To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what the (a) voluntary and (b) involuntary redundancy rates were in the public sector in (i) Leeds North-West constituency and (ii) each industrial category in each year since 1997. (322702)

Estimates of the total number of redundancies are available from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). However there is no available disaggregation between voluntary and involuntary redundancies or a constituency-level or regional breakdown.

Individuals recently made redundant are not asked in the LFS whether they were in the public or private sectors and are instead classified according to the industrial group of their previous job. The industrial group ‘public administration, education and health’ may act as a very broad approximation of a large part of the public sector. Although a large fraction of employees in and redundancies from this industrial group are likely to be in the public sector, private sector firms also operate within this industry whilst there are also public sector employees in other sectors.

BIS estimates of redundancies from public administration, education and health and all other industries are provided in the third and fourth columns of Table 1 for the first quarter of each year since 1999, the earliest date available. These figures should only be treated as indicative as the LFS is a self classification survey completed by individuals. Some individuals are unlikely to identify exactly the industry in which they work.

The second column of Table 1 reports Office for National Statistics published figures for total economy-wide redundancy rates. These do not exactly match the other columns due to missing values in the industrial classification of redundancies.