Factors affecting earnings and the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE)

You asked

Under the Freedom of Information Act, please can you inform me:

When the Office of National Statistics intends to publish its update to its analysis of factors affecting earnings using Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, based on 2017 ASHE data.

What is the reason for the delay in publication of this analysis, in comparison to the 2016 and 2015 versions of the analysis?

Please can you also provide me with copies of any correspondence between the Office of National Statistics and the Treasury regarding this publication (Analysis of factors affecting earnings using Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2017).

We said

Thank you for your request.

Please see the following response to your questions.

We have not confirmed a publication date for the update to the analysis of factors affecting earnings using Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, based on 2017 ASHE data. Once a decision has been made the public will be notified on the Office of National Statistics Release Calendar as is normal practice.

The reason for the delay in publication, compared with previous years, for the analysis based on 2017 ASHE is that we have been developing our model to include wider components of remuneration. Consideration is being given to whether additional elements such as employer pension contributions (which are collected on ASHE) should be included in the analysis to give an additional, more detailed, picture of reward from employment. An article ‘Is Pay higher in the public or private sector?’ published in November 2017 noted that the existing analysis is based only on mean pay per hour (excluding overtime), and in Footnote 1 it was outlined that we are developing this way of looking at differences between earnings.

A copy of email communications between ourselves and HM Treasury can be found in Document 1 . Also attached is a set of slides presented by us - about our plans for the 2017 publication - to the Earnings Statistics User event (hosted by us) in February 2018.