Tesseract Foundational Research: Skills & Labour Market
The most timely local labour-market signal, tidied for every authority
Employability programmes, skills bootcamps and local growth plans all have to target the right places, and the question “where is the labour market tightest right now” has a monthly answer in the claimant count. It is open, but it is delivered through a query builder few outside statistics teams use. This tidies it into one comparable indicator per authority.
The direction of travel
Devolution is pushing employment and skills funding down to combined authorities and councils, from the Local Skills Improvement Plans to the reformed adult-skills settlement and Connect to Work. Every one of those programmes has to evidence local need and target the right places, and the timeliest evidence is the monthly claimant count published by the ONS. It is fully open through NOMIS, and just awkward enough to reach that it usually is not.
The method, and its honest scope
We pull the latest month of the ONS Claimant Count from the NOMIS API for every local authority district and record two figures per authority: the count, and the claimant rate as a share of residents aged 16 to 64. It is a single, timely indicator, not a full labour-market model: the claimant count tracks people claiming unemployment-related benefits, which is a leading signal rather than the whole picture of worklessness. Its value is currency and coverage, a like-for-like reading for all 374 authorities, refreshed monthly.
The spread is wide: from 1.1% in the tightest local markets to 10.1% in Birmingham, against a national mean of 3.5%, with Barking and Dagenham and Haringey next at 7.7%. That range is exactly what a place-based programme needs to see before it decides where to act.
Where this goes
The same NOMIS pipeline extends to employment and economic-activity rates, to a monthly time series for trend, and to a join with our skills and occupation work to connect where the labour market is slack to which skills pathways could relieve it. It is the labour-market half of a picture whose other half is skills supply.
Independent, self-initiated open research. Contains ONS data © Crown copyright, via NOMIS, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Explore the dataset
Claimant count and rate for all 374 authorities, and the reproducible build.
