Ministers will consider the guidance on wind turbine noise when it is due to be published in spring 2013.

The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey), is responsible for renewable energy strategy. I am responsible for renewable energy deployment.

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Letter from Glen Watson, dated December 2012:

As Director General for the Office for National Statistics, I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question asking, for which Government employment and training programmes participants are categorised as being employed in the Labour Market Statistics. 134480

The published labour market statistics for employment are derived from the Labour Force Survey which identifies people participating in government-supported training and employment programmes. Participants on such programmes are classified as either employed, unemployed or economically inactive. This classification is based primarily on the activities they report that they were undertaking in the survey reference week.

The type of programme is not a determinant of labour market statistics on its own. Participants who report that they were engaged in any form of work, work experience or work-related training are classified as in employment.

The remainder are classified as either unemployed or economically inactive, in line with internationally accepted definitions, according to the nature and extent of their reported job search activity.

The Unistats website provides prospective students with comparable information, known as the Key Information Set, for higher education courses at universities and further education colleges. This includes data from the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Destination of Leavers of Higher Education (DLHE) surveys, which are independently collected by a survey

agency appointed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Data for further education colleges is also linked to the Individual Learner Record, which is subject to its own audit requirements.

The HEFCE validates all Unistats data and each further education college (and each university) was given a preview of their Unistats data to check for accuracy and highlight any errors. In addition, as part of its early review of the Key Information Set, HEFCE are undertaking a small number of audits to establish whether there are systematic issues with the data. HEFCE intend to continue this audit activity in future years.

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Letter from Glen Watson, Director-General for ONS, to Lord Greaves, dated December 2012.

As Director-General for the Office for National Statistics (ONS), I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question asking whether for the purpose of statistics of the number of jobs in the economy a person who has two separate part-time jobs is counted once or twice. (HL4113)

The workforce jobs (WFJ) statistics provide estimates of the number of jobs in the economy. Because these estimates represent the number of jobs, where a person has two separate jobs, this counts as two jobs.

This differs from the number of people in employment, produced from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which represents the number of people in employment where a person with two part-time jobs is counted once.

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Letter from Glen Watson, dated 5 December 2012:

As Director General of the Office for National Statistics, I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question asking, what progress has been made by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) towards inclusion of the value of natural capital into the UK environmental accounts by 2020 (131789).

In November 2011, the ONS published a paper "Towards a Sustainable Environment - UK Natural Capital and Ecosystem Economic Accounting" to outline its approach to including natural capital in the UK Environmental Accounts. In terms of ecosystems accounting, the paper identified the compilation of a pilot ecosystems account for woodlands as an important first step in the process of increasing the coverage of natural capital within the UK Environmental Accounts. The ONS has already started work on a pilot woodlands ecosystem account.

In July 2012, the ONS published a consultation on "Accounting for the value of nature in the UK", which set out the rationale for the accounts, provided a tentative outline timetable of development work, and sought views on the scope of the accounts and relative priorities for their development.

The consultation, which was completed in September 2012, was followed up by a stakeholder workshop in October to discuss the priorities and scope of a roadmap which will provide a more detailed timetable for the development of the accounts. The roadmap will be published on 19 December 2012, which will provide a detailed timetable for including natural capital into the UK Environmental Accounts by 2020.

It would be in contravention of rules on the pre-empting of official statistics for Work programme providers and subcontractors to publish their own job outcome data prior to the release of official statistics. Once official statistics have been released, providers and subcontractors can release their own job outcome data for the period covered by the official statistics.

The Department has no plans to identify separately patients with pancreatic cancer in the statistics on waiting times for suspected and diagnosed cancer patients.

The publication of these statistics is managed in line with the United Kingdom Statistics Authority's Code of Practice for Official Statistics. An assessment of the quality of the data used to create these statistics and the risk of patient disclosure was carried out prior to finalising the current format. This assessment concluded that due to potential for error in clinical coding within the patient records and small numbers of patients in some areas there was a risk of misrepresentation or disclosure of patient identities if all tumour types were published separately.

The Ministry of Justice's Analytical Services Directorate provides statistics, research and analysis to underpin evidence based policy and delivery across the Department.

The Ministry of Justice is required to ensure that all statistics produced by the Department are produced according to the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. Its statistical publications are independently assessed by the UK Statistics Authority to ensure they meet the standards expected for official statistics. This helps maintain public confidence in the robustness, quality, integrity and impartiality of statistical publications.

All research undertaken by the Department adheres to the Government Social Research code. This ensures it is generated, handled and released in a way which maintains public trust in its robustness, integrity and impartiality. Maintenance of high standards is ensured through rigorous quality assurance processes, including internal and external peer review. Research outputs are published on the Ministry of Justice website.

The statistics and research published by the Ministry of Justice are accurate to the best of our knowledge.

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Letter from Glen Watson, Director General for ONS, to Lord Laird, dated November 2012.

As Director General for the Office for National Statistics (ONS), I have been asked to respond to your Parliamentary Question to Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Wallace of Saltaire on 22 October (WA 28-9), why there is a difference between the estimate of 27,000 Romanians entering the United Kingdom in the four years from 2007-2010 and the figure of 81,630 adult Romanians registering for national insurance numbers in those years; which of those figures was used in annual net migration statistics for their migration target purposes; and whether they will review the efficacy of the International Passenger Survey as their preferred immigration measure. (HL3124)

ONS uses data from the International Passenger Survey (IPS) to estimate long-term international migration (LTIM), with adjustments made for asylum seekers, people whose intentions change with regards to their length of stay, and migration to and from Northern Ireland. LTIM estimates adhere to the UN definition of a long-term international migrant, which states that a long-term migrant is a person who changes his or her country of usual residence for a period of at least a year.

There are several reasons why the figures for Romanian nationals derived from the IPS differ from figures on those registering for national insurance numbers (NINos):

NINos are compulsory for all migrants intending to work, regardless of the duration of their stay, so will include short-term migrants staying in the UK for less than 12 months, who are excluded from LTIM estimates;

NINo allocations do not necessarily reflect a recent move to the UK, as an overseas national may already have been in the UK for several years (for example as a student or a dependent) before they decide to seek employment; and

people who have been allocated a NINo may have subsequently left the UK. They will still be included in NINo figures, but not in net migration estimates.

The figure of 27,000 is the inflow of Romanian citizens, which coupled with the emigration figure of 4,000 for the years 2007-10 was part of the annual net migration statistics produced by ONS. This is the data the Home Office use for net migration targets.

At the national level, IPS estimates are considered very reliable. However, in common with all sample surveys, the reliability decreases as estimates are calculated for lower levels of detail, for example by geography, age, sex or nationality. This applies when IPS data are used to calculate estimates of small groups of migrants. ONS publish confidence intervals alongside these estimates. These intervals refer to the margin of error, and are a measure of uncertainty associated with making inferences from a sample. In the case of Romanian nationals, the confidence intervals indicate that inflow was between 19,000 and 35,000 in the years 2007 to 2010.

ONS have made an assessment of the different sources of data on international migration and published a report, available at the following link: http://www.ons. gov.uk/ons/rel/migration1/population-by-country-of-birth-and-nationality/sources-of-international-migration-data/differences-between-sources-of-international-migration-data.pdf.

ONS concluded that the International Passenger Survey (IPS) is currently the most appropriate source for the calculation of long-term international migration based on the UN definition.

Improvements have been made to the IPS as part of the Migration Statistics Improvement Programme, in response to the National Statistician's Task Force on Migration. Several changes were introduced to the IPS design in 2009 to reflect changing patterns of migration to and from the UK. These included changes to the

sampling at regional airports and have led to more robust and timely estimates of international migration at both the national and regional level.

The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Letter from Glen Watson, dated November 2012:

As Director General for the Office for National Statistics, I have been asked to reply to your recent question.

A short guidance paper on the Impact of Registration Delays on Mortality Statistics in 2011 was published alongside the annual Mortality Statistics: Deaths registered in England and Wales (Series DR), 2011 on the 6 November 2012 and is available here:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/user-guidance/health-and-life-events/impact-of-registration-delays-on-mortality-statistics--2011.html

Figures presented include the median registration period for the ONS short list of cause of death codes for all deaths registered in England and Wales in 2011. Figures are not presented by age group.

The number of deaths registered in England and Wales each year by sex, age, cause, marital status and place of death are published annually and are available here:

www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/all-releases.html?definition=tcm%3A77-27475