asked the Secretary of State for Employment how many people are to be employed in the Lancashire textile industry; and how many were ployed at the same date in the preceding nine years.
Separate information is not readily available for Lancashire but annual estimates are made for the whole of the North-West Region and the figures are given in the following table. The latest available annual estimate for the region relates to June 1973. However, provisional estimates are compiled monthly for the whole of Great Britian and these indicate that 152,000 were in employment in the textile industries in December 1974, compared with 162,000 in June 1973.
| Estimated numbers of employees in employment in the spinning and weaving of cotton, flax, linen and man-made fibres, and textile finishing (minimum list headings 412, 413 and 423 of the Standard Industrial Classification) | |
| North-West Region | |
| (thousands) | |
| June 1965 | 170 |
| June 1966 | 161 |
| June 1967 | 137 |
| June 1968 | 131 |
| June 1969 | |
| (a) | 130 |
| (b) | 128 |
| June 1970 | 121 |
| June 1971 | |
| (a) | 110 |
| (b) | 105 |
| June 1972 | 95 |
| June 1973 | 94 |
a) and earlier dates are classified according to the Standard Industrial Classification (1958) and are not fully comparable with those from June 1969( b) which are classified on the basis of the SIC (1968).
(2) Estimates up to June 1971( a) are based on counts of national insurance cards and are not strictly comparable with those from June 1971( b) which are from censuses of employment.