Regional employment from 1970

FOI reference: FOI-2025-2804

You asked

I am looking for regional employment data across England from 1970.

We said

Thank you for your query regarding regional employment data.

We produce estimates of regional employment from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), based on interviews with people resident in households in the UK.

The definition of “region” changed in the early 1990’s, with the new regions covering different geographical areas to the older Standard Statistical Regions. Due to the way in which georeferenced data was stored on older datasets, it was only possible to code datasets from 1992 onwards to the new regions. Older datasets did not have sufficient geographical detail stored to convert them to the new regions.

Consequently, we only have LFS information on regional employment from 1992 onwards consistent with the current definition of region.

This data is published in our Labour market in the regions of the UK release in our table HI00 Regional labour market: headline Labour Force Survey indicators for all regions.

Prior to 1992 some of the regions were similar to the updated geographic areas, although some were completely different. We retain some information on these equivalent regions for the Spring period only, back to 1984, taken from old, published articles. I have included these in the attached spreadsheet.

Prior to 1984, regional employment estimates were not produced from the survey.