06 April 2021
Go to release: Live Register March 2021
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (06 April 2021) issued results from the Live Register in respect of March 2021. Today’s release also includes details regarding the COVID-19 income support schemes.
Commenting on today’s publication, Catalina Gonzalez, CSO Statistician, said:
“The unadjusted Live Register total for March 2021 is 183,096. When seasonal effects are considered, the seasonally adjusted Live Register total for March 2021 was 186,300 which was a decrease of 2,700 from February 2021.
Outside of the traditional Live Register, in the last week of March 2021, 443,247 people were in receipt of the PUP. The current release is the first time the CSO has been able to analyse a full year of the number of people in receipt of the PUP. There are currently 49,274 more persons in receipt of the PUP than at the end of March 2020. Users should consider the impact of Government restrictions when comparing the numbers of people in receipt of PUP at different points in time.
As Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme (EWSS) data has not been disseminated by the CSO yet, the total number of persons that were on the Live Register or who benefitted from the COVID-19 income supports (PUP or EWSS) in March 2021 is not available at this time.”
Commenting further on aggregates of the COVID-19 income supports, Catalina Gonzalez continued:
“The Department of Social Protection (DSP) have supplied supplementary information on whether PUP recipients were in full-time education when asked to certify their status on the MyWelfare.ie service. While it should be noted that this information is not complete, it is estimated that at least 8.1% of all recipients of PUP since March 2020 were attending full-time education at the time of certification. For those aged 25 years and over this could be as low as 1.3% while it is at least 33.3% for those aged under 25 years. If the PUP scheme did not exist, those persons, being in full-time education, would not be eligible to receive Unemployment Assistance or Unemployment Benefit and so would not be included on the Live Register.
It should be noted that DSP has been paying arrears to recipients of the PUP, to take account of the movement of people in and out of employment. The main arrears payment occurred on 01 December 2020. All arrears paid to date are now included in the week of the entitlement period, rather than the week of payment.
Tables providing the breakdowns of the numbers receiving the PUP each week by sex, age group, county and nationality grouping are being made available today. (See PxStat).
Looking at this data, of the 443,247 persons in receipt of the PUP for the week ending 28 March 2021, 54.6% are male, 70.9% are Irish, and almost a quarter are in each of the 25-34-year-old (22.1%) and 35-44-year-old (22.7%) age groups. It can also be noted that 857,145 people have received at least one payment since the scheme was established in March 2020, of which 56.1% are male and 47.6% are aged between 25 and 44 years of age. From the weekly breakdown of those receiving the PUP, it can also be seen that the number of those receiving the payment has decreased in each of the last seven weeks, after seven weeks of an increase."
In the last week of March 2021, 443,247 of those employed whose income has been affected due to COVID-19 benefitted from the PUP which is administered by the DSP. The Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme (TWSS) has been replaced by the EWSS since the start of September 2020. Both the TWSS and EWSS schemes have been administered by the Revenue Commissioners which have provided TWSS and EWSS data to the CSO for statistical purposes and dissemination to users. The CSO has not yet disseminated EWSS data, but we will continue to work with the Revenue Commissioners to make this available to users as soon as possible.
The income support payments are not captured in the traditional methodology of the Live Register which is a historical series that includes the number of claimants for Jobseekers Benefit and Jobseekers Assistance (see the Information Note on Implications of COVID-19 on the Live Register and the Monthly Unemployment Estimates for more details).
A review of non-recipient Live Register claims is ongoing at the DSP and relates primarily to cases where a person who received a PUP has since closed their PUP claim and reported a return to employment. This will impact the Live Register totals, as some of these non-recipient jobseeker claims were included on the Live Register, but their jobseeker claims were not automatically closed at that time (see the Technical Note published by the CSO to accompany the Live Register, August 2020 release for more information).
The CSO has decided to compile the Live Register data for March 2021 in the traditional way and provide details of COVID-19 income support payments (see CSO PxStat series LRW01 to LRW12 separately. An analysis of the Live Register total broken down by recipient and non-recipient claims is available in Annex Table A3 in the Live Register release.
The CSO will continue to evaluate the available income support schemes and the results of the recipient and non-recipient analysis to determine whether any changes are required to the methodology for the Live Register to improve the usability of the series. Any changes the CSO may make to the methodology in the future will be clearly outlined to users in the statistical release and accompanying material.
Catalina Gonzalez, Labour Market Analysis - (+353) 87 646 7535
Email: labour@cso.ie
Catalina Gonzalez (+353) 21 453 5163 or Martina O'Callaghan (+353) 21 453 5491
or email labour@cso.ie
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