Unemployed benefit claimants

You asked

I am currently using the following datasets from nomsiweb.co.uk with the information on unemployment and benefit claimants:

1. Registrants stocks - published June 1972 - October 1982 - Pre-1996 counties - Breakdown by gender

2. Jobseeker's Allowance with rates and proportions - June 1983 - June 1993 - Pre-1996 counties and pre-1996 districts - Breakdown by gender - Total claimants

3. Registrants - age and duration - July 1978 - January 1979 - pre 1996 counties - Breakdown by gender and age

4. Registrants - age and duration - April 1979 - October 1982 - pre 1996 counties - Breakdown by gender and age

5. Claimant count - age and duration - October 1983 - June 1993 - Pre-1996 counties and pre-1996 districts - Breakdown by gender and age

Please provide datasets 1, 3 and 4 with a breakdown by pre-1996 districts.

Please could you clarify the meaning of “Total claimants” in Job Seeker’s Allowance with rates and proportions dataset. Is the total claimants in the second dataset similar to the stock of unemployed claimants? And since the option of choosing variables is not available for earlier datasets, which notion better ensures continuity: unemployed claimants or total claimants?

We said

Thank you for your request.

For the registrant datasets, the level of detail that is available on Nomis is the lowest level of geographic information that we have. Those electronic datasets were actually created from entering data from sets of hard-copy published tables. So what we have is already available.

For the Job Seeker's Allowance (JSA) with rates and proportions dataset, the term 'Total claimants' arises from the replacement of the previous system of compiling data, to the use of computerised records. Although individual computerised records were used, for various reasons not everyone was recorded in the computer system and some claims had to be dealt with outside the system, which we refer to as "clerical claims". For example, people without National Insurance Numbers or without an address could not be recorded within the system. Consequently, in addition to using the computerised records, counts of the number of records that were being dealt with clerically were also collected. The Total claimants in this dataset reflects that the counts have the number of clerical claims added to the number of computerised claims. This is different from our JSA age and duration dataset covering the same period, which is only based on the computerised claims, since we do not have full characteristic information for these clerical claims.

If you have further queries about the information available and the detailed history of the datasets that we hold on Nomis, it would be best to direct your queries to the Nomis helpdesk as they have more information on the history of those specific datasets. They can be contacted through support@nomisweb.co.uk, which is also given as the contact information in the top right corner of each page of the website.