DECON-Labour Market Statistics and Financial Data Feasibility Project

The Scottish Government’s Labour Market Statistics team has awarded a contract for a feasibility study to assess the potential of using anonymised financial data to enhance national and sub-national labour market statistics. The feasibility study will establish if and how we can extract and assess labour market trends such as employment, unemployment and economic inactivity from financial data such as bank transactions, payroll records, or other administrative financial data. The ultimate aim of this study is to establish whether or not this type of data and methodology could add valuable insights to our existing statistics on an ongoing basis (subject to future procurement activities).

Objectives

• Evaluate the feasibility of using financial data to enhance Scottish labour market statistics on employment, unemployment and economic inactivity.
• Develop a Scotland-specific dataset using anonymised financial data for feasibility analysis
• Validate Scotland-specific dataset against official statistics (e.g., Census 2022).
• Develop inference methodology and provide strategic recommendations for future data use in Scotland and the rest of the UK based on this.

Scope of Requirement

The requirement is for services. Specifically, we ask that suppliers provide the following, however, bidders are invited to suggest alternative approaches that could also meet the needs of the specification:

• Segmentation and categorisation of suppliers financial datasets to meet Scotland and sub-Scotland level breakdowns and categorisations of data, with a focus on demonstrating high quality data and robust sample sizes.
• Validation of dataset and research outputs against official national statistics, including the Scottish Census and other reference datasets, to evidence representativeness of the data based on criteria to be agreed, and accuracy of outputs.
• Methodology development to establish economic trends from suppliers financial data, specifically employment, unemployment and economic inactivity (see glossary).
• Data analysis services using anonymised financial data that the suppliers have access to, analyse outputs for trends in employment, unemployment and economic inactivity, alongside other economic variables, for Scotland and sub-Scotland geographies and different population groups.
• Geodemographic analysis to identify labour market trends across sex, age, and Local Authority as a minimum, although breakdowns by other protected equality characteristics would be beneficial.
• Strategic reporting to summarise methodologies and findings and potential uses of financial data in economic trends, recommend data provision formats and frequencies for ongoing delivery of data, and identify gaps in current labour market data provision.