The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the Authority to reply.Letter from Karen Dunnell, dated 21 April 2008:"As national Statistician I have been asked to reply to your two parliamentary questions. The first asks how many workless households in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey constituency there were in each year since 1997 [200090]. The second asks how many children were living in workless households in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey constituency in each year since 1997 [200118].""Estimates are provided from the labour Force Survey (LFS). There is currently no annual household dataset, so the figures are given for the April-June quarter to be consistent with those published in the ‘Work and worklessness among household first Release’ (see web link http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/work0807.pdf). The boundaries for parliamentary constituencies in Scotland were redrawn in 2005, and data is only available for 2006 and 2007 using the LFS household datasets.""There were approximately 1,000 workless households in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey constituency in 2006 and 2007. Estimates for the number of children (aged under 16) living in these workless households are disclosive and cannot be released under confidentiality rules.""A workless household is a household that includes at least one person of working-age (a woman aged 16 to 59 or a man aged 16 to 64) where no one aged 16 or over is in employment.""The LFS is a sample survey covering over 52,000 households in the United Kingdom in each three month period. As with any sample survey, estimates from the Labour Force Survey are subject to a margin of uncertainty."