To ask Her Majesty's Government what was the average number of miners employed in the coal industry in each year from 1984 until 2010.

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

Letter from Stephen Penneck, Director General for ONS, to Lord Ashcroft, dated March 2011.

As Director General for the Office for National Statistics, I have been asked to reply to your Parliamentary Question asking the average number of miners employed in the coal industry in each year from 1984 until 2010. HL7974

The available information is provided in the attached table and is derived from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Estimates prior to 1992 are not available. It is not possible to provide reliable estimates from 2001 onwards because the sample sizes for this survey are not sufficiently large enough for the coal industry.

Source: Labour Force Survey

.. Data suppressed due to insufficient sample sizes

Guide to Quality:

The coefficient of variation (CV) indicates the quality of an estimate, the smaller the CV value the higher the quality. The true value is likely to lie within +/- twice the CV-for example, for an estimate of 200 with a CV of 5% we would expect the population total to be within the range 180-220.

It should be noted that the above estimates exclude people in most types of communal establishment (eg hotels, boarding houses, hostels mobile home sites etc.)