Labour Force Survey, 1987

The provision of information for the Statistical Office of the European Communities (SOEC) continued to be one of the reasons for carrying out the survey on an annual basis. SOEC co-ordinated information from labour force surveys in the member states in order to assist the EC in such matters as the allocation of the Social Fund.

The survey was carried out biennially from 1973 to 1983 and was increasingly used by UK government departments to obtain information which would assist in the framing of social and economic policy. By 1983 it was being used by the Employment Department (now the Department for Work and Pensions) to obtain information which was not available from other sources or was only available for Census years. From 1984 the survey was carried out annually, and since that time the LFS has consisted of two elements:<ul><li>a quarterly survey conducted in Great Britain throughout the year, in which each sampled address was called on five times at quarterly intervals, and which yielded about 15,000 responding households in every quarter</li><li>a `boost' survey in the spring quarter (March-May), which produced interviews at over 44,000 households in Great Britain and over 4,000 households in Northern Ireland</li></ul>Users should note that only the data from the spring quarter and the 'boost' survey were included in the annual datasets for public release, and that only data from 1975-1991 are available from the UK Data Archive.