Dear Ed,

I am writing to request the suspension of the official statistics accreditation for the DCMS Sector Economic Estimates: Employment series. If you agree, we would publish this summer’s Economic Estimates: Employment in DCMS sectors, January 2024 to December 2024 as official statistics in development. 

Our employment outputs are created using the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) Annual Population Survey (APS) and following the suspension of ONS labour market statistics based on the APS, we have undertaken analysis of the quality of our estimates and the effect of sample size issues on the reliability of our estimates.  

The DCMS Sector Economic Estimates: Employment series is currently classed as accredited official statistics. The employment publication is our only accredited official statistic based on APS microdata and is used to estimate the number of filled jobs in DCMS sectors and subsectors. Employment data for DCMS sectors and subsectors are then further broken down by various demographics. 

The ONS has reported concerns regarding the quality of APS estimates, particularly for smaller segments of the population. In light of the concerns to the APS data, we have conducted analysis to understand the quality of our estimates. Following this, we have concerns regarding increased volatility due to low APS sample sizes and its impact on the reliability and quality of our estimates.  

We believe it would be appropriate to suspend the status of accredited official statistics DCMS Economic Estimates: Employment and classify the publication series as official statistics in development. This would be in line with the ONS’ approach to their own APS derived outputs and with other government departments who also publish statistics using the APS, including the Department for Science Innovation and Technology, which produces similar estimates of employment for the digital sector. 

We will continue to ensure we are transparent with users on how reliable our estimates are. With your agreement, we intend to publish DCMS Sector Economic Estimates: Employment statistics as official statistics in development. Additionally, we intend to publish additional information alongside the estimates to help users to interpret the data and assess its quality. We will ensure that appropriate caveats and data handling advice are communicated in our publications for users of our data and will continue to apply suppression where appropriate. 

Yours sincerely, 

Sarah Alloway-Lasher 

Head of Statistics 

Department for Culture, Media and Sport