The information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.
Letter from Karen Dunnell, dated 13 November 2007:
As National Statistician, I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question about what recent estimates have been made of the number of (a) non-UK EU and (b) non-EU nationals in employment in the UK who reside in communal establishments; whether houses in multiple occupation are regarded as communal establishments for the purposes of counting non-UK nationals in employment in the UK; and what criteria is used for this purpose. (162353)
The Labour Force Survey covers people resident in private households and in NHS accommodation in the UK. A random sample is drawn from the 'small users' sub-file of the Postcode Address File (PAF) for Great Britain. This sub-file contains addresses which receive less than 50 items of mail a day and so covers 97% of private households in GB but not most communal establishments. For Northern Ireland, the Valuation List is used instead of the PAF.
A study completed by ONS in 2005 investigated extending the LFS to cater for residents in small communal establishments such as hotels and guesthouses. The results concluded that it was possible to collect information from this type of accommodation and that the study should be extended to cover other communal establishments. Therefore, the ONS plans to investigate methods to collect data from communal establishments in the future and this extension, would in principle pick up the resident and migrant workers living there who are currently excluded. However, until such time, it is not possible to estimate their numbers from the LFS.
The 2001 Census definition of a communal establishment is one providing managed residential accommodation with either full time or part time supervision. Therefore, multi-occupant households are not considered to be communal establishments. Houses in multiple occupation are included in the 'small users' sub-file PAF and sampled in the LFS and all residents of these households are interviewed including non-UK Nationals.