Dear Ed,
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) produces the DCMS Sector Economic Estimates: Employment publication series as part of its wider DCMS Economic Estimates. Our employment outputs are based on the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) Annual Population Survey (APS) and include estimates of filled jobs in DCMS sectors and subsectors, which are then further broken down by various demographics. In our previous correspondence in August, you agreed to our request to temporarily suspend the accreditation for the DCMS Sector employment series. Following this, the DCMS employment series has been published as official statistics in development.
Following on from this correspondence, I am writing to inform you that we intend to pause our rolling 12-month quarterly employment publications and continue to publish only the calendar year (January to December) employment estimates.
We have made this decision as we do not think that the rolling 12-month quarterly estimates currently provide much additional information compared to our annual calendar year estimates. This is due to the ongoing quality issues associated with the low sample size of the APS and Labour Force Survey (LFS) which led to the suspension of the accreditation for ONS statistics based on the APS and LFS and the DCMS APS derived employment series.We have seen increased volatility and uncertainty in our employment estimates. This has impacted the reliability and quality of our estimates, making harder to detect changes over time, limiting the usefulness of our rolling 12-month quarterly publications.
Before making this decision, we reached out to stakeholders, both internal and external, to seek their feedback. A call for feedback was published on both the DCMS Economic Estimates landing page and the latest publication page and we directly contacted both internal stakeholders and known external stakeholders. We have not received any objections to our proposed approach and the responses received were supportive of pausing the three non-calendar year publications.
We will inform users of the pause. We will review whether or not to return to publishing rolling quarterly releases as the quality of the underlying ONS data improves, in line with user needs.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah Alloway-Lasher
Head of Statistics
Department for Culture, Media and Sport