To ask the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills what proportion of people in Leeds North West constituency aged (a) between 16 and 18 and (b) between 19 and 24 years have not been in education, employment or training in each year since 1997.

Estimates are available at local education authority (LEA) level for 16 to 24-year-olds⁽¹⁾ not in education, employment or training (NEET), using the Annual Population Survey (APS). These are given from 2000 to 2008 in table 1. Due to small sample sizes we are unable to produce reliable estimates for geographies smaller than LEA, or for small age groups from the APS. Due to incomplete data, estimates are not available prior to 2000.

Please note that the estimates in table 1 are subject to large sampling variability and should therefore be treated with caution and viewed in conjunction with their confidence intervals⁽²⁾ (CIs), which indicate how accurate an estimate is. For example, a CI of +/-3.0 percentage points (pp) means that the true value is between 3.0 pp above the estimate and 3.0 pp below the estimate.

We are able to provide estimates for 16 to 18-year-olds NEET from records maintained by Connexions services. Table 2 shows the number and percentage of 16 to 18-year-olds not in education, employment or training in Leeds local authority from 2006 to 2008. These data are not directly comparable with the figures given in table 1 or the annual estimate of the proportion of 16 to 18-year-olds NEET in England published annually by DCSF. Connexions data are not available at this level of detail for years before 2006.

Reliable estimates cannot be provided at parliamentary constituency level for any age grouping from either this data or other sources. No data are available at local authority level for 19 to 24-year-olds.

⁽¹⁾ Age used is the respondents academic age, which is defined as their age at the preceding 31 August.

⁽²⁾ Those given are 95 per cent. confidence intervals.