The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.
Letter from Karen Dunnell, dated July 2009:
As National Statistician, I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question on what the latest estimate is of the number of children in a household in which no adults work in a) the UK and b) Stoke-on-Trent. (283099)
Information at local authority level comes from the Annual Population Survey (APS) household dataset. Estimates for January to December 2007 are shown in the attached table. Information for the UK is also provided from the same dataset for consistency purposes.
Figures for children in households are based on children aged under 16 years old living in working age households. A working-age household is a household that includes at least one person of working-age, that is a woman aged 16 to 59 or a man aged 16 to 64.
As with any sample survey, estimates from the APS are subject to a margin of uncertainty as different samples give different results. A guide to the quality of the estimates is included in the table.
Thousands Estimate Lower bound3 Upper bound3 UK 1,759 1,709 1,810 Stoke-on-Trent 11 8 14 1 Children under 16. 2 Workless household is a working-age household where no one aged 16 or over is working. 3 95 per cent. confidence interval which means that from all samples possible there would be 95 per cent. certainty that the true estimate would lie within the lower and upper bounds. Source: Annual Population Survey Household data sets.