on their response to the question: "Were you working as an employee or were you self-employed?" Consequently, it is based on the respondent's self-classification. Further details are available in Volumes 2, 3 and 4 of the LFS user guides.