Analysis of ONS Employment Measures

Andy Cosh, Giorgio Caselli and Robert Hughes

Working Papers from Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge

Abstract: The ONS produces a wide variety of measures of employment in the UK. These measures have different methods and outcomes, which have important implications as one moves to a more geographically disaggregated level of analysis. A key difference between the ONS measures of employment is whether they are based on the employees’ place of residence or their place of work. If one is interested in exploring sub-regional employment dynamics (and clustering is indeed about sub-regional analysis), BRES is the only relevant measure. BRES gives good coverage relative to other measures and is the only ONS measure that can both cover district-level workbased employment and provide this information at the sector level. However, BRES has shown some significant volatility in the estimation of Greater Cambridge’s employment performance in recent years, particularly for KI sectors. This points to important difficulties with using BRES data to capture employment growth in a dynamic, knowledge intensive economy like Greater Cambridge. In recent years, CBR suggests higher employment growth than BRES, with this divergence being particularly pronounced in KI sectors. We are keen to continue working on this to help ONS find ways of further improving BRES.

Keywords: Employment growth; innovation cluster; knowledge economy; official statistics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 L16 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
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