Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the extent to which people are excluded from unemployment statistics as a result of not being eligible for social security benefits.
The UK’s official measure of unemployment is produced by the independent ONS and based on the International Labour Organisation’s long-standing definition of unemployment: persons without work, available for work in the next 2 weeks, and who have actively sought work in the last 4 weeks.
The latest available statistics were released by the ONS on 11 June 2019 and show an unemployment rate (for ages 16+) of 3.8% - the lowest since 1974. This statistic is estimated using responses to the Labour Force Survey and is unrelated to a person’s eligibility for social security benefits.