Claimant Count Herefordshire
About this dataset
The Office for National Statistics publishes a data on numbers of people claiming benefits because they are unemployed. We extract some key measures from this data so that local people and organisations can understand how unemployment is changing in Herefordshire. This is part of our additional data for Herefordshire project.
The Claimant Count is a measure of the number of people claiming benefits principally for the reason of being unemployed, based on administrative data from the benefits system.
The Claimant Count is not a measure of unemployment. Since the people claiming benefits are generally a particular subset of the unemployed, the Claimant Count can provide a useful indication of how unemployment is likely to vary between areas and over time. If the claimant count number increases, unemployment is increasing.
The Office for National Statistics has a more detailed description of this dataset.
About the chart
You can choose between two measures in the chart.
Claimants as a proportion of residents aged 16-64 shows the % of people claiming in that month as a percentage of the the number of people who lived in that area in that month and were aged between 16 and 64 inclusive. Those ages are used to indicate the “working age” population.
Claimant count is based on the numbers of people claiming benefits in each month. Because many more people live in the Wet Midlands than Herefordshire and in England than the West Midlands, we compare the numbers in each month to the number in January 2008. So if in a given month the number of claimants in each area was the same as it was in January 2008, we assign it a value of 100. If the figure was twice the level in January 2008 we assign it a value of 200. That makes it easier to compare changes in Herefordshire to changes in the region and in England.
About the data
This data is published by the Office for National Statistics and released under the Open Government Licence.
This service is part of our Additional data for Herefordshire project which is funded by a grant from Herefordshire Community Foundation.
About the photo
The photo used in the header image is holiday 2006 by sarsfields_ghost used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0