Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what are the employee activity rates for people aged between 16 and 25 in (1) Wales, (2) England, (3) Scotland, and (4) Northern Ireland.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

A response to the Hon gentleman’s Parliamentary Question of 11th June is attached.

Dear Lord Wigley,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what are the employee activity rates for people aged between 16 and 25 in (1) Wales, (2) England, (3) Scotland, and (4) Northern Ireland (HL8389).

An employee activity rate measures the amount of time employees spend engaged in productive billable work, versus non-billable activities. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) does not collect any information from businesses on their estimated employee activity rates.

We can estimate the proportion of the population aged from 16 to 25 years, that are employed as employees, which may be interpreted as an employee activity rate.

The ONS uses the Annual Population Survey (APS), which is a survey of people resident in households in the UK, to estimate the number of employees in the countries of the UK and the proportion of the population aged from 16 to 25 years that this represents.

Table 1 contains APS estimates of the number of employees aged 16 to 25 years and the proportion of the population of that age this represents, for the countries of the UK, for the period January to December 2024, the latest data currently available.

The ongoing challenges with response rates, response levels and weighting approach mean that labour market statistics based on the Annual Population Survey (APS) are subject to increased volatility and are considered ’official statistics in development’ until further review.

Yours sincerely,

Emma Rourke

Table 1: Number of employees aged 16 to 25 years and the proportion of the population of that age that represents, for the countries of the UK, January to December 2024.

Source: Annual Population Survey