| Title | Cohesion - regional equity (participation). Purpose Target. |
Associated Targets | To narrow the gap in participation between Scotland's best and worst performing regions by 2017. |
Brief Description | The GES identifies the Government's desired characteristics of growth, which are set out as a set of golden rules - one of which is Cohesion (regional equity). The Cohesion golden rule should ensure that there is greater regional equity in sharing in increased sustainable economic growth. Over time the gap in employment rates between the best and worst performing regions will narrow. |
Strategic Objective(s) to Which Indicator Relates | This indicator informs progress in relation to all five Strategic Objectives: Wealthier and Fairer;
Healthier;
Safer and Stronger;
Smarter; and
Greener. |
More Detailed Definitions | |
Definitions of Keywords | Participation is defined as covering those in employment - this will be measured using employment rates. Employment rates measure the proportion of population aged 16-64 in employment. Employment is defined as people who are employees, self employed, on government training programmes and unpaid family workers. Regions are defined as Local Authority Areas. Local Authority areas are administrative regions within Scotland. There are 32 Local Authority Areas in Scotland. In measuring this target, the top and bottom three Local Authorities within each year will be grouped together. As a result, the Local Authority areas included within the top and bottom three may change between years, and therefore may differ from the top and bottom three Local Authority areas in the baseline year. Using the highest and lowest areas within each year also ensures that all 32 Local Authority areas are moving in the right direction and that work on increasing employment rates in one area does not happen at the expense of work in other areas which are not currently in the worst performing Local Authority areas. Aggregating Local Authority areas for this indicator increases the reliability of the data ensuring that changes over time are reasonably robust and are not dominated by random fluctuations in the data due to small numbers. |
Evidence Source | The Annual Population Survey (APS) will be used to measure employment rates by Local Authority areas. Data from the APS are available for regions within Scotland from 1995. Data from the Annual Population Survey are available at Local Authority level. For data below this level, proxies such as benefits data may be used. |
Baseline and Past Trends | Baseline: The baseline for this target is the situation pertaining in 2006 (Jan-Dec). At this point the gap between the 3 Local Authority areas with the highest employment rates and the 3 Local Authority areas with the lowest employment rates was 15.5%. The 3 highest Local Authorities had an employment rate of 82.0% and the 3 lowest had an employment rate of 66.5%. |
Methodology for Data Source | This indicator is calculated as the number of people aged 16-64 in employment in each region divided by population aged 16-64 in each region. The 95% confidence interval around the estimate should be no more than 2 percentage points for each region. |
Data Ownership and Quality Assurance | The Annual Population Survey is a National Statistics publication. |
Publication of Data | Data from the Annual Population Survey (APS) are published on a quarterly basis by the Office for National Statistics. A publication of headline figures from the APS is published in August each year by the Scottish Government covering the period January to December of the previous year. The latest APS publication can be found using the following link. The current publication (2009) provides working age employment rates by local authority. (where working age refers to males aged 16-64 and females aged 16-59). The publication for 2010 will provide data for the population aged 16-64 http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Labour-Market/Publications Data are also published on the National Online Manpower Information System (NOMIS) website ( www.nomisweb.co.uk) |
Methodology for Recent Change Arrow on Scotland | This evaluation is based on: any difference in the gap within +/- 1 percentage points of last year's figure suggests that the position is more likely to be maintaining than showing any change. A decrease in the gap of 1 percentage points or more suggests that the position is improving; whereas an increase in the gap of 1 percentage points or more suggests the position is worsening |
Future issues or reviews | Prior to June 2011, the Cohesion Target (To narrow the gap in participation between Scotland's best and worst performing regions) was based on the traditional working-age population, defined as males aged 16-64 and females aged 16-59. In June 2011, the Cohesion Target was revised to be based on the definition for the new headline employment rate which covers the population aged 16 to 64 for both men and women. This new definition has been applied to the back series to ensure consistent comparisons. This change was implemented as the female state pension age is now gradually increasing from 60 to 65, over a ten year period from April 2010 to 2020. As a result, the headline employment rates as published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are now based on the population aged 16 to 64 for both men and women. The change to the definition was made in June 2011, as the January to December 2010 APS dataset was released at this time, and the female state pension age started to change from April 2010 |