Northampton CB/MB — Current theme: Work & Poverty

This theme is concerned with who was able to find work, and the consequences for those who could not. The census is not the ideal source to study these questions, because it is taken only every ten years, and we plan to add additional information from other sources such as the records of National Insurance and the Poor Law system, and their modern equivalents, Job Seekers Allowance and Income Support.

For now, our only non-census data here comes from the trade union-run welfare system that laid the foundations for the National Insurance system before the 1914-18 war. One strength of census data on unemployment is that it is relatively little affected by the changing rules of benefit systems, although we do add numbers on government training schemes to our figures for 1991.

For most of the twentieth century, the unemployment rate among women was of limited value. Many women were not involved in paid work, and even those with jobs had problems claiming benefits when they lost them. We therefore concentrate instead on the "activity rate", which measures what proportion of women were economically active, either in work or looking for it.

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We hold these detailed statistics for Northampton, which we graph and tabulate here:

Available datasets	Period covered	Variables (number of categories)
Census Unemployment by Sex	1931 to 1951	Sex (2) Census Unemployment (3)
Economically Active by Sex	1921 to 1951	Sex (2) Economically Active (2)

Read more about how we hold statistics here.