Overview
At the time of this report, statistics from Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA)’s Labour Market Report are published as accredited official statistics.
NISRA’s Labour Market Report is published monthly and draws on multiple sources, which include the Labour Force Survey (LFS). These statistics provide a wide range of key labour market statistics in Northern Ireland, including headline estimates of employment, unemployment and economic inactivity, as well as feeding into ONS’s monthly labour market updates.
This report is the first in a series of reviews looking at NISRA’s transition to its new Labour Market Survey (LMS) and how it is ensuring that the new labour market estimates produced from the LMS meet the standards set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics.
Why we did this review
The LFS is the main household survey used to compile official estimates of the UK labour market. It is vital for informing the public about many aspects of the labour market. NISRA collects and processes the survey data in Northern Ireland and feeds the information to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to produce UK estimates.
ONS decided to redevelop the LFS in Great Britain and move to an online-first approach in 2020, influenced by falling response rates and the change in data collection necessitated by management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Following that, NISRA chose to redevelop its own labour market survey in Northern Ireland, and informed users of this move in 2024. NISRA’s focus was on developing a short survey with the key labour market indicators for NI stakeholders, and it planned to remove questions where the data were not used or where data were available from other sources. This led to NISRA developing its Labour Market Survey (LMS) alongside ONS’s new survey (the transformed LFS, or TLFS).
We are carrying out this review of NISRA’s transformation programme due to the importance of these statistics for private and public sector decision making within Northern Ireland and at the UK level. OSR published a report in April 2026 on ONS’s transformation of its LFS for Great Britain. This NISRA focused review aims to address the following questions:
- Is NISRA effectively handling the transformation of labour market statistics, including engaging with users to understand whether proposed improvements meet user needs and being transparent about its work?
- Is NISRA adequately assuring itself and users about the quality of statistics produced using new data and methods?
- Is NISRA effectively seeking ways to ensure statistics are coherent at the UK level, in line with user needs?
Highlighted findings
NISRA has balanced response rate and data quality considerations with user needs in developing a shorter survey. In response to falling response rates for the longer LFS, NISRA engaged with its main users in 2024 to provide an overview of the planned transformation and seek feedback. NISRA chose to develop a shorter survey, focusing on key labour market topics to maximise the number and quality of survey responses for Northern Ireland.
Although NISRA has published a question-mapping document and information on the results of the LMS in one of its transformation updates, information is spread over multiple publications and some users are still not clear which content from the old survey will not be included in the new survey or if removed content will be available from other sources.
Most users spoke highly of NISRA’s approach to engaging with them and were confident that NISRA would deliver the LMS. NISRA regularly engages with a range of government departments, academics, research institutes and Northern Ireland user NISRA has also attended ONS’s LFS/TLFS user groups to provide updates to a wider set of users. Despite attending these forums, some users told us that they were not clear about NISRA’s plans for transitioning or how their views were collated and used to inform decision making.
NISRA is currently performing quality assurance on the data from the LMS and finalising how it will assess the readiness of the LMS. It has published information on response rates and the achieved sample, but it has not yet published further quality assurance work, such as discontinuity analysis. It is not currently clear on what basis NISRA will decide it is ready to transition to the LMS.
NISRA and ONS have worked collaboratively to ensure delivery of cohesive UK-level labour market estimates. Transitioning to two new surveys (the LMS and the TLFS) with differing content and timelines has presented a range of challenges for both producers. Whilst this work is still ongoing, and we have been told that ONS and NISRA have a data strategy, this has not yet been published.
Our judgement
Overall, NISRA has taken a considered approach to developing a shorter labour market survey, balancing response rates, data quality and user needs, and has engaged widely with users and stakeholders. However, there remains a lack of clarity and transparency for some users—particularly around survey content changes, readiness criteria for transition, and the wider UK data strategy.
This report identifies six recommendations for NISRA to take forward to provide users with greater clarity about the transition, the quality of the new labour market statistics and how user need will be met. These recommendations are set out in full in the following section. We recognise that this project is still ongoing. NISRA have explained that they have plans in place to deliver on our recommendations as part of the transformation programme.
Next steps
This report is the first in a series of compliance reviews on NISRA’s Labour Market Survey transformation. Through our engagement with NISRA, we recognise that NISRA plans to deliver a range of publications as the project progresses. We expect NISRA to write to us in six months to provide an update on progress against these recommendations, but we will continue to engage with NISRA throughout the transformation process.
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