nisrarr

nisrarr is a package for accessing data from the NISRA data portal directly from R.

Installation

Install nisrarr from CRAN with:

install.packages("nisrarr")

Alternatively, you can install the development version of nisrarr from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("MarkPaulin/nisrarr")

Example

nisra_search() lets you search for a dataset using keywords or variable names, and shows information like the last time the dataset was updated:

library(nisrarr)
head(nisra_search(keyword = "claimant"))
#> # A tibble: 3 × 5
#>   dataset_code dataset_label    frequency dataset_dimensions updated            
#>   <chr>        <chr>            <chr>     <list>             <dttm>             
#> 1 CCMLGD       Claimant Count … Month     <chr [3]>          2025-06-10 10:18:23
#> 2 CCMAA        Claimant Count … Month     <chr [3]>          2025-06-10 10:17:45
#> 3 CCMSOA       Claimant Count … Month     <chr [3]>          2025-06-10 10:16:16

nisra_read_dataset() can be used to download a dataset from the NISRA data portal as a data-frame:

claimant_count <- nisra_read_dataset("CCMLGD")
head(claimant_count)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 4
#>   Statistic      Month   `Local Government District`          value
#>   <chr>          <chr>   <chr>                                <dbl>
#> 1 Claimant Count 2005M01 Northern Ireland                     29573
#> 2 Claimant Count 2005M01 Antrim and Newtownabbey               1530
#> 3 Claimant Count 2005M01 Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon  2165
#> 4 Claimant Count 2005M01 Belfast                               7948
#> 5 Claimant Count 2005M01 Causeway Coast and Glens              2763
#> 6 Claimant Count 2005M01 Derry City and Strabane               4674
#> # Source: Claimant Count Monthly Data

The data portal also provides various types of metadata, which can be accessed using get_metadata() or get_metadata_field():

get_metadata(claimant_count)
#> Label: Claimant Count Monthly Data
#> Subject: Claimant Count
#> Type: Official statistics
#> Updated: 2025-06-10T10:18:23.357Z
#> Note: The claimant count is an administrative data source derived from Jobs and Benefits Offices ...
#> Contact: Economic and Labour Market Statistics
#> Contact email: [email protected]
#> Contact phone: +44 (0)28 90529475
#> Copyright: Crown Copyright (https://www.nisra.gov.uk/crown-copyright)

get_metadata_field(claimant_count, "contact")
#> $name
#> [1] "Economic and Labour Market Statistics"
#> 
#> $email
#> [1] "[email protected]"
#> 
#> $phone
#> [1] "+44 (0)28 90529475"

You can also access boundaries from the data portal. This isn’t available for all datasets, so your mileage may vary:

library(dplyr)
#> Warning: package 'dplyr' was built under R version 4.4.1
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
library(ggplot2)
#> Warning: package 'ggplot2' was built under R version 4.4.3

claimant_count |> 
  nisra_get_boundaries() |> 
  filter(Statistic == "Percentage Claimant Count", Month == max(Month)) |> 
  ggplot(aes(fill = value)) +
  geom_sf() +
  scale_fill_binned(
    type = "viridis", 
    n.breaks = 6, 
    name = "Percentage Claimant Count",
    labels = scales::label_percent(scale = 1)
  )

Help wanted / things that need done

There isn’t much error handling at the moment. If you’re using this package and get an error message, please open an issue!

Inspiration

This package is heavily based on csodata, which wraps an identical API. I also learnt a lot from reading the code for nomisr.