§ Mr. Dudley Smithasked the Secretary of State for Employment (1) whether any Warwickshire residents unemployed in October 1976 were included in the official statistics for the West Midlands metropolitan county area;
(2) whether the figure of 8,242 registered unemployed in Warwickshire in October 1976 and used in the rate support grant distribution was the total of officially known unemployed residents of the county.
§ Mr. GoldingEstimates of the numbers unemployed in counties are made by combining the numbers registered at individual employment offices and careers offices within the county. Where, however, an employment office area straddles a county boundary all the registrants are allocated to the most 307W appropriate county. For this reason, and also because unemployed people can choose the office at which to register, the estimates do not measure precisely the number of unemployed persons resident in each county.