FOI reference: FOI-2024-2141
You asked
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:
- From the Labour Force Survey quarterly dataset, how many people whose last job was in construction became economically inactive each year due to sickness or injury, from 2014 to the most recent data release, broken down by reason
- The number of working days lost each year since 2014 to sickness in the construction industry
- The average number of working days lost each year to sickness across all industries
We said
Thank you for your query regarding sickness and the construction industry data available from the Labour Force Survey (LFS).
We do not hold the information requested in your first question. The LFS would not be able to tell you the reason why someone became economically inactive. It only asks individuals their current reason for not looking for work, which may differ from the reason they originally left a job.
If you would like to discuss further what alternative information we could provide from the LFS for this question, please contact our Social Surveys team to discuss bespoke analysis options. Bespoke services are subject to disclosure controls, legal frameworks, resources, and an agreement of costs in line with the ONS Charging Policy. Please note that such an analysis may not yield very usable results in this case due to the small sample sizes that would be involved.
In response to your second and third questions, we produce an occasional release looking at Sickness absence in the UK labour market. The latest version of this release included analysis up to the year 2022. Within the published analysis for that article, there are estimates of the total number of days lost to sickness absence overall and within the construction industry. Whilst we have a series for total days lost that goes back to 1995, the series for the construction industry only goes back to 2019.
Again, you could request a tailored analysis to produce a longer time series for the construction industry, as detailed above.