The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the Authority to reply.
Letter from Jil Matheson, dated December 2009:
As National Statistician has been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question asking how many public sector employees in (a) Pendle and (b) Lancashire earn more than £18,000 per annum. (304663)
The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), carried out in April each year, is the most comprehensive source of earnings information in the United Kingdom. Annual levels of earnings are estimated from the ASHE, and are provided for employees on adult rates of pay, who have been in the same job for more than a year. ASHE is not used to provide estimates of the numbers of employees whose earnings is more than a specific amount, but can be used to provide estimates of percentage of employees in that category.
I attach a table showing the percentage of full-time public sector employees in (a) Pendle and (b) Lancashire earning more than £18,000 per annum in 2009.
Percentage % Coefficient of Variation Lancashire 22 7 Pendle 7 50 1 Full-time employees on adult rates who have been in the same job for more than one year. As at April 2009. Guide to Quality: The Coefficient of Variation (CV) indicates the quality of a figure, the smaller the CV value the higher the quality. The true value is likely to lie within +/- twice the CV—for example, for an average of 200 with a CV of 5% we would expect the population average to be within the range 180 to 220. A CV of 50% indicates a low quality estimate. Source: Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Office for National Statistics.