Statistics Wales quarterly update: December 2022

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 publish our monthly labour market overview release, which brings together a range of different labour market sources providing the most up to date picture of the impact different events have on the labour market. Our Welsh Economy in Numbers dashboard has also been updated.

In October we published our Annual Population Survey labour market statistics data for July 2021 to June 2022 which includes data for UK countries and regions and also for local areas. We also updated our Business Register and Employment Survey release for 2021, presenting employee and employment estimates, as well as publishing estimates for Regional gross disposable household income data for 2020.

Latest data from the Annual survey of hours and earnings was also published in October, providing information on average hourly, weekly and annual earnings for 2022 and we also updated our short-term output indicators release to cover the second quarter of 2022.

In November, we published Regional gross domestic product for January to March 2022 as well as publishing information on Business demography for 2021. Latest estimates of total expenditure on research and development (R&D) across different market sectors was also published for 2020, as well as estimates of research and development (R&D) expenditure by businesses for 2021.

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

Input output tables

Our project to develop input output tables for Wales continues. Input output tables provide detailed data on economic flows in Wales. If anyone with an interest in this project would like to receive regular updates or discuss how this may benefit your work, then please contact stats.trade@gov.wales.

Schools

We continued to publish weekly data on pupils’ attendance in maintained schools throughout the Autumn term with the first publication on 14 September.

The following statistical releases have been published since September:

• Pupils educated other than at school: September 2021 to August 2022 (8 September)
• Academic achievement of pupils in on-entry assessments and at Key Stage 3: 2022 (28 September)
• Provisional examination results (6 October)
• Permanent and fixed-term exclusions from schools (20 October)
• Final examination results (6 December)

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

October was a busy month with a number of publications across different areas. Annual statistics on the participation of young people in education and the labour market were released alongside the annual statistical bulletin on young people not in education, employment or training. These outputs were published later than usual following a reweighting of the Annual Population Survey.

We also published the latest set of annual statistics for the post-16 learner destinations performance measure. This looks at learners in post-16 education in the 2019/20 academic year and whether they had sustained employment and/or learning destinations in the following year.

The first set of quarterly headline statistics on the Jobs Growth Wales+ programme was also published in October. A more detailed full statistical release will be provided with the publication of data for the fourth quarter of each financial year. Statistics on the maintained youth work sector in Wales for the 2021-22 financial year were also published.

Finally, provisional statistics on apprenticeship learning programmes started for the third quarter of the 2021/22 academic year have recently been published through both our interactive dashboard and StatsWales.

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

Higher education and student finance

We have published our annual release on Welsh Government Learning Grants (further education).

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

Monthly management information on homelessness accommodation provision and rough sleeping continues to be published regularly. Since September the following regular housing statistics outputs have been published:

• National Indicator 049: Percentage of households spending 30% or more of their income on housing costs (29 September)
• New house building: April 2021 to March 2022 (6 October)
• Help to Buy – Wales (Shared Equity Loan Scheme): April to June 2022 (27 October)
• Social landlord housing stock and rents: as of 31 March 2022, (3 November)

The Office for National Statistics continue to publish monthly House Price Index data for Wales, the latest of which (for August 2022) was published on 19 October alongside data for the rest of the UK. 

Please contact stats.housing@gov.wales with any queries or requests.

Housing conditions and fuel poverty

• Welsh Housing Quality Standards: as of 31 March 2022 (published 10 November)
• Fuel poverty modelled estimates for Wales: as at October 2021 (published 2 November). These latest estimates include estimates of fuel poverty by tenure, household composition, age and type of dwelling.

We have two new members of staff in post, working to develop the Housing Stock Analytical Resource (HSAR) which brings together a range of administrative data on housing for analytical purposes. At the moment, we’re focussing on refreshing current datasets and identifying and acquiring new datasets. We’re also interested in undertaking demonstrator projects to highlight the value of HSAR. If you have a request, we may be able to help with, please contact us at stats.housingconditions@gov.wales.

We are also developing a fuel poverty data dashboard which will incorporate data from internal and external sources including other government departments and Ofgem. Publication is planned for the first quarter of 2023.

Over the next quarter we will be looking into options for a future housing conditions survey.

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

Coronavirus (COVID-19) response

During March 2022 the Together for a safer future: Wales’ long-term COVID-19 transition from pandemic to endemic plan was published. This explains that the link between COVID-19 infection, serious illness, hospitalisation, and death has been weakened significantly. This means we can begin to move beyond the emergency response. In line with this plan, we have stopped or reduced in frequency many of our COVID-19 outputs.

We continue to update some key outputs to ensure that data is still available, including on; positivity and antibody estimates from the Coronavirus Infection survey, admissions and hospitalisations, care homes, NHS staff absence and self-isolation and treatments by therapeutic agent.

A full overview of COVID-19 indicators is available on our Coronavirus (COVID-19) related statistics and research page. Other content on COVID-19 is still updated weekly by Public Health Wales on the Coronavirus (COVID-19) surveillance dashboards.

Hospital statistics

We continue to improve our monthly updates on NHS performance and activity which includes data on unscheduled and scheduled care. In the last quarter we have published a new Chief Statistician blog to aid users’ understanding of comparisons of NHS performance statistics across the UK. We will continue to work with colleagues across the UK to better identify and communicate where differences exist and support users in making meaningful comparisons.

We continued to report on:

• new management information of the number of individual patients on treatment waiting lists, in addition to the number of patient pathways, and
• on performance against a number of key ambitions in light of the impact COVID-19 has had on NHS activity and performance set out by the Welsh Government to reduce waiting times.

An update to the number of NHS beds was also published.

Primary and community care

We continue to add additional insight to many of our outputs, including this quarter on prescriptions with new analysis by deprivation quintile based on our previous article on General practice and primary care cluster population and workforce by deprivation level. Updated annual reports for NHS dental services, Community pharmacy services and Flying start are also available as well as quarterly updates on GP workforce, the Healthy Child Wales Programme, breastfeeding and substance misuse (which is now published by DHCW).

Other health and social services statistics

This quarter there was an update to the healthier Wales chapter within the Wellbeing of Wales report 2022 and the associated children and young people’s wellbeing sub-report.

New data was published from the National Survey for Wales on ease and difficulty making GP appointments, as well as satisfaction with care received at GP and hospital appointments.

This quarter has also seen updates to a range of mental health statistics including; Admission of patients to mental health facilities, detentions under Section 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act, referrals and waiting times for Mental Health Support Services and specialist children and adolescent mental health service first appointment waiting times.

In addition to an array of other statistics on health and social services, including:

• children looked after by local authorities
• NHS sickness absence
• staff employed by the NHS
• eye care measures, smoking cessation services

All our statistical releases are available on the Statistics and research website and more detailed underlying data is available on the health and social care area of StatsWales

For further information or to get in touch please email stats.healthinfo@gov.wales.

This quarter we contributed to ADR UK Annual report 2021-22. This highlights and key milestone achievements by ADR Wales in the last year, alongside ADR UK wider delivery.

ADR Wales were pleased to launch our planned programme for 2022-2026 on 1 December 2022 at an event in the Senedd. Our plan sets out how we will deliver on our strategy published earlier this year. Thanks to close liaison with policy teams within government, our programme of work for the next four years directly aligns to inform policy evidence needs on the areas of education, early years, skills and employability, mental health, well-being, housing and homelessness, social care, climate change and social justice. As a result, we are confident that the requirements of both the research team and policy teams are met by all the research undertaken and there is significant opportunity to achieve impact.

If you would like to get in touch, please contact adruwales@gov.wales.

We published the latest annual Well-being of Wales report at the end of September. This report provides a “state of the nation” assessment of progress towards the seven well-being goals set out in the Well-being of Future Generations Act.

You can also view data for each of the national well-being indicators using the interactive dashboard.

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

Please contact us at surveys@gov.wales if you have any questions.

National Survey 2023-24 onwards

The current contract to deliver the National Survey, held by Office for National Statistics, comes to an end with the end of 2022-23 fieldwork in March 2023.

Following an open procurement process, we have now appointed Kantar as the contractor to deliver the survey for future years. However, fieldwork will not take place in 2023-24. The first fieldwork year under the new contract will be 2024-25.

Based on information identified during the procurement process additional time is needed for the new contractor to set up and test arrangements to deliver the survey, meaning it is not possible for fieldwork to begin in April 2023. We did consider having fieldwork for just part of 2023-24 but concluded that it would not meet users’ needs for data. 

The next full-year’s results will be published as planned in July 2023 (based on 2022-23 fieldwork), no results in July 2024, and then full-year results will be published in July 2025, based on 2024-25 fieldwork.

If you have any queries, please contact the National Survey team surveys@gov.wales.

Publications

Following the first release of 2021-22 results in July we have now published the first in-depth, topic specific statistical bulletin using these results. The GP and hospital services bulletin covers people’s use of and satisfaction with GP surgeries and hospital services.

People were asked about the ease of getting an appointment and the frequency of appointments; whether they saw a GP or another health professional; whether their hospital appointment was as an in-patient or out-patient; and, how satisfied they were with the care received.

For information on the wide range of poverty related statistics available, please refer to our poverty related statistics collection page.

Cost of living

As mentioned above, we have published more detailed analysis on fuel poverty and are working towards a fuel poverty dashboard. In October we published the first monthly update of StatsWales data on Emergency Assistance Payments made from the Discretionary Assistance Fund (DAF) in order to provide timely insight on the cost of living crisis.

Citizen’s Advice have begun to publish a Wales-specific data dashboard providing insights on how the crisis is affecting their clients.

These and other sources of data on the cost of living crisis are signposted in a blog that we published in December. We will continue to work with relevant organisations to ensure that Wales-level data on key cost-of-living metrics are made available wherever possible.

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 at stats.inclusion@gov.wales to discuss.

Ukraine response

We continue to work with the ONS, Home Office, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) and the other devolved governments to produce statistics relating to the Ukraine crisis.

The ONS published results from the second wave of the UK Humanitarian Response Insight Survey (UKHRIS) on Tuesday 22 November. Analysis from this survey, which in late October and early November interviewed adults from Ukraine who had previously taken part in an earlier survey.

The Home Office also, on Thursday 24 November, published updated demographic statistics. These provide a demographic breakdown of those who have applied for or received visas or arrived in the UK with sponsors in Wales.

The weekly statistics on visa applications, visas issued and arrivals to the UK with sponsors in Wales continue to be updated.

Community safety

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

• Fire and Rescue Incident Statistics, 2021-22 (28 September)
• Fire and Rescue Authorities Operational Statistics 2021-22 (28 September)
• Fire and Rescue Authority Performance, 2021-22 (28 September)
• Grassland fires: April 2021 to March 2022 (26 October)
• Deliberate fires: April 2021 to March 2022 (30 November)

Please email stats.inclusion@gov.wales for more information.

On Tuesday 29 November, we published Ethnic group, national identity, language, and religion: Census 2021. This topic summary provides an overview of these four topics using data from Census 2021, including ethnic groups (high-level categories and detailed), national identity or identities, main language, English proficiency in those without English or Welsh as a main language, and religion. This data is analysed at the national and local authority level, and includes data on ethnic groups, main languages, and religion for households.

Please note while this bulletin includes data on main language, it does not include extensive analysis on the Welsh Language. A separate bulletin on the Welsh Language was published on 6 December 2022.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also published Census 2021 data on ethnicity, national identity, language and religion of individuals and households in Wales and England on Tuesday 29 November in four separate bulletins:

• Ethnic group, England and Wales: Census 2021
• National identity, England and Wales: Census 2021
• Language, England and Wales: Census 2021
• Religion, England and Wales: Census 2021

Following variable reweighting at the ONS, we have updated our quarterly ethnicity and national identity estimates using Annual Population Survey (APS) data on Thursday 10 November 2022, bringing these estimates up to June 2022. Please note that this survey data allows for more timely estimates than the Census, but as a survey the estimates are less robust and precise.

Stay tuned for more census equality outputs in the new year – questions on sexual orientation and gender identity were asked for the first time in the 2021 Census, and we will be publishing our topic summary on this data on 6 January 2023.

Equality, race and disability evidence units

The Units published an Equality, Race and Disability Evidence Units strategy in October 2022 following Cabinet approval on 12 September. The strategy and accompanying emerging priorities describe the scope of the Units and initial projects to be carried out.

Initial research priorities for each Unit have been developed with stakeholders based on commitments already made and emerging requirements from An Anti-Racist Wales action Plan, Advancing Gender Equality, LGBTQ+ Action Plan, Disability Rights Taskforce, Inclusive Data Taskforce and other Welsh Government plans and strategies.

We have been working through how and when we can use co-productive approaches throughout the evidence cycle. We are in the process of exploring how we might overcome certain barriers when adopting this way of working.

We are also working on the following tasks:

• an evidence audit that will provide an understanding of the information that is available, the gaps and inconsistences which need to be addressed.
• working with the Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan to support the development of goals, actions, and measures.
• commissioning work to help understand how we can collect evidence in line with the social model of disability
• developing a survey of equality data across public sector bodies.
• working closely with the Disability Taskforce and LGBTQ+ Action Plan team to deliver evidence to support their work.

For more information contact: equalityevidenceunit@gov.wales.

Trade Survey for Wales

Analysis of the findings from the third Trade Survey for Wales (TSW), reference year 2020, is still underway – the previously anticipated publication date of May 2022 has been delayed to 2023 given the need to undertake further quality checks and introduce new imputation processes to the methodology now that several years’ data has been gathered.

Fieldwork for the fourth year of the survey launched in September and will close mid-December, collecting 2021 data.

IFF Research are currently contracted for one further year of the survey and the project board are considering options for delivering this in 2023 and 2024.

The analytical team have overseen two research projects with TSW respondents who agreed to follow-ups around Mode 5 Services (‘sovietisation’) and Rules of Origin. The Mode 5 services report was published in November: Mode 5 services: exploratory research with businesses and trade bodies. The Rules of Origin report will be due in January 2023.

Welsh International Goods Trade

Headline results from HMRC Regional Trade Statistics for Wales’s international goods trade for the year ending June 2022 was published in October 2022: Welsh international goods trade: July 2021 to June 2022.

Alongside the above headline, the interactive trade dashboard has also been updated:

For further information contact: stats.trade@gov.wales.

In September we updated our annual road lengths and conditions release for April 2021 to March 2022, presenting information by road class.

In October we published a range of information collected through the National Survey for Wales about active travel by people during April 2021 to March 2022 in our Active travel (walking and cycling) release.

In November we published latest data on volume of traffic by type of vehicle and class of road for 2021 in our Road Traffic statistical release which showed that coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions continued to impact travel in 2021, though to a lesser extent.

We have also recently updated our interactive dashboard for police recorded road accidents for the second quarter of 2022 (April to June 2022). This includes a number of breakdowns including severity or injury and type of road user.

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

Census 2021

The census is the authoritative source for the number of Welsh speakers in Wales, and this is how the Welsh Government measures progress against its ambition of having a million Welsh speakers by 2050.

Working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), we published the first census data on the Welsh language on 6 December.

This included information on the number and percentage of the population aged three or older in Wales who can speak Welsh (as well as other skills in Welsh) at a Wales, local authority and LSOA level. A statistical release and accompanying Excel tables summarising the data was published on the WG website.

Annual Population Survey 

The latest data from the Annual Population Survey was published on 25 October.

The next update, for the year ending 30 September, will be published in the new year. Note that the census is the authoritative source for the number of Welsh speakers in Wales, and this is how progress will be measured against the WG ambition of having one million Welsh speakers by 2050.

Welsh Language Use Survey

A statistical bulletin on the social use of the Welsh language was published on 17 November, the latest in the series using data from the 2019-20 Language Use Survey. This analysis reports on the use of Welsh in the community, including use of the language within different social groups and situations. The previous articles are available on the Welsh Government website giving the initial results and the Welsh language in the home and in education.

We intend to publish the rest of the survey findings in separate statistical bulletins, according to theme, combining the Welsh National Survey data 2019-20 where relevant. We will work on publishing the next two bulletins in the series as soon as possible in the new year:

• Welsh in the workplace
• use of Welsh with services

Email welshlanguagedata@gov.wales for further information. 

Latest estimates for agricultural land and livestock as at June 2022 were published. Latest farm finance estimates from Farm Business Survey are due to be published in January 2023.

Latest annual statistics on municipal waste collection and recycling were published in November.

Email stats.environment@gov.wales for further Information.

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

For further information or to get in touch please email stats.popcensus@gov.wales.

General statistics enquiries

Email: stats.info.desk@gov.wale

Subject specific

Contacts for statistics

Twitter

StatisticsWales

Welsh Government email newsletter and alert service

News and alerts

Admin queries

Email: kasadmin@gov.wales