§ Mr. HepburnTo ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how many young people aged 16 or 17 he expects will be entitled to the national minimum wage in(a) the Jarrow constituency, (b) South Tyneside (c) the North East and (d) the United Kingdom. [166815]
§ Ruth KellyThe information requested falls within the responsibility of the National Statistician, who has been asked to reply.
Letter from Colin Mowl to Mr. Stephen Hepburn, dated 21 April 2004:
The National Statistician has been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question about national minimum wage. I am replying in his absence. (166815)Information about entitlement to the national minimum wage is not available.However, estimates for the number of employees aged 16 and 17 from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) provide an upper limit for the number of people entitled to the national minimum wage.The table below gives estimates of the number of employees aged 16 and 17 in the United Kingdom and in the North East for the three month period ending November 2003. They include a 502W small, but not measured, number of people with a contract of apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship schemes who are not entitled to the minimum wage.
Number of employees aged 16 and 17 in the United Kingdom and the North East People aged 16 and 17 People aged 16 People aged 17 United Kingdom 631,000 247,000 384,000 North East 25,000 1 16,000 1 Sample size too small for reliable estimate.
As with any sample survey, estimates from the LFS are subject to sampling variability and the sample size is too small to provide comparable estimates for the Jarrow parliamentary constituency and the south Tyneside local authority with any reliability.