§ Mr. Ben ChapmanTo ask the Secretary of State for Social Security what estimate she has made of the number of women in Wirral, South who will benefit from the minimum wage. [47457]
§ Mrs. LiddellI have been asked to reply.
The information requested falls within the responsibility of the Chief Executive of the Office for National Statistics. I have asked him to reply.
Letter from Tim Holt to Mr. Ben Chapman, dated July 1998:
I have been asked to reply, as the Director of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), to your parliamentary question on the national minimum wage.The national minimum wage will become effective in April 1999 and has been set at £3.60 for employees aged over 21 and £3.00 for those aged 18 to 21, although there are a number of qualifications to this general observation.The Low Pay Commission, in arriving at their recommendations, had to adjust 1999 pay rates to 1997 values. Their methodology produces £3.40 and £2.80 as the 1997 values of the government's preferred rates.The New Earnings Survey (NES) can provide earnings data for small geographical areas. However, the release of NES data is restricted to figures which are derived from a sufficiently large sample of employees, and which have an acceptable level of accuracy (as defined statistically through the standard error of an individual figure being 5 per cent. or less). Reliable estimates of the number of women in Wirral South who will benefit from the minimum wage cannot be provided, because the associated standard errors are too high. I have therefore provided available data for Merseyside in the attached table. These are for women aged over 21, because estimates for those aged 18–21 years who would earn below the proposed minimum wage cannot be provided. Again, this is because the associated standard errors are too high.The NES is based on a one percent sample of employees in the PAYE system and is therefore likely to under-represent relatively low paid staff earning below the tax threshold and in particular those who work part-time.314WThe extent of this bias may be estimated for Merseyside by using data from the NES augmented by data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). This suggests that the estimate of the overall proportion of employees aged over 21 years earning below £3.60 could understate the true position by as much as 3 percentage points. However, it is unlikely that the occurrence of lower paid jobs is uniform across the region, and so it would be wise to treat this figure as broadly indicative rather than a precise estimate.
Employees whose pay for the survey pay-period was unaffected by absence—New Earnings Survey—April 1997 Percentage of employees with hourly earnings excluding overtime and shift payments less than: £3.40 £3.60 Merseyside Employees aged over 21 on adult rates of pay Full-time females 3.3 5.1 Part-time females 12.9 17.3 All females 7.3 10.1