Political Grades UK · Beta › The Four Nations
The Four Nations
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the ONS headline labour-market measures, Apr 2025-Mar 2026. Reported, not scored — and the reason is printed below, not buried.
ONS Annual Population Survey · last refreshed 2026-10-18. Rechecked automatically every night.
Employment rate, 16–64
estimate ● with its 95% confidence interval — where the whiskers overlap, the gap may not be realHow it has moved — rolling annual (Jan–Dec survey window), 2020–2025:
Unemployment rate, 16+
estimate ● with its 95% confidence intervalHow it has moved — rolling annual (Jan–Dec survey window), 2020–2025:
| Nation | Employment rate, 16–64 | Unemployment rate, 16+ |
|---|---|---|
| England | 75.8% ±0.3 | 4.6% ±0.2 |
| Northern Ireland | 74.1% ±1.3 | 2.1% ±0.5 |
| Scotland | 74.6% ±0.9 | 4.0% ±0.4 |
| Wales | 72.1% ±0.9 | 4.3% ±0.5 |
Who sits for each nation at Westminster
parties that stand in one nation only, with their Commons seats — links to the rosterEngland is contested by the Great Britain–wide parties (Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Reform), which also hold most Scottish and Welsh seats — so no single nation is the honest label for them, and they are not listed by nation here. (The Green Party of England and Wales and the Scottish Greens are separate parties, so the Greens are not a single GB-wide party either.) See the full Commons →
Why these are not grades
Context, not grades: UK labour-market outcomes are heavily shaped by reserved UK-wide policy (macroeconomics, most taxation, employment law), so attributing them to a devolved government is a far weaker claim than attributing a US state's outcomes to its governor. This table reports; it does not score.
Employment rate covers ages 16-64; unemployment rate covers 16+ as a share of the economically active — two different bases by ONS convention, never one denominator. The period is a 12-month rolling survey year, not a calendar year. APS is a survey: each figure carries its published ± confidence value, and small-nation estimates (Northern Ireland especially) carry the widest.
Source: ONS Annual Population Survey via the official Nomis API. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Refreshed nightly.