Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people have been out of work who were blind or deaf in each calendar year from 2010 in (a) Sunderland City Council borough, (b) each English region and (c) England.

The tables attached provide estimates on the number of out of work people of working age in the local authority of Sunderland, each English region and England who reported having one of the following specific long term health conditions (as either their main or secondary health condition):

• Table 1: Difficulty in seeing or hearing
• Table 2: Conditions related to skin or epilepsy
• Table 3: Musculoskeletal conditions
• Table 4: Heart, blood pressure or blood circulation problems
• Table 5: Diabetes

Not all data is available by the exact health conditions requested. Where data on the blind and deaf has been requested, data on those who report having difficulty in seeing or hearing has been provided. In addition, data is also not available for those with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes, therefore only information for individuals who report they have any type of diabetes has been provided.

Data has been provided for each financial year between 2010/11 to 2015/16.

A change in how the survey questionnaire captures information on long term health conditions was made in April-June 2013. This change led to a break in the series and in order to provide data for complete years it has been presented in financial years, not calendar years. This series break also means that data for 2013/14 onwards cannot be compared with previous years. Data is not available for 2009/10 and has therefore not been provided.

The estimates provided are based on survey data and are therefore subject to sampling variation and bias, this means that some changes over time can appear volatile and should be treated with caution. Please see the full list of caveats below the tables for further methodological information on how this data was calculated and how these figures should be interpreted appropriately.