Statistics Wales quarterly update: December 2021

This is the latest in a series of quarterly updates, for users of Welsh statistics, on our latest developments, consultations and plans.

A full list of our most recent publications can be found on our upcoming calendar.

We continue to adapt our usual operations to ensure we are able to support the government’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic, as well as providing the necessary information when it is needed the most. We will continue to use the Digital and Data blog to provide information on our approach.

We continue to publish an expanded range of datasets and releases to inform the public during the pandemic. We are continuing to review the frequency and content of some of the COVID-19 related statistical releases. We welcome any comments or feedback on how you use the releases, and any suggested changes to them via KAS.COVID19@gov.wales.

An overview of COVID-19 indicators is available on our COVID-19 in Wales interactive dashboard, which is intended to present a weekly snapshot of a selection of indicators on both direct and wider harms from COVID-19. Since the last quarterly update data on care homes and booster vaccinations have been added to the dashboard. As usual more detail on these indicators and a wider selection of data can be found on our Coronavirus (COVID-19) related statistics and research page.

Public Health Wales also publish a comprehensive picture of new COVID-19 cases, deaths, vaccinations (now also including People who have received a third or booster dose of COVID-19 vaccine) reported in Wales and now variant surveillance. These are published on the Rapid COVID-19 surveillance dashboard (Public Health Wales).

We have continued to publish our monthly labour market overview release, which brings together a range of different labour market sources to give the most up to date picture of the impact COVID-19 continues to have on the labour market. We have also published the latest data on the coronavirus job retention scheme (CJRS) and the self-employment income support scheme (SEISS). Our Welsh Economy in Numbers dashboard has also been updated.

The labour market statistics (Annual Population Survey) estimates for UK countries, regions, and local areas in Wales were published in October. This covered data up to the July 2020 to June 2021 and follows the April 2020 to March 2021 publication in September which including the reweighting of the data for year ending March 2020 onwards.

We also published in October estimates for average earnings from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings for 2021 and updated our short-term output indicators release for the second quarter of 2021. In November, we published the latest data covering 2020 from the Business Register and Employment Survey as well as data for business demography for 2020.

We have also published a Chief Statistician’s blog on our plans for economic and labour market statistics and we really want to hear your views (using the contact details at the end of this section). As part of this blog, we explained our plans for new analysis on the labour market by protected characteristics for the period April 2020 to March 2021 which will be published on 16 December.

If you would like to get in touch please contact economic.stats@gov.wales.

Schools

We continue to publish weekly data on pupils’ attendance in maintained schools throughout the autumn term.

As noted in the previous quarterly update, data collections in the 2020-21 school year were delayed or suspended due to the pandemic. However, the 2021-22 school year should see a return to a more usual data collection and publication schedule for school statistics, beginning with:

• Final results from the EOTAS census (for pupils educated other than at school) in April were published on 16 September
• Provisional GCSE and A level results from summer 2021 were published on 30 September; and
• Permanent and fixed term exclusions from the 2019-20 school year were published on 25 November.

If you have any questions or would like to provide feedback you can contact us on school.stats@gov.wales.

Cross-cutting and post-16 education

September saw the publication of our annual statistical release on participation of young people in education and the labour market, and the related statistical bulletin on young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). The publications were delayed from their usual July date due to the reweighting of the Annual Population Survey. A further quarterly update on our NEET statistics was published on 21 October 2021.

Following the conclusion of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, we have ceased the publication of regular management information on apprentices furloughed or made redundant during the coronavirus pandemic. The final release was published on 5 October 2021.

In November we published provisional data for quarter three of the 2020/21 academic year on apprenticeship learning programmes started which includes an update to our interactive dashboard.

Statistics on the maintained youth work sector for 2020/21 have been postponed from the planned October publication date due to delays in collecting the data from some local authorities. The statistics will now be published on 21 December 2021.

In order to provide feedback, or for any further information, please contact post16ed.stats@gov.wales.

Higher education and student finance

This quarter we have continued our weekly publication of Positive coronavirus cases reported to higher education institutions in Wales. We have also published our annual statistical releases on Welsh Government Learning Grants (further education) and Education Maintenance Allowances (EMA) awarded in Wales.

Please contact us via our HE and Student Finance Stats mailbox: HigherEducationAndStudentFinance.Stats@gov.wales.

Monthly management information on homelessness accommodation provision and rough sleeping continues to be published regularly and quarterly data on the Help to Buy – Wales (Shared Equity Loan Scheme).

Publication of housing statistics has been affected by the decision during the COVID-19 pandemic that many of the housing data collections for 2019-20 would be cancelled and several others postponed. Since September however, a number of our more regular publications have been published including:

• Data on the progress made by social landlords in achieving the Welsh Housing Quality Standard (WHQS) for their stock (as at 31 December 2020), 30 September 2021
• Social landlord stock, rent and sales, 26 October 2021
• Social landlord sales, 14 October 2021

Statistical releases on New Housebuilding (April 2019 to March 2021), Homelessness (2020-21) and Affordable Housing provision (2020-21) are all due out in December 2021.

The Office for National Statistics continue to publish monthly House Price Index data for Wales (ONS), the latest of which (for September 2021) was published on 17 November alongside data for the rest of the UK (ONS). 

The Office for National Statistics has also made available online some analysis of dwellings chargeable for council tax which are classed as second homes, by LA and MSOA (ONS).

Data on Land Transaction Tax continues to be published regularly by the Welsh Revenue Authority.  

Please contact us via the stats.housing@gov.wales mailbox with any queries or requests.

Housing Condition Evidence Programme (HCEP)

The September update provided an outline of the longer term work-programme for the Housing Conditions Evidence programme (contingent on the funding being made available in the budget). In recent months the programme team have been providing analytical support and advice on high priority topics including:

• Building Safety
• Energy efficiency of homes in relation to the climate change agenda, and planning for the future of the Warm Homes programme.
• Fuel Poverty: renewal of strategy
• Work to update the Welsh Housing Quality Standard (WHQS)

Alongside this, work continues to:

• map and gap data/Management information held in WG across housing/planning etc., assess quality and bring into HSAR
• refresh data already held, identify further data sources and secure access to them; recent agreement has been reached on access to council tax data from Welsh Local Authorities received by ONS
• work with ONS on the use of administrative data on energy efficiency, as part of the Integrated Data Programme
• contribute to cross government groups on conditions, admin data, fuel poverty

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) released an article on Energy Efficiency of Housing in England and Wales (ONS) on 10 November analysing Energy Performance Certificate data. It included insight on the energy efficiency, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, estimated energy cost and main fuel type for new and existing homes, by property type, property tenure and property age. The article provides separate figures for England and for Wales

Please contact us via the mailbox with any queries, requests or input on any of the above: stats.housingconditions@gov.wales.

All our statistical releases are on the Statistics and research website.

For further information please email stats.healthinfo@gov.wales.

NHS activity

Publication of monthly NHS performance and activity data continues, and continues to show the impact coronavirus has had on waiting times within NHS scheduled care services. The publication highlights the increasing demand for ambulance services and that performance is below targets.

More in-depth annual publications are on hold for the time being. 

NHS primary and community health

Quarterly StatsWales releases for both breastfeeding and Healthy Child Wales Programme data were published on 30 November.

The annual statistical release on Flying Start statistics was published on 24 November.

Further stats releases in this quarter included prescriptions, community pharmacies, GP workforce, NHS dental activity and workforce and sensory health.

Social Services

The annual statistical release on Children looked after by local authorities in Wales was published on 4 November.

Groups are continuing to review the Children’s Censuses and develop an Adults Receiving Care and Support Census for Wales.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has committed to providing further funding for Administrative Data Research Wales (ADR Wales) until 2026 as part of the £90m UK wide Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) investment.

Within the last quarter, ADR Wales has published two ad hoc outputs on vaccination rates of teachers based on analysis of School Workforce Annual Census (SWAC) data, linked to vaccination data in the SAIL Databank.

Our two flagship data linking projects, the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) Data Linkage Project and the Administrative Data | Agricultural Research Collection (AD | ARC) project continue to make good progress and we have been working on bids for funding for other large-scale data linking projects.

The ADRU data acquisition team has recently developed a live tracker of all Welsh Government data flows into the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank.  We are also working to improve data match rates and the quality of metadata.

If you would like to get in touch please contact ADRUWales@gov.wales or DataScienceUnit@gov.wales.

Reporting

The first results from the 2021-22 survey were published on 11 October 2021 and covered months April to June 2021. The results for the full-year (April 2021 to March 2022) will be published in July 2022.

Since July 2021 we have been running a trial online survey - the online trial involves a random subsample of 2,000 respondents who will be asked to complete a 15-minute online survey after they have completed the telephone survey with an interviewer. The online survey covers some questions from the face-to-face survey have not been included in the telephone survey. This includes more sensitive topics that respondents might not feel comfortable covering with an interviewer.

Research

Looking forwards to future survey design we have commissioned three small-scale contracts:

• a review and cognitive testing of the process for recruiting respondents to the telephone survey and the online element
• a review/testing of questions for 2022-23
• a review of options for the survey design from 2023-24 onwards

Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD)

If you want to receive notification of publication updates for WIMD, please email stats.inclusion@gov.wales to subscribe. We are also able to provide information sessions on WIMD 2019, if you are interested in arranging this for yourself, your organisation or network please contact us to discuss. Our first session was held on 4 November and we will run another on 8 December 2021.

Equality

We updated published data from the All Wales Gypsy and Traveller Caravan Count online collection, bringing the data up to July 2021 in the 20 October publication.

Our quarterly Local Authority population estimates by ethnicity (StatsWales) and national identity (StatsWales) were updated on 17 November 2021. Following a reweighting of the Annual Population Survey (APS) for 2020 onwards, the data is now provided up to the year ending 30 June 2021 with reweighted revisions for 2020.  

Community safety

Autumn has been a busy month for data updates relating to fire and rescue, with new publications for:

• Fire and rescue incident statistics: April 2020 to March 2021 (23 September 2021)
• Fire and rescue authority performance: April 2020 to March 2021 (28 September 2021)
• Fire and rescue service operational statistics: April 2020 to March 2021 (28 September 2021)
• Grassland fires: April 2020 to March 2021 (28 October 2021)

Trade Survey for Wales (TSW)

The third Trade Survey for Wales (TSW) is currently in the field and will run until 14 December 2021. Results will be published in May 2022.

The Trade Analyst team continue to explore methods of incorporating alternative data sources alongside the TSW findings to improve the estimates from this survey, and are also exploring the possibility of more detailed sectoral analysis.

Welsh International Goods Trade: new dashboard

The Trade Analyst team remotely hosted a Masters Placement student who has developed a new dashboard based on HMRC’s Regional Trade in Goods data. This will be published on Welsh Government pages in December 2021.

We published a statistical bulletin on road freight during 2020 that highlights the impact of coronavirus on the activities of road goods vehicles.

Our sea transport bulletin was published on 24 November 2021 which covers sea freight and sea passenger data in 2020. It considers the impact COVID-19 restrictions had on sea transport.

For feedback and comments please contact stats.transport@gov.wales.

Welsh Language Use Survey

On 14 September, initial findings from the Welsh Language Use Survey 2019-20 were published (for the period July 2019 to March 2020). The survey concluded earlier than planned due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The analysis reports on how often Welsh speakers speak the language, how well and where they have learnt the language. It also includes data for the national indicator on the use of Welsh.

We are now working on analysing the remainder of the survey in separate statistical bulletins, by theme, combining data from the National Survey for Wales 2019-20 where relevant. We have identified the following four broad topic areas, which we will aim to publish next year:

• use of the Welsh language at home and in education
• use of the Welsh language in the workplace
• use of the Welsh language in the community
• use of the Welsh language when using services

Annual Population Survey

On 5 October, the Annual Population Survey (APS) results on the Welsh language for the year from July 2020 to June 2021 were published.

According to the survey, 29.2% of people aged three or older in Wales were able to speak Welsh (this figure equates to around 884,300 people) for the year ending 30 June 2021.

The next update, for the year ending 30 September 2021, will be published in January 2022.

It is important to emphasise, of course, that the census is the authoritative source for the number of Welsh speakers in Wales, and this is how we will measure progress against the ambition of having a million Welsh speakers by 2050. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will publish 2021 Census data from late spring next year.

Welsh language statistical profiles for local authorities

The Welsh Government is currently developing a tool that brings together data on the Welsh language at a local authority level and Wales level.

The profiles include the following data:

• demographics of the area
• Census (including Welsh language transmission)
• Annual Population Survey
• Welsh Language Use Survey
• Early years
• Education

The need for data to support the Welsh in Education Strategic Plans was identified therefore an additional version of the tool to include those data specifically has also been developed for local authorities.

The profiles are currently in draft, and have been shared with a small group of local authority users, so that we are able to receive some feedback on the tool.

If you would be interested in having access to an early draft of the profiles, please contact WelshLanguageData@gov.wales for further information.

The Annual Survey of Agricultural Land and Livestock has been completed and Wales level results were published in November 2021.

Annual statistics on municipal waste collection and recycling were also published in December. The annual report is based on final validated data (rather than the provisional quarterly updates). Local authority level data are available on StatsWales.

On 30 September 2021 we published the annual Wellbeing of Wales: 2021 which helps us assess whether we are making progress against the seven national wellbeing goals set out in the Well-being of Future Generations Act.

Additionally, we have also been carrying out a consultation on ‘Shaping Wales’ Future: Using national milestones and indicators to measure our nation’s progress, to ask for people’s views and experiences against our proposals for setting the first wave of national milestones for Wales and seeking views whether any revisions need to be made to the existing national indicators following the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For feedback and comments please contact stats.info.desk@gov.wales.

A separate Demography quarterly update is published which includes all things population related.

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