Income and employment: key data sources
Scottish Government
The Scottish Government publish a range of statistics on poverty and inequality in Scotland. This includes annual reports on trends in poverty and inequality and persistent poverty in Scotland, and supplementary data (including on priority groups, child poverty, in-work poverty, fuel poverty and food insecurity), which are regularly updated.
To support local areas in understanding child poverty in their area they have produced a Local child poverty dashboard of indicators, and also highlight the new Children in Low income families local estimates produced by DWP/HMRC.
National Records of Scotland released results from Scotland's Census 2011. Key outputs will be released in stages. Since December 2012, data on topics including population, ethnicity, health, housing and accommodation have been published. More information on the data currently available and planned for release in future is available on the website. Data from the 2001 Census is also available via this page.
The ScotPHO Profiles present a range of indicators to give an overview of health and its wider determinants at a local level. The profiles give a snapshot of health for each area and highlight variation through a variety of different visualisations. More than 250 indicators of public health are presented, along with measures of health inequalities.
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
The DWP website contains a variety of research reports and statistics. In addition, the DWP also produces the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) dataset, a dataset derived from the UK Family Resources Survey, which aims to produce estimates of the proportion of the population in the UK living in poverty (as defined in a variety of different ways). The DWP Stat Xplore system also provides statistics on Housing Benefit claimants, the number of National Insurance Number (NINo) registrants entering the UK from overseas, Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) sanction decisions, Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Universal Credit (UC).
The Improvement Service provides a range of data and analysis tools. They have recently published the Spatial Hub, a comprehensive source of Scottish local government spatial data.
Informing Interventions to reduce health Inequalities (Triple I)
This suite of tools, published by ScotPHO, allows users to model various income distribution policies on population health and health inequalities.
NOMIS is a key web source for information on the labour market.
Labour force survey
In Scotland, the Labour Force Survey is the preferred population survey used to measure labour market activity. However, declining responses rates, especially during the pandemic, led to concerns that results have become unreliable (Has labour market data become less reliable? (parliament.uk)).
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has embarked on a programme of work to improve survey quality through the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TFLS). More detail can be found here: Labour market transformation – update on progress and plans - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk).
Expanding flexible job opportunities and flexible childcare and addressing the fundamental causes of health inequity will be essential to address this.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have created a new site allowing for visualisation and analysis of poverty, housing and care data. The site includes a range of graphs, charts and maps showing the latest data and analysis of trends in these issues for Scotland and other parts of the UK.
The principal purpose of the survey is to collect information in the areas of social justice and transport, although a wide range of other topics are covered. In relation to economic circumstances the survey collects figures on employment, training and unemployment (based on the highest income householder). For households, figures on income, savings and borrowings, housing costs and financial concerns are collected.
Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD)
The SIMD, which was created to provide an improved and updateable deprivation index for Scotland, identifies the most deprived areas across Scotland and is based on 38 indicators across seven individual domains: Income; Employment; Housing; Health; Education, Skills and Training; Geographic Access to Services and Telecommunications; and Crime. SIMD 2012 is presented at data zone level, of which there are 6505, and provides a comprehensive picture of relative area deprivation across Scotland.
This website provides a wide range of economic related data mostly at a variety of different geographies (although local authority is the level at which the greatest range of data is consistently available). It includes figures on employees by industry, business sites by industry, earnings, labour market indicators (of economic activity, unemployment, employment) and a variety of benefits data.
