You asked
Please take this email as an official request for the following information:
The total number of union members for each union Prospect, PCS, Unite, GMB and FDA who are MOD civil servants working in the public sector or the total union membership who are MOD civil servants working in the public sector.
I believe this information is available on the statistical bulletin for Trade Union Membership dated May 2019, but I require the breakdown of the figure as on your bulletin you have grouped defence together with public administration and compulsory docoal security.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The Labour Force Survey (LFS) is the source of the data for the trade union statistics bulletin that you reference. The LFS does not ask respondents which union they are members of, so it is not possible to produce estimates of the members of individual unions.
The LFS does ask for the industry in which a respondent is working and whether they are working in the public or private sectors. It may be possible from this to approximate membership for MOD civil servants. Advice on how this can be done can be obtained from the customer services team of our Social Services Division: this team provides an ad hoc analysis service, including tabulations of the LFS. This service is subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate. Details of the variables included in these datasets can be viewed in the LFS User Guides
If you would like to enquire about our service, then please contact socialsurveys@ons.gov.uk
As this information is available through this route, Freedom of Information Act S21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the Freedom of Information Act. S21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest needs to be applied.
If you are able to do your own cross-tabulations, you could purchase an anonymised LFS dataset from the UK Data Service. Details on costs and how to download the data can be found on their website:
Advice for commercial users - http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/get-data/how-to-access/registration.aspx#/tab-commercial-users
Charges - http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/get-data/how-to-access/charges.aspx