Scottish Register of Employment, 1950-1993

The Scottish Executive compiled the <i>Scottish Register of Employment</i> (SRE) in order to gather more information about Scottish industry. The data were collected by the then Scottish Office, with the aim of building up a database of Scottish manufacturing.<br> The depositor has stated that no written records remain of how the data were gathered, but apparently this was done by direct surveying of companies, analysis of press articles etc. The definition of a manufacturing unit is 'a single plant or site (i.e. not a single company) with greater than ten employees'.<br> The database was discontinued because the Office for National Statistics (ONS) had started producing a UK wide database which duplicated what the SRE attempted to do in Scotland - this was the Annual Census of Production (ACOP - more a survey, not a census), which commenced in 1983. ACOP is not currently held at the Data Archive.<br> The depositor of the SRE notes that it is does not appear to be possible to relate the SRE and ACOP to one another, probably because of differences in the definition of a 'manufacturing unit': unfortunately this tends to preclude extrapolation from the SRE to more recent times. However the SRE can be regarded as internally consistent, and so can be used to analyse time series from 1950 to 1993.